Page:Sacred Books of the East - Volume 11.djvu/17

Rh more than a good working hypothesis to be accepted until all the texts of the Buddhist Pâli Suttas shall have been properly edited. For it depends only on the fact that one of the texts now translated contains several statements, and one very significant silence, which afford ground for chronological argument. That argument amounts only to probability, not to certainty; and it might scarcely be worth while to put it forward were it not that the course of the enquiry will be found to raise several questions of very considerable interest.

The significant silence to which I refer occurs in the account of the death of Gotama at the end of the Mahâ-parinibbâna-Sutta ; and I cannot do better than quote Dr. Oldenberg's remarks upon it at p. xxvi of the able Introduction to his edition of the text of the Mahâ-vagga.

'The Tradition regarding the Councils takes up the thread of the story where the accounts of the life and work of Buddha, given in the Sutta Pitaka, end. After the death of the Master—so it is related in the Kulla-vagga—Subhadda, the last disciple converted by Buddha shortly before his death, proclaimed views which threatened the dissolution of the community.

'"Do not grieve, do not lament," he is said to have said to the believers. "It is well that we have been relieved of the Great Master's presence. We were oppressed by him when he said, 'This is permitted to you, this is not permitted.' In future we can do as we like, and not do as we do not like."

'In opposition to Subhadda,—the tradition goes on to relate,—there came forward one of the most distinguished and oldest of Buddha's disciples, the great Kassapa, who proposed that five hundred of the most eminent members of the community should assemble at Râgagaha, the royal residence of the ruler of Magadha, in order to collect the Master's precepts in an authentic form. It has already been said above, how, during the seven months' sitting of