Page:Sacred Books of the East - Volume 11.djvu/21

Rh other narrative, gave rise to the holding of the Council; and having referred to events which took place after the Council,—it is scarcely a tenable argument to say that he, knowing of it, did not refer, even incidentally and in half a sentence, to so important an event, simply because it did not come, necessarily, within the subject of his work. And when we find that in other works on the death of the Buddha, referred to below, the account of the Council of Râgagaha has, in fact, been included in the story, it is difficult to withhold our assent to the very great probability of the hypothesis, that it would have been included also in the Pâli Book of the Great Decease had the belief in the tradition of the Council been commonly held at the time when that book was put into its present shape. At the same time we must hold ourselves quite prepared to learn that some other explanation may turn out to be possible. The argument, if it applied to writers of the nineteenth century, would be conclusive. But we know too little about the mode in which the Pâli Pitakas were composed to presume at present to be quite certain.

The Mahâ-parinibbâna-Sutta was then  the account of the First Council of Râgagaha in the concluding part of the Kulla-vagga. It was also almost certainly composed  Pâtaliputta, the modern Patna, had become the capital city of the kingdom of Magadha; after the worship of relics had become common in the Buddhist church; and after the rise of a general belief in the Kakkavatti theory, in the ideal of a sacred king, a supreme overlord in India.

The first of these last three arguments depends on the prophecy placed in Gotama's mouth as to the future greatness of Pâtaliputta—a prophecy found in the Mahâ-vagga as well as in the Mahâ-parinibbâna-Sutta. It is true that the guess may actually have been made, and that it required no great boldness to hazard a conjecture so vaguely expressed. The words simply are—

'And among famous places of residence and haunts of