The Second Buddhist Council

A monk named Yasa, travelling in the Vajji country, saw the community at Vesali collecting money from lay donors at the fortnightly recitation and objected to it. The monks of Vesali expelled him. He went out and gathered senior monks from the west and from Avanti, and what began as one man's complaint about a collection became the second council of the Buddhist order.

The Vinaya sets out ten practices at issue and most of them are small. Carrying salt in a horn against future need. Eating after the shadow has passed the mark by two finger widths. Drinking palm juice that has begun to ferment. Sitting on an unbordered mat. Taking a second meal in another village. The tenth is the one that carried weight: accepting gold and silver.

The assembly did not settle the matter by counting heads. A committee of eight was appointed, four from the east and four from the west, and it took the ten points one at a time, tracing each back to the rule it was said to break and to the occasion on which the Buddha was said to have laid that rule down. Every one was declared unlawful. The tradition then has the whole assembly recite the teaching again, and the council takes its formal name from that recitation rather than from the judgment.

What makes the account credible to historians is how unglamorous it is. No gods attend, nothing miraculous happens, and the dispute is a procedural quarrel about monastic property of a kind any religious order generates within a generation of its founder's death. A tradition inventing a founding council for itself would not have invented an argument about salt.

For most of the last two centuries the Second Buddhist Council was told as the moment Buddhism broke in two. The account ran that the monks of Vesali, defeated over the ten points, walked out and formed the Mahasanghika, the great assembly, leaving the Sthaviras, the elders, behind; and that every later school descends from one side or the other of that room.

The Vinaya account does not say this. It closes with the ten points settled, the offending monks corrected, and the community intact. The schism appears in different material altogether, later and separate, and it turns on a quite different question: five theses about the limitations of the arhat, the perfected person, which one party held and the other rejected. Nothing in the earliest layer joins the two events.

Charles Prebish set the problem out plainly in a survey of the scholarship, and the position that has since become ordinary is that the two should be kept apart. There was a disciplinary quarrel at Vesali. There was a schism, somewhere afterwards, over what an arhat is. Tradition welded them together because a single dramatic rupture is easier to hold in mind than a slow divergence, and nineteenth century scholarship inherited the weld without inspecting it.

This matters beyond the detail. Buddhism's early history is often narrated as a sequence of councils, each producing a decision and a split, and that shape comes largely from later chronicles with their own reasons for wanting a clean line of descent. Taking the join out of Vesali leaves a messier picture and a more honest one.