Of great importance for the history of the Sinhalese Church is the reign of Vattagamani Abhaya who after being dethroned by Tamils recovered his kingdom and reigned for twelve years.[40] He built a new monastery and dagoba known as Abhayagiri,[41] which soon became the enemy of the Mahavihara and heterodox, if the latter is to be considered orthodox.  The account of the schism given in the Mahavamsa[42] is obscure, but the dispute resulted in the Pitakas, which had hitherto been preserved orally, being committed to writing.  The council which defined and edited the scriptures was not attended by all the monasteries of Ceylon, but only by the monks of the Mahavihara, and the text which they wrote down was their special version and not universally accepted.  It included the Parivara, which was apparently a recent manual composed in Ceylon.  The Mahavamsa says no more about this schism, but the Nikaya-Sangrahawa[43] says that the monks of the Abhayagiri monastery now embraced the doctrines of the Vajjiputta school (one of the seventeen branches of the Mahasanghikas) which was known in Ceylon as the Dhammaruci school from an eminent teacher of that name.  Many pious kings followed who built or repaired sacred edifices and Buddhism evidently flourished, but we also hear of heresy.  In the third century A.D.[44] King Voharaka Tissa suppressed[45] the Vetulyas.  This sect was connected with the Abhayagiri monastery, but, though it lasted until the twelfth century, I have found no Sinhalese account of its tenets.  It is represented as the worst of heresies, which was suppressed by all orthodox kings but again and again revived, or was reintroduced from India.  Though it always found a footing at the Abhayagiri it was not officially recognized as the creed of that Monastery which since the time of Vattagamani seems to have professed the relatively orthodox doctrine called Dhammaruci.

Mention is made in the Katha-vatthu of heretics who held that the Buddha remained in the Tusita heaven and that the law was preached on earth not by him but by Ananda and the commentary[46] ascribes these views to the Vetulyakas.  The reticence of the Sinhalese chronicles makes it doubtful whether the Vetulyakas of Ceylon and these heretics are identical but probably the monks of the Abhayagiri, if not strictly speaking Mahayanist, were an off-shoot of an ancient sect which contained some germs of the Mahayana.  Hsuan Chuang in his narrative[47] states (probably from hearsay) that the monks of the Mahavihara were Hinayanists but that both vehicles were studied at the Abhayagiri.  I-Ching on the contrary says expressly that all the Sinhalese belonged to the Aryasthavira Nikaya.  Fa-Hsien describes the Buddhism of Ceylon as he saw it about 412 A.D., but does not apply to it the terms Hina or Mahayana.  He evidently regarded the Abhayagiri as the principal religious centre and says it had 5000 monks as against 3000 in the Mahavihara, but though he dwells on the gorgeous ceremonial, the