Vinaya Texts

Author(s): T W Rhys Davids, Hermann Oldenberg
Publisher: Oxford

Page 24

INTRODUCTION.
xxi
state of things leading, in the Introductions to the Gâtaka Stories, to what were unquestionably inventions: and it must be acknowledged that the compilers have not taken the slightest trouble to conceal the evidently unsubstantial character of most of these summary introductions. But it does not follow that they were invented at the time when the Sutta-vibhanga and the Khandhakas were compiled. They may possibly have formed part of the traditional explanatory teaching of the schools.
As to the time when the Sutta - vibhanga and the Khandhakas were compiled, we have important evidence in their silence regarding the well-known Ten Points.
The long-continued struggle on that question-as important for the history of Buddhism as the Arian controversy for that of Christianity-agitated the whole Buddhist world to its very centre; and the attempted settlement of it, at the Council of Vesalî, led to a most serious schism in the Buddhist Church. Now the ten expressions in which the question was summarised or catalogued are (as was pointed out in the Introduction to the Pâli Text of the Mahâvagga) conspicuous by their absence from the Vibhanga, and from all, except the last, of the Khandhakas? The first mention of most of them, and the first use of any one of them as a distinctive war-cry, is found in those last books, which are evidently an appendix to the rest of the Khandhakas, and of an entirely different nature from the earlier ones : for they contain a regular historical account of the two Councils, that of Râgagaha, and that of Vesâlî3.
1 Singilona, dvargula, &c. (Kullavagga XII, 1, 10).
. That is, as war-cries; gâtardparagata occurs in the sense of the precious metals.
. In the present division of the Khandhakas into two parts, called the Larger and Smaller Divisions (Maha- and Kulla-vagga), there are ten Khandhakas in the first Division, and ten, apart from this appendix, in the second Division. Without the appended two last Khandhakas the so-called smaller Division is really considerably smaller than the larger Division; and there is therefore a good reason for the name which was given to it. With the two last Khandhakas the difference in length of the two Divisions as a whole is not sufficiently striking to account satisfactorily for the choice of their names; and the smaller
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