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THE GREAT BUDDHIST KINGS
have been of sufficient importance to split the community in two. The Ceylonese Dipavamsa records that following their condemnation for heresy the rebuked monks retired and held a council of their own, and this has been called, significantly enough, even in the orthodox texts of the group against which it was directed, the Mahasangīti, the "Great Council."
The monks of the Great Council twisted the teaching round. They broke up the original scriptures and made a new recension, A chapter put in one place they put in another,
And distorted the sense and doctrine of the Five Nikayas.
These monks-who knew neither what had been spoken at length Nor what had been spoken in abstract, neither What was the obvious nor what the higher meaning
Put things referring to one matter as if they referred to another, And destroyed much of the spirit by holding to the shadow of the letter.
They partly rejected the Sutta, and the Vinaya so deep, And made another rival Sutta and Vinaya of their own. The Parivara abstract, and the book of the Abhidhamma, The Patisambhidă, the Niddesa, and a portion of the Jātaka, So much they put aside, and made others in their place. They rejected the well-known rules of nouns and genders too, Of composition and of literary skill, and put others in their place.22
Obviously, as T. W. Rhys Davids points out, the animus of this description is that of a group that regards itself as superior; and yet they are compelled to call the council of their opponents the Great Council, "which seems to show that the number of its adherents was not to be despised." 23 Each party possessed its own version of the commonly accepted books, and also,
22 Dipavamsa 5. 32ff.; as translated and cited by T. W. Rhys Davids, Buddhism, Its History and Literature, New York and London, 1896, p. 193. The various texts mentioned are portions of the orthodox Pali canon, as preserved by the Buddhist community of Ceylon.
23 1b.. pp. 193-194.
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