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THE GREAT BUDDHIST KINGS
In Ceylon, about 80 B.C., the early Buddhist canon was committed to writing. "In former times," the Ceylonese Mahāvamsa records, "the most learned monks handed down the text and commentary of the Three Pitakas orally; but since they perceived that the people were falling away from the orthodox teaching, the monks convened; and so that the true doctrines might endure, they wrote them down in books." $4 This corpus of sacred literature-the often cited Pāli canon-is preserved, probably without much alteration, to the present; a comparison with the quotations on King Aśoka's rock-carved monuments reveals that at least a considerable part is now just as it was in that century. But this is not enough to support the orthodox claim that the canon was fixed in its present form at the "First Council" at Rajagṛha, just following the Buddha's death. "Some parts of the texts," wrote Dr. Ananda K. Coomaraswamy, "almost certainly go back to an carlier period, and record the sayings and doctrine of Gautama as remembered by his immediate disciples. . . . Howthe Buddhist Bible, like the Christian, consists of books composed at different ages, and many or most of the books are compilations of materials by many hands and of various periods." 35
ever...
Nevertheless, in spirit the books of the Pāli canon certainly antedate the great popular movement which we see in full development in Aśoka's time, with its imperial patronage, pilgrimages, veneration of relics, and lavishly sculptured religious monuments. An arresting fact, speaking volumes for the gradual transformation of Buddhist religiosity during the almost unrecorded period between the death of the Fnlightened One and the conversion of King Aśoka, is the transfer of emphasis in the inscriptions of the latter's rock-carved edicts from the ideal of nirvāņa to that of svarga-heavenly salvation as a reward for good behavior in
84 Mahāvamsa 33.
85 Ananda K. Coomaraswamy, Buddha and the Gospel of Buddhism, New York, 1916, p. 262.
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