the treatment of such cases when he should no longer be with them. If anywhere, we should certainly have expected to find here some allusion to the great authentic depositions of Dhamma and Vinaya after Buddha's death, which, according to the general belief of Buddhists, established a firm standard according to which differences could be judged and have been judged through many centuries. There is not the slightest trace of any such allusion to the Council. This silence is as valuable as the most direct testimony. It shows that the author of the Mahâ-parinibbâna-Sutta did not know anything of the First Council.'
The only objection which it seems to me possible to raise against this argument is that the conclusion is worded somewhat too absolutely; and that it is rather a begging of the question to state, in the very first words referring to the Mahâ-parinibbâna-Sutta, that it is older than the story in the Kulla-vagga, and that its author could not have known that work. But no one will venture to dispute the accuracy of Dr. Oldenberg's representation of the facts on which he bases his conclusion; and the conclusion that he draws is, at least, the easiest and readiest way of explaining the very real discrepancy that he has pointed out. We shall be quite safe if we only say that we have certain facts which lend strong probability to the hypothesis that the author of the Mahâ-parinibbâna-Sutta did not know that account of the First Council which we find in the Kulla-vagga.
We do not know for certain the time at which that part of the Kulla-vagga, in which that account occurs, was composed. I think it quite possible that it was as late as the Council of Patna (b.c. 350), though Dr. Oldenberg places it somewhat earlier[1]. But even if we put the conclusion of the Kulla-vagga as late as the year I have mentioned, it is still in the highest degree improbable that the Mahâ-parinibbâna-Sutta, supposing it to be an older work, can have been composed very much later than the fourth century b.c.—a provisional date sufficient at present for practical purposes.
- ↑ Mahâ-vagga, p. xxxviii.
