as they call themselves, the orthodox party), it is acknowledged that the other, the laxer side, were in the majority; and that when the older and more influential members of the Order decided in favour of the orthodox view, the others held a council of their own, called, from the numbers of those who attended it, the Great Council.
Now the oldest Ceylon Chronicle, the Dīpavaŋsa, which contains the only account as yet published of what occurred at the Great Council, says as follows:[1] —
"The monks of the Great Council turned the religion upside down;
They broke up the original Scriptures, and made a new recension;
A discourse put in one place they put in another;
They distorted the sense and the teaching of the Five Nikāyas.
Those monks — knowing not what had been spoken at length, and what concisely,
What was the obvious, and what was the higher meaning —
Attached new meaning to new words, as if spoken by the Buddha,
And destroyed much of the spirit by holding to the shadow of the letter.
In part they cast aside the Sutta and the Vinaya so deep,
And made an imitation Sutta and Vinaya, changing this to that.
- ↑ Dīpavaŋsa, V. 32 and foll.
