later date.  Judging from these sources, it seems to us that most of Shakya Muni’s original teachings are embodied into the four Agamas.  But it is still a matter of uncertainty that whether they are stated in Agamas now extant just as they were, for the Buddha’s preachings were rehearsed immediately after the Buddha’s death in the first council held at Rajagrha, yet not consigned to writing.  They were handed down by memory about one hundred years.  Then the monks at Vaisali committed the so-called Ten Indulgences, infringing the rules of the Order, and maintained that Shakya Muni had not condemned them in his preachings.  As there were, however, no written sutras to disprove their assertion, the elders, such as Yaca, Revata, and others, who opposed the Indulgences, had to convoke the second council of 700 monks, in which they succeeded in getting the Indulgences condemned, and rehearsed the Buddha’s instruction for the second time.  Even in this council of Vaisali we cannot find the fact that the Master’s preachings were reduced to writing.  The decisions of the 700 elders were not accepted by the party of opposition, who held a separate council, and settled their own rules and doctrine.  Thus the same doctrine of the Teacher began to be differently stated and believed.

This being the first open schism, one disruption after another took place among the Buddhistic Order.  There were many different schools of the Buddhists at the time when King Acoka ascended the throne (about 269 B.C.), and the patronage of the King drew a great number of pagan ascetics into the Order, who, though they dressed themselves in the yellow robes, yet still preserved their religious views in their original colour.  This naturally led the Church into continual disturbances and moral corruption.  In the eighteenth year of Acoka’s reign the King summoned the council of 1,000 monks at Pataliputra (Patna), and settled the orthodox doctrine in order to keep the Dharma pure from heretical beliefs.  We believe that about this time some of the Buddha’s preachings were reduced to writing, for the missionaries despatched by the King in the year following the council seem to have set out with written sutras.  In addition to this, some of the names of the passages of the Dharma are given in the Bharbra edict of the King, which was addressed to the monks in Magadha.  We do not suppose, however, that all the sutras were written at once in these days, but that they were copied down from memory one after another at different times, because some of the sutras were put down in Ceylon 160 years after the Council of Patna.

In the introductory book of Ekottaragama (Anguttara Nikaya), now extant in the Chinese Tripitaka, we notice the following points:  (1) It is written in a style quite different from that of the original Agama, but similar to that of the supplementary books of the Mahayana sutras; (2) it states Ananda’s compilation of the Tripitaka after the death of the Master; (3) it refers to the past Buddhas, the future Buddha Maitreya, and innumerable Bodhisattvas; (4) it praises the profound doctrine of Mahayanism.  From this we infer that the Agama was put in the present form after the rise of the Mahayana School, and handed down through the hand of Mahasanghika scholars, who were much in sympathy with Mahayanism.