cepted that the great reformer died about 487 (or 477) B.C., having been born about 567 (or 557) B.C. A council of five hundred monks was held in Rajagriha, the capital of Magadha, immediately after his death, and together they chanted the sacred laws, so as to fix them on their memory. A hundred years later, in 377 B.C., a second council was held in Vaisali, mainly for the discussion and settlement of ten questions on which difference of opinion had arisen. A hundred and thirty-five years after this, the great Asoka, King of the Magadhas, held a third council in Patna about 242 B.C., to determine upon the religious works, or Pitakas.[1] Through the preaching of this monarch's son, Mahinda, a Buddhist whose zeal led him to send- missionaries to Ceylon and even to foreign countries, Syria, Macedon, and Egypt, to preach the religion, Ceylon embraced Buddhism in the third century B.C. About a hundred and fifty years after this the Pitakas were formally reduced to writing, and thus we have the most authentic account of the earliest form of Buddhism in Magadha in the Pali Pitakas of Ceylon.
These facts will show that the three Pitakas of the Southern Buddhists can claim a date anterior to 242 B.C., for no work which could not claim a respectable antiquity was included as canonical by the Council of Patna, and there is internal evidence in the Vinaya Pitaka for the hypothesis that the main portions of that Pitaka were settled before the Vaisali Council in 377 B.C.
- ↑ On the question of the latter date, see vol. ii, p 139.
