Dhammapada

SR No.: 007674
Original Sutra Author: N/A
Author: Max Muller
Publisher: Oxford
Publication Year: 1881
Total Pages: 2540
Language: English
Classification: Book_English
File Size: 45 MB

Page 45

xlii
DHAMMAPADA.
tradition fixing Mahâvîra's death 155 years before Kandragupta !, 470 B.C., is too late. Yet they both show that the distance between Asoka (259-222 B.C.), the grandson of Kandragupta (315-291 B.C.), and the contemporaries of Buddha was by the Gainas also believed to be one of two rather than one century.
When I saw that the date of Buddha's death, 477 B.C., which in my History of Ancient Sanskrit Literature (1859) I had myself tried to support by such arguments as were then accessible, had received so powerful a support by the discovery of the inscriptions of Sahasrâm, Rūpnâth, and Bairât, due to General Cunningham, who had himself always been an advocate of the date 477 B.C., and through their careful decipherment by Dr. Bühler, I lost no time in testing that date once more by the Dîpavamsa, that Ceylonese chronicle having lately become accessible through Dr. Oldenberg's edition and translation ? And here I am able to say that, before having read Dr. Bühler's Second Notice, I arrived, though by a somewhat different way, at nearly the same conclusions as those so well worked out by Dr. Bühler in his restoration of the Episcopal Succession (therâvali) of the Buddhists, and therefore feel convinced that, making all such allowances as the case requires, we know now as much of early Buddhist chronology as could be known at the time of Asoka's Council, 242 B.C.
Taking the date of Buddha's death 477 B.C. for granted, I found that Upâli, who rehearsed the Vinaya at the First Council, 477 B.C., had been in orders sixty years in the twenty-fourth year of Agâtasatru, i. e. 461 B.C., which was the sixteenth year A.B. He must therefore 3 have been born in 541 B.C., and he died 447 B.C., i. e. thirty years A.B., at the age of 94. This is said to have been the sixth year of Udâyi, and so it is, 453-6=447 B.C.
In the year 461 B.C. Dåsaka received orders from Upâli, who was then 80 years of age; and when Dâsaka had been
1 Oldenberg, loc. cit. p. 750.
The Dipavamsa, an ancient Buddhist historical record. London, 1879. * Assuming twenty to be the minimum age at which a man could be ordained.
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