Contemporaneity and Chronology of Mahavira and Buddha

Author(s): Nagrajmuni, Mahendramuni
Publisher: Today and Tomorrows Book Agency

Page 133

Research and Conclusion
113 218 years after Buddha's Nirvāņa” contradict not only Tripațakas and more genuine literary works, but also run counter to the fundamental historical facts.
Dr. Vinsent Smith had long ago warned the historians against the over-estimation of the value of the Ceylonese
(4) Cf, T.W. Rhy Davids, Introduction to the Mahāparinirvana Sutta S.B.E. vol. XI, p. XLV : "According to the Rāja-paramparà or line of kings, in the Ceylon chronicles, the date of great decease would be 543 B.C., which is arrived at by adding to the date 161 B.C. (from which the reliable portion of the history begins), two periods of 146 and 236 years. The first purports to give the time which elapsed between 161 B.C. and the great Buddhist church council held under Asoka, and in the eighteenth year of his reign at Patna ; and the second to give the interval between that council and the Buddha's death.
"It would result from the first calculation that the date of Asoka's coronation would be 325 B.C. (146+161+18). But we know that this must contain a blunder or blunders, as the date of Asoka's coronation can be fixed, as above stated with absolute certainty within a year or two either way of 267 B.C.
Would it then be sound criticism to accept the other, earlier period of 236 years found in those chronicles a period which we cannot test by Greek chronology-and, by simply adding the Ceylon calculation of 230 years to the European date for the 18th years of Asoka (i.e. circa 249 B.C.) to conclude that the Buddha died in or about 485 B.C. ?
"I cannot think so. The further we go back, the greater does the probability of error become, not less. The most superficial examination of this earlier period shows that they are unreliable and what reliance would it be wise to place upon the total, apart from the details, when we find it mentioned for the first time in a work Dipavamsa, written eight centuries after the date it proposed to fix ?
If further proof were needed, we have it in the fact that the Dipavamsa actually contains the details of another calculation-based on the lists of kings (Rājaparamparä), but on a list of Theras (Theraparam para) stretching back from Aśoka's time to the time of great Teacher-which contradicts this calculation of 236 years".