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Why Devadatta Was No Saint

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By Bhikkhu Sujato
 
Abstract

Devad­atta is depic­ted as the archetypal vil­lain in all Buddhist tra­di­tions. Regin­ald Ray has argued for a rad­ical reas­sess­ment of Devad­atta as a forest saint who was unfairly maligned in later mon­astic Buddhism. His work has been influ­en­tial, but it relies on omis­sions and mis­taken read­ings of the sources. Ray’s claim that ‘there is no over­lap between the Mahāsaṅghika treat­ment

of [[[Devad­atta]]]] and that of the five Sthavira schools’ is untrue. On the con­trary, the man­ner in which Devad­atta is depic­ted in the Mahāsaṅghika is broadly sim­ilar to the Sthavira accounts. Such dif­fer­ences as do exist are lit­er­ary rather than doc­trinal. The stor­ies of Devadatta’s deprav­ity became increas­ingly lurid in later Buddhism, but this is a nor­mal fea­ture of the myth­o­lo­giz­ing pro­

cess, and has noth­ing to do with any ant­ag­on­ism against forest ascet­ics. In any case, the early sources are unan­im­ous in con­demning Devad­atta as the instig­ator of the first schism in the Buddhist community.
Intro­duc­tion



In 1994 Regin­ald Ray pub­lished Buddhist Saints in India, a lengthy book on the ‘forest saint’ of Buddhist lit­er­at­ure. It told of how the wild, unpre­dict­able sage of the forest was the ori­ginal Buddhist ideal of saint­hood, or ara­hant­ship, but was sup­planted by the sed­ate, rule-bound mon­ast­ics of later years. This romantic tale was

sup­por­ted by an extens­ive frame­work of scholarship.

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There is some­thing to this idea, and Ray was right to emphas­ize the import­ance of the forest sage. The

ten­sion between the life of med­it­at­ive seclu­sion in the forest and settled mon­ast­i­cism in the city is still felt in Buddhist cul­tures today, and Ray does much to bring the some­times obscure forest life back into focus.


Nev­er­the­less, Ray fell into the all-too-common trap of over-dramatizing his thesis. It wasn’t enough to simply high­light the role of the forest sages; he had to recon­struct Buddhist his­tory as a vast move­ment ded­ic­ated to sup­press­ing these icon­o­clastic, cha­ris­matic her­oes. Given the anti-establishment roots of West­ern Buddhism, such rad­ical notions will always find eager ears, des­pite his flawed hand­ling of history.


These flaws are nowhere more appar­ent than in his aston­ish­ing rehab­il­it­a­tion of the so-called ‘con­demned saint’, Devad­atta. This meme has had a sur­pris­ing tenacity. It is repeated as if it were author­it­at­ive, and is used as a basis for fur­ther argu­ments on any­thing from veget­ari­an­ism to the authen­ti­city of mon­astic life.1 But it is wrong, and I would like to show why.


Ray’s argu­ment relies on two stud­ies, by Mukher­jee and Bar­eau. I do not have access to these, so my cri­ti­cisms are not of them, but rather of the way they have been used by Ray.
Devad­atta wasn’t all bad


Ray starts by recount­ing the tra­di­tional ver­sion of Devadatta’s story, say­ing he is depic­ted as an ‘invet­er­ate evil­doer’. He argues that the tra­di­tions’ bias against Devad­atta as an ascetic forest saint influ­enced them to cre­ate ever more lurid accounts of

Devadatta’s evil deeds. He goes on to acknow­ledge that Devadatta’s pos­i­tion as an evil­doer is not entirely con­sist­ent, giv­ing a few examples where he appears in a more pos­it­ive light.

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Ray seems to think that these two per­spect­ives are con­tra­dict­ory. But they are noth­ing of the sort. The story of Devad­atta is not that of an ‘invet­er­ate evil­doer’, but of a fall from grace: a tal­en­ted med­it­ator with psychic powers, who became cor­rup­ted by jeal­ousy and greed, and com­mit­ted many bad deeds, before finally seek­ing redemption.

Devadatta’s good qual­it­ies are required by the doc­trine of kamma. Power in this life can only come from good kamma in past lives. The Buddha could not have been threatened by a nobody. His adversary must have been someone whose birth was

as exal­ted as the Buddha’s, who was tal­en­ted in the mundane achieve­ments of con­cen­tra­tion and psychic powers—but not in the stages of Awakening—someone so cha­ris­matic he could sway a power­ful king to his will. In other words, it had to be someone like Devadatta.



If early ver­sions of Devadatta’s life con­tained no good qual­it­ies, the tra­di­tions would have had to invent them. So along­side the increas­ingly implaus­ible list of crimes attrib­uted to Devad­atta, we also find implaus­ible strengths. Lit­er­ally: the Pali com­ment­ar­ies say Devad­atta had the strength of five ele­phants.2


The real doc­trinal prob­lem is, why are there not more texts that show how Devad­atta became so power­ful? This is a ser­i­ous prob­lem for the doc­trine of kamma, given that Devadatta’s mis­deeds are recor­ded at such length in so many past lives. The prob­lem is addressed at length in the Milindapañha, where King Milinda lists a mul­ti­tude of Devadatta’s for­tu­nate births, and asks

Nāgasena how to explain this. Nāgasena says that when Devad­atta had been a ruler he had pro­tec­ted the land, built bridges and halls, and had been gen­er­ous to ascet­ics and those in need.3 The tra­di­tions were well aware that Devad­atta had some good in him.

How­ever, even though most ref­er­ences to a ‘good’ Devad­atta are unprob­lem­atic, indeed essen­tial to the story, one of Ray’s examples of the good Devad­atta (1624 ) can­not be explained in this way. Ray refers to a pas­sage in the Pali Udāna, which lists Devad­atta

along­side sev­eral great monks, call­ing them ‘brah­mans’ and, in the verse that fol­lows, claim­ing that they are ara­hants. If Devad­atta was an ara­hant it would be impossible for him to com­mit the crimes that are attrib­uted to him.

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Ray’s source is Woodward’s out­dated trans­la­tion, based on the Pali Text Soci­ety edi­tion of the Udāna. The PTS edi­tion is, how­ever, the only mod­ern edi­tion I have found that men­tions Devad­atta in this list. The Royal Thai, [[Sin­hala Buddha Jay­anthi, and

Chaṭṭha Saṅgāyana (Burmese) edi­tions all omit Devad­atta.5 Curi­ously, the PTS edi­tion does not even men­tion any vari­ant read­ings. Obvi­ously this is a mis­take. More recent trans­la­tions by Ire­land6 and Than­is­saro7 note this, and omit the ref­er­ence to Devadatta.



This is typ­ical of Ray’s sloppy use of primary texts. He seems to have not read the texts he refers to, and his third-hand descrip­tions often bear little resemb­lance to what they actu­ally say. For example, he claims, rather portent­ously, that in the Aṅguttara Nikāya Devad­atta ‘reveals him­self as one who has the right view and can preach the cor­rect doc­trine’. Ray gives no ref­er­ence for this start­ling rev­el­a­tion; and in fact no such text exists. Devad­atta does not even speak in the Aṅguttara Nikāya.8


Even when Ray gets the text right, he mis­rep­res­ents the mean­ing. He says that Sāri­putta praised Devadatta’s saint­li­ness, a praise that is con­firmed by the Buddha him­self. What he omits is the con­text.9 When Devadatta’s beha­vior got out of con­trol, the Buddha asked

Sāri­putta to inform the lay folk what was going on.10 Sāri­putta says that he had formerly praised Devad­atta for his great abil­it­ies; the Buddha said that that was true then, and it is true now that Devad­atta has changed. This is typ­ical of the way Ray picks and chooses from his sources, in the pro­cess twist­ing their mean­ing so they become unrecognizable.



Ray fur­ther argues (163) that Devad­atta appears with the char­ac­ter­ist­ics of a saint ‘even when the texts are openly hos­tile to him. For example, he is depic­ted as one who med­it­ates in solitude.’ But the pas­sage he refers to does not depict Devad­atta as med­it­at­ing in solitude, although some trans­la­tions might be taken to imply so.11 The rel­ev­ant term rahoga­tassa paṭisallīnassa simply means ‘in

private, alone’, and has noth­ing to do with being on a secluded med­it­a­tion retreat. Under this stand­ard, any­one who spends time think­ing alone in their bed­room would qual­ify as a ‘forest saint’!

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In the same para­graph, Ray says that ‘Devad­atta is also a real­ized mas­ter and, through his awaken­ing, is in pos­ses­sion of magical power.’ This dir­ectly con­tra­dicts the Pali text, which says that Devad­atta attained the ‘unen­lightened person’s psychic

powers’.12 Ray mis­un­der­stands the ele­ment­ary Buddhist doc­trine that psychic abil­it­ies are not con­nec­ted with Awaken­ing. This is a basic moral of the Devad­atta story as under­stood by any Buddhist med­it­ator: don’t be sat­is­fied with cheap tricks like psychic powers and stop ‘half-way’ like Devadatta!


Ray sums up the open­ing sec­tion of his essay by say­ing that: ‘This raises the ques­tion of why Devad­atta is on the one hand vil­i­fied as the very embod­i­ment of evil and on the other depic­ted as a real­ized saint.’ (163) As I have just shown, this ques­tion is mis­placed. The

bulk of these texts offer a coher­ent account of a spir­itual fall from grace. There is only one pas­sage cited by Ray where this explan­a­tion doesn’t apply, and in that case Ray relies on a faulty text.



The six Vinayas



The next sev­eral pages of Ray’s book are devoted to sum­mar­iz­ing the ana­lysis of Devadatta’s story as presen­ted by Mukher­jee and Bar­eau. Most of this is a dis­cus­sion of Devadatta’s legend as passed down in the five Vinayas of the Sthavira group of

schools. Essen­tially he shows that the texts of the five Sthavira schools are pretty sim­ilar, con­sist­ing of fif­teen basic epis­odes with a few vari­ations in struc­ture and detail. This is unprob­lem­atic, but also not par­tic­u­larly ger­mane to his thesis, so I will pass over it.

Ray then con­trasts the treat­ment of Devad­atta (169) in the Sthavira Vinayas with that in the Mahāsaṅghika Vinaya. To appre­ci­ate this part of the argu­ment, a little back­ground on the Vinaya texts is in order.


The early Buddhist texts are broadly divided into doc­trine (Sut­tas) and mon­astic dis­cip­line (Vinaya). While both these col­lec­tions con­tain early and later mater­ial, the Vinaya is, on the whole, some­what later than the Sut­tas. The story of Devad­atta is primar­ily

the account of the earli­est threat of schism to the Buddhist mon­astic com­munity, and is there­fore told at length in the Vinaya (although epis­odes from his life are also found in the Suttas).

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We are for­tu­nate to pos­sess com­plete Vinaya can­ons of six schools.13 These fall into two groups, based on the first his­tor­ical schism of Buddhism.14 This schism was between the Sthavira and the Mahāsaṅghika.15 We pos­sess five com­plete

Vinayas of the Sthavira group of schools, and only one from the Mahāsaṅghika. While all of these texts have many dif­fer­ences, schol­ars are agreed that the bulk of the import­ant mater­ial is shared by all the schools.

 

One of the prin­ciples used in text-critical stud­ies is that when two related texts share com­mon mater­ial, that mater­ial is most likely to derive from a com­mon ancestor. Of course, this is not neces­sar­ily the case, as com­mon mater­ial may stem from later bor­row­ing or from par­al­lel but inde­pend­ent devel­op­ments. Nev­er­the­less, in most cases the thesis of a shared ancestor is the simplest and most power­ful explanation.

All being equal, then, if we find mater­ial in the five Sthavira Vinayas but not in the Mahāsaṅghika Vinaya, it is likely that the mater­ial in ques­tion was added by the Sthavira tra­di­tion fol­low­ing the first schism. And this is exactly the line of

reas­on­ing that Ray relies on. Later we shall see, how­ever, that mat­ters are not so clear-cut, and that unshared mater­ial might point to some­thing quite different.

All the Vinayas include a sec­tion on schism. In the Sthavira group of schools, this sec­tion con­sists of a lengthy chapter in the part of the Vinaya called the Skand­haka.16 The Skand­haka con­sists of roughly twenty chapters that deal with vari­ous mat­ters

ran­ging from ordin­a­tion and dis­cip­lin­ary pro­ced­ures to build­ing stand­ards and deport­ment. This is one of the main two divi­sions of the Sthavira Vinayas, the other being the Vibhaṅga, which con­tains the rules for monks and nuns (pāṭimokkha), together with back­ground and explan­a­tions. This divi­sion into two sec­tions, and the rough con­tent of the two sec­tions, is com­mon to all

Vinayas. How­ever, the Mahāsaṅghika sec­tion that Ray calls the Skand­haka is not really com­par­able to the Skand­hakas found in the Sthavira Vinayas, des­pite the fact that they dis­cuss many of the same top­ics. More on this later.
The ques­tions of Upāli

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The schism chapter of the Sthavira Skand­hakas begins with a lengthy account of Devadatta’s attempts to cause a schism in the Buddhist mon­astic com­munity. After this is a briefer exchange between the Buddha and Upāli, the fore­most Vinaya expert, on the topic of schism.

Ray points out that the schism sec­tion in the Mahāsaṅghika Vinaya omits the story of Devad­atta and con­sists only of a con­ver­sa­tion between the Buddha and Upāli. He argues that this must rep­res­ent an early ver­sion of the text, and that it was only later that the Sthavira schools con­nec­ted Devad­atta with schism. How­ever, Ray’s dis­cus­sion is severely lack­ing. It would seem to be

a mat­ter of some import that we have found the earli­est Vinaya account of schism; yet he does not seem to have read the pas­sages in ques­tion; he does not con­sider the con­tent of them at all; he does not con­sider the genre of Vinaya lit­er­at­ure they belong to; and he

does not seek any grounds to inde­pend­ently con­firm that this is, in fact, an early text. When these omis­sions are rec­ti­fied, we shall see that Ray’s con­clu­sion is unfounded.



The dis­cus­sion between the Buddha and Upāli on schism is an example of a genre com­mon in all the Vinayas, known as the upāli­paripucchā. It depicts Ven­er­able Upāli, the fore­most expert on Vinaya, approach­ing the Buddha with vari­ous detailed and sys­tem­atic ques­tions on Vinaya. Such pas­sages are often found towards the end of chapters in the Skand­haka; and in some schools,

they were exten­ded to become com­plete Vinaya texts in them­selves. The exchanges have a mech­an­ical, arti­fi­cial qual­ity, far from the nat­ural dis­cus­sions of spir­itual life found in early Buddhism. They are never, as Ray says, the ‘core’ of the mat­ter (170); they are

rather the Vinaya equi­val­ent of the end­less cross-questions of the Abhid­hamma, con­cerned with legal defin­i­tions and cat­egor­ical niceties. The upāli­paripucchā class of lit­er­at­ure, there­fore, belongs to the later strata of canon­ical, and even post-canonical, text.



Given the ubi­quity of these dis­cus­sions, we can­not assume, as Ray does, that the upāli­paripucchās on schism in the Sthavira and Mahāsaṅghika Vinayas stem from a com­mon ancestor. Unless they share signs of a com­mon deriv­a­tion, they may just as eas­ily have arisen as inde­pend­ent par­al­lel devel­op­ments. Let us, then, com­pare the rel­ev­ant pas­sages in the Mahāsaṅghika Vinaya with the Pali as an example of a Sthavira Vinaya.


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In the Pali, the dis­cus­sion begins with Upāli ask­ing about the dis­tinc­tion between a ‘split in the Sangha’ (saṅgharāji) and a

schism in the Sangha’ (saṅghabheda), as well as the one who brings har­mony to the Sangha.17 As usual in an upāli­paripucchā, this is not an intro­duc­tion to the topic, but a cla­ri­fic­a­tion of legal defin­i­tions that only makes sense to an expert. The dis­cus­sion offers some verses,18 then pro­ceeds to exam­ine the exact con­di­tions whereby a schis­matic may or may not be destined to rebirth

in hell. This only befalls a monk who, with mali­cious intent to dis­tort the Dhamma and Vinaya, com­pletes a formal Act to divide the Sangha. While Devad­atta is not men­tioned, this pas­sage obvi­ously derives from the fact that Devad­atta was said to fall into hell fol­low­ing his attacks on the Buddha and his Sangha.19



Rather than the single extens­ive dis­cus­sion found in the Pali, the Mahāsaṅghika Vinaya con­tains two short sec­tions sep­ar­ated by sev­eral pages. In the first of these sec­tions, the Buddha tells Upāli that one who causes schism may do so based on either malice for the Dhamma or malice for the per­son, and goes on to dis­cuss the num­ber of monks who make up a quorum for

caus­ing a schism. It then dis­cusses the situ­ation if a ‘power­ful lay fol­lower’ is involved.20 In the second sec­tion there is a brief dis­cus­sion of one who either breaks or brings har­mony to the Sangha, leav­ing out most of the details of the Pali account, such as the dis­tinc­tion between the ‘split in the Sangha’ and the ‘schism in the Sangha’.21 Neither of these pas­sages fea­ture any verses.


Unfor­tu­nately for Ray’s thesis, the Mahāsaṅghika upāli­paripucchā shares little in com­mon with the Pali pas­sages. A more detailed study, tak­ing into con­sid­er­a­tion the other Sthavira Vinayas, might reveal some points in com­mon between these texts. More likely the texts arose inde­pend­ently, with sim­il­ar­it­ies due to the simple fact that they adopt sim­ilar lit­er­ary styles to explain related

basic texts. The men­tion of the ‘power­ful lay fol­lower’ has been taken to refer to King Ashoka; if this is cor­rect, it con­firms the late­ness of the Mahāsaṅghika ver­sion. In any case, it is clear that the upāli­paripucchā is not a com­mon core in the Vinaya treat­ment of schism.

Devad­atta as schis­matic in the Mahāsaṅghika Vinaya

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Con­trary to Ray’s claim that ‘there is no over­lap between the Mahāsaṅghika treat­ment [of Devad­atta] and that of the five Sthavira schools’ (170), the Mahāsaṅghika Vinaya depicts Devad­atta as the archetypal schis­matic, in much the same way as the Sthavira Vinayas. This pas­sage is found in the dis­cus­sion of the pāṭimokkha rule on schism.22 Devad­atta appears as a scoun­drel try­ing to divide the Sangha, just as in all other Vinayas.

The only rel­ev­ant dif­fer­ence is the grounds he is said to base his attempt on. Whereas the Sthavira Vinayas say he pro­mul­gated a set of ‘five points’, by which he tried to enforce an excess­ively ascetic life­style on the monks, the Mahāsaṅghika Vinaya omits

the five points and attrib­utes a much more com­pre­hens­ive agenda to him. He cor­rup­ted the entire cor­pus of Buddhist lit­er­at­ure, includ­ing the twelve sut­ras,23 the vari­ous cat­egor­ies of Vinaya offences, and the nine class of scrip­ture (aṅgas). Not only did he change the texts, he taught the monks to use a dif­fer­ent script and diverse dialects.



This account of Devadatta’s evil deeds is obvi­ously later than that found in the Sthavira Vinayas. Not only does the sheer length of the details sug­gest this, but the whole tenor of the prob­lem has shif­ted from ascetic life­style to tex­tual redac­tion. The

diversity of dia­lects is an issue that became a grow­ing prob­lem for Buddhism in the later period, as the Sangha moved across a wide range of the Indian sub­con­tin­ent. And, of course, the men­tion of writ­ing con­firms that this pas­sage is late. As usual, the Mahāsaṅghika Vinaya, far from being an early text, is later than the Pali and per­haps other Sthavira Vinayas.



Ray is aware of this pas­sage (171–172), and acknow­ledges that it is much the same as the account found in the Sthavira Vinayas, say­ing, ‘All the ver­sions accord major respons­ib­il­ity for the divi­sion in the com­munity to Devad­atta.’ (171) One would ima­

gine that, since this is a cent­ral text that dir­ectly con­tra­dicts Ray’s basic thesis, he would have a solid argu­ment for why this pas­sage is to be dis­reg­arded. Sur­pris­ingly, there is no such argu­ment. All he says is this:

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    … [[[Bar­eau]]] does not assume—as does Mukherjee—that the Vibhaṅga ver­sion is the earlier. Unlike Mukher­jee, Bar­eau begins his ana­lysis with the legend of the schism as it appears in the Skand­haka, as the more authen­tic earlier ver­sion. Bareau’s

argu­ment makes good sense, among other reas­ons because the Vibhaṅga ver­sion clearly leaves the story of the schism incom­plete and dangling—in order to inter­ject the rule that this story is sup­posed to have provoked—whereas the Skand­haka account gives the story in a dra­mat­ic­ally com­plete form.
    “



So, of the two stud­ies on which Ray relies, Mukher­jee takes the Vibhaṅga account to be the earlier, while Bar­eau takes the Skand­haka to be earlier. This dis­agree­ment is hardly reas­sur­ing. Leav­ing aside what Ray unhelp­fully refers to as ‘other reas­ons’, the only

actual argu­ment he gives for pre­fer­ring Bareau’s pos­i­tion over Mukher­jee is that the Skand­haka account gives a more com­plete nar­rat­ive, while the Vibhaṅga only includes a trun­cated account as neces­sary back­ground for the rule.

This, how­ever, is no reason at all. It is far more likely that the nar­rat­ive of the Buddha’s life was ori­gin­ally told as isol­ated incid­ents, anec­dotes shared among the com­munity, which were gradu­ally gathered and arranged into a com­plete legend, one chapter of

which con­cerned Devad­atta. This is how all stor­ies are told; they don’t start out as fully-formed bio­graph­ies, such as that found in the Skand­haka. They evolve from bits and pieces.



In the early period, the Sangha would have been famil­iar with the story of Devad­atta. It would have been hot gos­sip in the com­munity, so there’d be no need to spell the whole story out in every con­text. After the Buddha’s death, how­ever, as the com­munity moved on and memor­ies grew dim, the need for a com­pre­hens­ive account as found in the Skand­haka would become press­ing. There is, there­fore, no

reason to believe that the Skand­haka account is earlier simply on the basis that it is fuller. On the con­trary, this very fact sug­gests that it can­not be early.

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The Vibhaṅga treats schism under a pāṭimokkha rule (saṅghādisesa 10) for one agit­at­ing for a schism. This is a ser­i­ous offence that’s meant to deter any­one from try­ing to cause a schism, or to sup­port one who is caus­ing a schism. The Vibhaṅga account, how­ever, is incom­plete. It does not describe what to do if the deterrent doesn’t work and a group

of Sangha go ahead to cause a schism any­way. This topic is taken up in the Skand­haka, which describes the exact legal defin­i­tion of a schism in detail, how it may be healed, and so on. This is why the Vibhaṅga account does not include the full

nar­rat­ive of Devad­atta. It has noth­ing to do with a gen­er­al­ized assump­tion of the rel­at­ive age or authen­ti­city of the Vibhaṅga over the Skand­hakas or vice verse. Rather, it fol­lows dir­ectly from the pur­pose and func­tion of the two texts, which are organ­ized as an inter­de­pend­ent whole.24



This mis­take is dev­ast­at­ing to Ray’s argu­ment. His whole case rests on the argu­ment that the absence of Devad­atta from the Mahāsaṅghika Skand­haka indic­ates that it was a later addi­tion. This argu­ment is false.

But Ray’s prob­lems do not end there, for Devad­atta does in fact appear as a schis­matic in the Mahāsaṅghika Vinaya in the por­tions that are par­al­lel to the Sthavira Skand­hakas. There is a short para­graph depict­ing an epis­ode of the Devad­atta story, sim­ilar to

that found in the Sthavira Vinayas. It describes how, intent on caus­ing a schism, he took 500 monks away with him, and the dis­cus­sion between the Buddha and Ānanda on this prob­lem.25 Ray over­looks this pas­sage, which under­mines his entire thesis.


There are, in con­clu­sion, two pas­sages in the Mahāsaṅghika Vinaya that depict Devad­atta as the archetypal schis­matic. These epis­odes are sub­stan­tially sim­ilar to the depic­tions found in the Sthavira Vinayas, and where they dif­fer, the Mahāsaṅghika is later. These two pas­sages cor­res­pond with the sec­tions that Mukher­jee iden­ti­fied as epis­odes 13 and 14 of Devadatta’s story—the

grounds for the schism and the schism itself. Ray ignores one of these pas­sages, and dis­misses the other on grounds that are both flimsy and false. Ray’s mis­take is far from incid­ental; it is the core of his thesis.

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    The fact that the Devad­atta legend, includ­ing its core (epis­odes 13 and 14) and its elab­or­a­tion (epis­odes 1 to 12 and 15), is com­mon to the vinayas of the five schools deriv­ing from the Sthavira but not found in the Mahāsāṅghika vinaya sug­gests that the legend arose among the Sthaviras, after they split from the Mahāsāṅghika in the fourth cen­tury BCE.26
    “

When Ray’s errors are cor­rec­ted, the same logic leads to the oppos­ite con­clu­sion. The fact that the Devad­atta legend, at least the core epis­odes 13 and 14, is com­mon to all six Vinayas includ­ing the Mahāsaṅghika sug­gests the legend arose among the pre­sec­tarian com­

 munity, and in all like­li­hood harks back to the time of the Buddha himself.
Nar­rat­ive in the Mahāsaṅghika Vinaya

This leaves open the ques­tion of the remain­ing epis­odes of Devadatta’s legend, which are indeed absent from the Mahāsaṅghika Vinaya. Per­haps these elab­or­a­tions are the product of the Sthavira schools fol­low­ing the schism. Indeed, the inher­ent

implaus­ib­il­ity of many of these epis­odes, as well as the vari­ations in the tra­di­tions, make it cer­tain that they were sub­ject to a degree of elaboration.

 

How­ever, even this weakened ver­sion of Ray’s thesis fails. The absence of elab­or­ated nar­rat­ive does not indic­ate that the Mahāsaṅghika Vinaya is early. It is merely a lit­er­ary fea­ture of the Mahāsaṅghika Vinaya, which reg­u­larly removes nar­rat­ive material.


While all the Vinayas con­tain some nar­rat­ives which serve to illu­min­ate the dis­cip­lin­ary code, there was a marked tend­ency to add more and more, until the dis­cip­lin­ary mat­ter was almost bur­ied under lay­ers of increas­ingly elab­or­ate storytelling. The most extreme example of this

tend­ency is the Mūlas­ar­vāstivāda Vinaya. The redact­ors of the Mahāsaṅghika Vinaya took the oppos­ite road, remov­ing most lengthy nar­rat­ives and focus­sing on the legal aspects. Pre­sum­ably the nar­rat­ives were col­lec­ted else­where, per­haps in a quasi-Vinaya col­lec­tion of legends such as the Mahāsaṅghika’s own Mahāvastu.


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There are many examples of this. Sev­eral of the Vinayas include part or whole of the Mahā­par­in­ib­bāna Sutta. In the Mahāsaṅghika, this novel-length text is sum­mar­ized in a few lines, begin­ning with King Ajātasattu’s hatred for the Vajji­ans, and indic­at­ing that

the entire text be filled in up to the time the Buddha lay down between the twin sal trees.27 Clearly the text is abbre­vi­at­ing an earlier ver­sion that con­tained the full story.


 
Some­times we actu­ally have the full ver­sion of the text that is abbre­vi­ated in the Mahāsaṅghika Vinaya. This is because there exists a par­tial Vinaya of the Lok­ut­tara­vāda school, who are a branch of the Mahāsaṅghikas. This Vinaya is very sim­ilar to


the Mahāsaṅghika Vinaya, except that it expands nar­rat­ives that are abbre­vi­ated in the Chinese Mahāsaṅghika text. So, for example, when the Mahāsaṅghika Vinaya says, ‘All should be told as in the Seven Women Sutra’,28 the Lok­ut­tara­vāda Vinaya includes the whole text.29

In some cases, the redac­tion of nar­rat­ive from the Mahāsaṅghika Vinaya has led schol­ars down mis­taken byways. So, for example, Jan Nat­tier argued that the Mahāsaṅghikas did not have a ver­sion of the request of the Buddha’s step­mother Mahāpa­jāpatī for ordin­

a­tion.30 She con­cluded, using par­al­lel logic to Ray, that this implied that the story was inven­ted by the Sthaviras after the first schism. She neg­lected, how­ever, to take into account the Lok­ut­tara­vāda Vinaya, which does include the story.31 Indeed, when examined closely, the Mahāsaṅghika Vinaya indic­ates that the story has been elided, instruct­ing that it should be told in full.32

In all these cases we are wit­ness­ing, not a genu­ine sec­tarian diver­gence, but a mere lit­er­ary fea­ture of the Mahāsaṅghika Vinaya: it omits most nar­rat­ive. Such is the case, also, with the story of Devad­atta. It requires no fur­ther explanation.
Does the Mahāsaṅghika Vinaya even have a Skandhaka?



The prob­lems with Ray’s ana­lysis go even deeper than this. It seems that the sec­tion of the Mahāsaṅghika Vinaya that Ray treats as the Skand­haka is not a Skand­haka at all. To under­stand this, we have to review some of the mod­ern schol­arly work on the Vinaya.

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The most detailed com­par­at­ive ana­lysis of the Skand­hakas is that of Frauwall­ner. He argued that all the Skand­hakas stemmed from a com­mon ancestor, and were char­ac­ter­ized by a struc­tured approach to Vinaya top­ics, embed­ded within the earli­est large-scale bio­graphy

of the Buddha. His ana­lysis was a power­ful insight into the shared struc­ture of the Sthavira Vinayas, but he struggled to recon­cile these with the Mahāsaṅghika Vinaya, con­clud­ing that it had been sub­ject to a major later restruc­tur­ing.33



More recently Shayne Clarke has argued per­suas­ively that what Frauwall­ner had iden­ti­fied as the Mahāsaṅghika Skand­haka bears a much closer rela­tion to an entirely sep­ar­ate class of Vinaya lit­er­at­ure, known as the mātikā. Thus while all the Sthavira

Vinayas con­sist of the Vibhaṅga plus the Skand­haka (and some sup­ple­ment­ary mater­ial), the Mahāsaṅghika Vinaya con­sists of the Vibhaṅga plus the mātikā.

If we accept Clarke’s argu­ment, as it seems we must, Ray’s point becomes even less per­tin­ent. There is noth­ing sur­pris­ing in the fact that the story of Devad­atta is absent from the Mahāsaṅghika Skand­haka, because it isn’t a Skand­haka at all. He is com­par­ing apples with oranges. We could take up just about any fea­ture of the Sthavira Skand­hakas, espe­cially the nar­rat­ive por­tions, and show that they are absent or very dif­fer­ent in the Mahāsaṅghika. This proves noth­ing except that these texts are not all that closely related.



We should instead com­pare the rel­ev­ant sec­tion of the Mahāsaṅghika Vinaya with the other texts iden­ti­fied as Vinaya mātikā (of which there are four, accord­ing to Clarke).34 A curs­ory sur­vey of the rel­ev­ant Sar­vāstivāda and Haimavata texts in Chinese reveals that the Haimavata Vinaya mātikā has a para­graph deal­ing with Devadatta’s five points,35 but noth­ing more than this.

This is no sur­prise, since they are a strictly leg­al­istic type of text. It is the Skand­haka that uni­fied jur­is­pru­dence and nar­rat­ive, and there is no reason for the mātikās to include any such material.

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While it seems clear enough that the Mahāsaṅghika mātikā is closely related to other Vinaya mātikā texts, the implic­a­tions of this are less clear, and are left open by Clarke. It is pos­sible that they com­prise an earlier type of text than the Skand­haka, clas­si­fy­ing much of the same kind of mater­ial in a more bare-bones way. It is equally pos­sible that they are a par­al­lel devel­op­ment, or a later reshuff­ling of material.

Even if the Vinaya mātikās (includ­ing the Mahāsaṅghika) are an earlier form of Vinaya lit­er­at­ure, this does not imply that the Devad­atta story in the Sthavira Vinayas is late. It just means that the Devad­atta story was added to the Skand­haka at this later date.36 There is noth­ing excep­tional about this, since all the nar­rat­ive mater­ial was added at this time. This tells us noth­ing about when the mater­ial was created.

Be that as it may, I find no reason to think that the mātikās are earlier than the canon­ical Vinayas. They are an Abhiv­inaya style of sys­tem­atic sum­mary, and I sus­pect that more sober ana­lysis will con­clude that they are, on the whole, deriv­at­ive of other canon­ical mater­ial.37
Devad­atta in other Mahāsaṅghika texts

If Ray is to be believed, Devad­atta was a forest ascetic, who was vil­i­fied in the Sthavira group of schools as part of the dec­ad­ent tend­ency of mon­astic Buddhism. If this were the case, one might expect that the Mahāsaṅghikas would proudly pre­serve the authen­tic, saintly Devad­atta as part of their tra­di­tion. But this is not what we find at all.

As we have seen, the Mahāsaṅghika Vinaya itself includes an account of Devadatta’s schis­matic efforts that is even later than the ver­sion in the Sthavira Vinayas. In addi­tion, the epis­ode where he leads 500 monks astray is recoun­ted. But these are not the only dis­par­aging men­tions of Devad­atta in the Mahāsaṅghika Vinaya. The vibhaṅga to bhikkhuni pācit­tiya 87 gives a num­ber of examples of oaths that a bhikkhuni should not make. These include an oath to the effect that she be charged with a crime like that of Devad­atta.38 This assumes that we know who Devad­atta is, and that he is a villain.

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We also find Devad­atta in his nefar­i­ous role in the Ekot­tara Āgama, which is usu­ally attrib­uted to the Mahāsaṅghikas.39 While this attri­bu­tion is uncer­tain, it at least sug­gests that the Mahāsaṅghikas, fol­low­ing the example found in their Vinaya, dis­paraged Devad­atta no less than other schools.

We are on firmer ground in the Mahāvastu, a Mahāsaṅghika ver­sion of the life of the Buddha. Here, as in all other ver­sions of the Buddha’s life, Devad­atta appears as the vil­lain, and is mocked and humi­li­ated in his vari­ous evil endeav­ours in past lives as well as this life.40

So it’s clear that Devad­atta was the bad guy for the Mahāsaṅghikas just as in the Sthavira schools. This is the case from the early canon­ical texts (Vinaya, Ekot­tara) through to the later legends (Mahāvastu). Ray offers no explan­a­tion for why the Mahāsaṅghikas would so lightly dis­card one of their early saints.
The his­tor­ical sur­vival of Devadatta’s community

Ray con­tin­ues his argu­ment by stat­ing (174): ‘There can be no doubt that Devadatta’s schism is not an event ima­gined by Buddhist authors, but is a his­toric fact, as shown by the evid­ence provided by the two Chinese pil­grims, Fa-hsien and Hsuan-tsen.’

Such cer­tainty is always a red flag in a his­tor­ical recon­struc­tion. Descrip­tions of things that happened 2500 years ago are rarely, if ever, so bor­ingly devoid of ambi­gu­ity, and cer­ti­tude reveals only the pres­ence of dogma. There are any num­ber of reas­ons why the accounts of the Fa-xian and Xuan-zang need not imply that Devad­atta suc­cess­fully estab­lished a long-term spir­itual movement.

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But what do these accounts actu­ally say? Xuan-zang, as well as record­ing many of the usual neg­at­ive stor­ies of Devad­atta, men­tions that in the Aṅga region of India ‘there are three mon­as­ter­ies in which they do not use thickened milk, fol­low­ing the dir­ec­tions of Devad­atta.’41 This doesn’t show that there was a com­munity with any his­tor­ical link with Devad­atta, merely that some mon­ast­ics were fol­low­ing one of the rules Devad­atta had pro­mul­gated.42 To this day, if a reform group in Theravāda advoc­ates veget­ari­an­ism, they will be dis­par­agingly dis­missed as ‘dis­ciples of Devad­atta’. Most likely the groups Xuan-zang referred to were some­thing of the sort.

Fa-xian is more def­in­ite, say­ing that: ‘There are also com­pan­ies of the fol­low­ers of Devad­atta still exist­ing. They reg­u­larly make offer­ings to the three pre­vi­ous Buddhas, but not to Sakyamuni Buddha.’43 Without con­text, it is hard to know what this implies. A few lines fur­ther on, the text men­tions that stu­pas for the birth­places of three pre­vi­ous Buddhas were found in the vicin­ity. This explains why they were wor­shipped there, but not why this was con­nec­ted with Devadatta.

It is, of course, quite pos­sible that Fa-xian simply made a mis­take. It does seem rather odd that none of the Indian Buddhist texts men­tion a sect of Devadatta’s fol­low­ers. There are hun­dreds of pages in Buddhist texts devoted to refut­ing both Buddhist and non-Buddhist her­es­ies; so why did no-one so much as refer in passing to the Devad­atta group? It’s hard to set up a spir­itual order, and extremely unusual for one to last after the founder’s death. In all the sprawl­ing com­plex­ity of Indian reli­gion, there are only three or four nat­ive reli­gious orders that have man­aged to last. How is it that a major devel­op­ment passed down for a thou­sand years with only a couple of passing ref­er­ences in the journ­als of for­eign travellers?

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I could go on with other prob­lems, but this is suf­fi­cient to show that Ray’s claim that the sur­vival of Devadatta’s schis­matic group is ‘no doubt’ a ‘his­toric fact’ is unten­able. The cas­ual, passing ref­er­ences by the Chinese pil­grims are indeed intriguing, and invite sev­eral inter­est­ing inter­pret­a­tions. No inter­pret­a­tion, how­ever, can offer the cer­tainty that Ray asserts.

Ray makes a basic mis­take here. He starts out by con­tra­dict­ing the entire cor­pus of early lit­er­at­ure, includ­ing the Mahāsaṅghika Vinaya, which depicts Devad­atta as a mali­cious schis­matic who ended in fail­ure. He then takes a couple of lines writ­ten a thou­sand years later as abso­lute evid­ence for a his­tor­ical real­ity in the time of the Buddha. This is not his­tory, it’s fantasy.
Devadatta’s redemp­tion

Ray’s final argu­ment brings us to the appear­ance of Devad­atta in the Māhāy­ana Saddharmapuṇḍarīka Sūtra, bet­ter known as the Lotus Sutra (175–6). There, the Buddha is depic­ted as telling a past life story of Devad­atta as a forest sage, prais­ing Devad­atta, who is part of the assembly of monks, and then pre­dict­ing that he would become a Buddha in the far dis­tant future. There is no men­tion of Devadatta’s fall from grace.

Ray, while acknow­ledging the late­ness of this text, won­ders whether this account might ‘retain a tra­di­tion relat­ing to this saint that ante­dates or is con­tem­por­an­eous with his vili­fic­a­tion in the vari­ous vinayas?’ The sec­tion of the Lotus Sutra that includes this story (Chapter 11) is dated circa 200 CE, that is, 600 years or so after the Buddha. The text as a whole is one of the most fant­ast­ic­ally ima­gin­at­ive of all the Buddhist scrip­tures. To regard this kind of story as in any way con­nec­ted with a genu­ine his­tory of the Buddha’s time is preposterous.

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This depic­tion of Devad­atta, moreover, con­tains little that is not found in the early schools. We already know that Devad­atta, while he was still a monk of good stand­ing, was praised for his med­it­at­ive prowess and psychic powers. There are Jātaka stor­ies in Pali that depict Devad­atta as an ascetic in past lives, albeit a cor­rupt one.44 As I explained at the start of this essay, it is essen­tial that he developed good qual­it­ies in the past in order to have the power he pos­sesses in the present.

And the notion that Devad­atta will be redeemed and attain Awaken­ing in the future is com­mon, and was prob­ably a uni­ver­sally held belief among Buddhists then, as today. Ray notes that of the canon­ical Vinayas only the Mūlas­ar­vāstivāda Vinaya includes a legend that Devad­atta will become Awakened. But this is to be expec­ted. Just as the Mahāsaṅghika Vinaya leaves out most legend, the Mūlas­ar­vāstivāda Vinaya puts it in. Stor­ies and legends con­tained in the Mūlas­ar­vāstivāda Vinaya are often found in the other tra­di­tions, but in their com­ment­arial or other lit­er­at­ure, not in the can­ons. And that is pre­cisely the case here, for the post-canonical Theravāda texts proph­esy that Devad­atta will in the far dis­tant future become the Pac­ceka­buddha Aṭṭhissara.45

This, too, is an essen­tial part of his story, required by the fun­da­ment­als of Buddhist doc­trine. No bad kamma lasts forever, and even the most evil per­son is cap­able of redemption.
Con­clu­sion

Ray’s thesis that Devad­atta was a forest saint who was unfairly vil­i­fied by later mon­astic Buddhists is base­less. The read­ings on which he relies are either mis­taken or wrongly inter­preted. This is not a mat­ter of sub­ject­ive judge­ment; he just gets his texts wrong. When his mis­takes are cor­rec­ted it all falls apart.

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Devad­atta was a prom­ising young monk, a tal­en­ted rel­at­ive of the Buddha, who fell prey to the all-too-human weak­nesses of jeal­ousy and con­ceit. His fall from grace was dra­matic, but there was still the hope of redemp­tion. This story is told con­sist­ently through all the Buddhist tra­di­tions. Like all the pop­u­lar epis­odes in the Buddha’s life, it has been sub­ject to all man­ner of exag­ger­a­tion. In this pro­cess, the his­tor­ical fig­ure of Devad­atta has become obscured as if by a deep fog. The meth­ods of tex­tual cri­ti­cism offer some hope in dis­tin­guish­ing the more or less plaus­ible aspects of his legend, and giv­ing a glimpse of the man behind the legend.

In Ray’s hands, how­ever, this glimpse is lost and we are left with just another cari­ca­ture. In place of the car­toon­ish vil­lain of the tra­di­tions, so hope­lessly fool­ish and doomed, we have an equally car­toon­ish hero, a flaw­less real­ized saint, tra­gic­ally mis­un­der­stood, whose every fail­ing is arbit­rar­ily attrib­uted to the crooked motiv­a­tions of mon­astic pro­pa­gand­ists. The life of Devadatta―his com­plex, nuanced, elu­sive, fra­gile, tor­men­ted soul―is still hidden.
Bib­li­o­graphy

BAREAU, A. Étude du bouddhisme. Annuaire du Collège de France, 1988–89.

―――. ‘Devad­atta and the first Buddhist Schism.’ Buddhist Stud­ies Review 14, 1997, pp. 19–37.

BEAL, Samuel. Si-yu-ki. Buddhist Records of the West­ern World―Translated from the Chinese of Hiuen Tsang (AD 629). Digital Edi­tion by Mar­cus BINGENHEIMER (Ver­sion 2.0). http://mbingenheimer.net/​t​o​o​l​s​/​b​e​a​l​/​i​n​d​e​x​B​e​a​l​.​h​tml

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CLARKE, Shayne. ‘Vinaya Matṛkā​—​Mother of the Mon­astic Codes or Just Another Set of Lists?’ Indo-Iranian Journal, 2004, pp. 77–120.

HIRAKAWA, Akira. Mon­astic Dis­cip­line for Buddhist Nuns (An Eng­lish trans­la­tion of the Chinese text of the Mahāsāṁghika Bhikṣuṇi-Vinaya). K. P. Jay­aswal Research Insti­tute, 1999.

IRELAND, John. The Udāna and the Itivut­taka. Buddhist Pub­lic­a­tion Soci­ety, 1997.

LEGGE, James. A Record of Buddhistic King­doms. The Clar­en­don Press, Oxford, 1886.

MUKHERJEE, Biswadeb. Die Über­liefer­ung von Devad­atta, dem Wider­sacher des Buddha, in den kan­on­is­chen Schriften. Munich, 1966.

NATTIER, Jan. Once Upon a Future Time: Stud­ies in a Buddhist Proph­ecy of Decline. Asian Human­it­ies Press, 1991.

RAY, Regin­ald. Buddhist Saints in India. Oxford Uni­ver­sity Press, 1994.

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―――. ‘A Con­demned Saint: Devad­atta.’ Pages 162–178 of the above, avail­able at: www​.leighb​.com/​D​e​v​a​d​a​t​t​a​.​pdf.

ROTH, Gustav. Bhikṣuṇī Vinaya. K. P. Jay­aswal Research Insti­tute, 1970.

WALSER, Joseph. Nāgār­juna in Con­text. Columbia Uni­ver­sity Press, 2005.
Foot­notes

1 For uncrit­ical cita­tions of Ray’s argu­ment about Devad­atta see http://en.wikipedia.org/​w​i​k​i​/​D​e​v​a​d​a​tta, http://nichirenscoffeehouse.net/​R​y​u​e​i​/​D​e​v​a​d​a​t​t​a​_​S​t​o​r​y​.​h​tml, and http://fraughtwithperil.com/ryuei/2010/06/30/devadatta’s-ambition/. Sev­eral reviews of Buddhist Saints are lis­ted on Ray’s own Wiki­pe­dia page (http://en.wikipedia.org/​w​i​k​i​/​R​e​g​i​n​a​l​d​_​Ray).

2 Saṁyutta Nikāya Com­ment­ary 1.62.

3 Milindapañha 4.4.7 (PTS pp. 200ff.): devad­at­topi, mahārāja, issar­iye ṭhito janapadesu ārakkhaṁ deti, setuṁ sabhaṁ puññasālaṁ kāreti, samaṇabrāhmaṇānaṁ kapaṇaddhikavaṇibbakānaṁ nāthānāthānaṁ yathāpaṇihitaṁ dānaṁ deti.

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4 In this essay, brack­eted num­bers in the text refer to page num­bers in the digital edi­tion of Ray’s essay on Devad­atta. This dif­fers slightly from the print edition.

5 The list occurs at Udāna 1.5 Brahmaṇa. Thanks to Bhikkhu Ānanda­joti for help with the vari­ous Pali editions.

6 IRELAND, p. 15, note 8.

7 http://www.accesstoinsight.org/​t​i​p​i​t​a​k​a​/​k​n​/​u​d​/​u​d​.​1​.​0​5​.​t​h​a​n​.​h​tml.

8 Pos­sibly the ori­gin of this notion was Aṅguttara Nikāya 9.26, which, how­ever, con­cerns a dis­cus­sion between Sāri­putta and a monk called Can­dikāputta regard­ing what Devad­atta taught, and makes no claim by or about Devad­atta himself.

9 Ray does tell the fuller story later on, p. 167.

10 Pali Vinaya 2.189.

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11 Pali Vinaya 2.184.

12 Pali Vinaya 2.183: devad­atto pothuj­janikaṁ iddhiṁ abhinipphādesi.

13 Mahāvi­hāravāsin in Pali (the school known today as Theravāda); Mahāsaṅghika, Sar­vāstivāda, Mahīśā­saka, and Dharmagup­taka in Chinese trans­la­tion; and the Mūlas­ar­vāstivāda in com­plete Tibetan, and par­tial Chinese and Sanskrit ver­sions. In addi­tion to these com­plete Vinayas there are a vari­ety of smal­ler or par­tial texts.

14 This was prob­ably about 200 years after the death of the Buddha.

15 The term sthavira (mean­ing ‘elder’) is the Sanskrit ver­sion of the term bet­ter known today in its Pali ver­sion thera, as in Theravāda, the ‘Teach­ing of the Eld­ers’. The ori­ginal Sthaviras, how­ever, are by no means identical with the mod­ern school called Theravāda. Rather, the Sthaviras are the ancestor of a group of related schools, one of which is the Theravāda.

16 This is the Sanskrit spelling; it is khand­haka in Pali.

17 Pali Vinaya 2.203–2.212.

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18 Cf. Itivut­taka 18 and Aṅguttara Nikāya 10.39.

19 Hell is, of course, tem­por­ary. He gets out even­tu­ally, and will, accord­ing to the tra­di­tions, become Awakened in the future.

20 T № 1425, pp. 440 c19–441 a26. For the pas­sage on the ‘power­ful lay fol­lower’, see my Sects & Sec­tari­an­ism, 1.52–59.

21 T № 1425, p. 489 c9–25.

22 Mahāsaṅghika saṅghādisesa 10 at T № 1425, pp. 281 c12–283 b14. The rel­ev­ant pas­sage is trans­lated in WALSER, pp. 102–3. It can be read online on Google Books.

23 It is unclear what this refers to. It may be the twelve-fold aṅgas, but the text just below refers to the nine aṅgas. Per­haps the text is merely inconsistent.

24 This also explains why Mukherjee’s epis­odes 13 and 14 (the five points and the split­ting of the Sangha) are shared in com­mon between the Skand­haka and the Vibhaṅga. There is no reason to con­clude on this ground alone that these are the earli­est parts of Devadatta’s legend.

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25 T № 1425, pp. 442 c29–443 a26.

26 RAY, p. 170.

27 T № 1425, pp. 489 c26–490 a1: 爾時阿闍世王韋提希子。與毘舍離有怨。 如大泥洹經中廣說。乃至世尊在毘舍離於放弓杖塔邊捨壽。向拘尸那城熙連禪河側力士生地堅固林中雙樹間般泥洹.

28 T № 1425, p. 519 a6: 如七女經中廣說.

29 ROTH, pp. 111 §145ff.

30 NATTIER, pp. 30–32.

31 ROTH, pp. 4 §2ff.

32 T № 1425, p. 471 a26–27: 如線經中廣說.

33 FRAUWALLNER, pp. 206–7.

34 These are the Haimavata Vinaya mātikā (毘尼母經) at T № 1463; Sar­vāstivāda ver­sions as part of their Vinaya the 十誦律 at T № 1435 and a closely related text in the 薩婆多部毘尼摩得勒伽 at T № 1441; and part of the uttara­grantha sec­tion of the Mūlas­ar­vāstivāda Vinaya in Tibetan.

35 T № 1463, pp. 823 a17–26.

36 In my opin­ion, the Skand­hakas were in the main com­posed fol­low­ing the Second Coun­cil, a hun­dred years after the Buddha.

37 One of the reas­ons for this is the fact, noted above, that in sev­eral cases the nar­rat­ive mater­ial has been removed from the Mahāsaṅghika Vinaya. More detailed study is neces­sary before any con­clu­sion can be reached.

38 T № 1425, p. 532 a18. Eng­lish trans­la­tion in HIRAKAWA, p. 279.

39 For example, he incites Ajātasattu to murder the Buddha at T2, № 125, p. 590 a8–p. 591 a7 (trans­la­tion at http://santifm.org/santipada/2010/ekottara-agama-18–5/).

40 For example, Devad­atta is called a ‘bad man’ at Mahāvastu 1.128 (kalipuruṣo devad­attaḥ), 1.131 (kupuruṣadevadatto), and 1.132 (asatpuruṣeṇa devad­at­tena).

41 BEAL’s trans­la­tion from BINGENHEIMER’S edition.

42 Refrain­ing from milk is one of Devadatta’s five points accord­ing to the (Mūla)sarvāstivāda.

43 LEGGE, chapter 20.

44 Eg. Tit­tira Jātaka (№ 438).

45 Dhammapada Com­ment­ary 1.125, Milindapañha 4.1.3 (PTS p. 111).
October 24, 2012 – 9:53 pm By Bhikkhu Sujato Posted in Essays, Study Tagged Buddhism, councils, early Buddhism, history, myth, Nikāyas, Pali, scholarship, text, text criticism Comments (0)
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