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What the Sources Do and Do Not Agree On

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What the Sources Do and Do Not Agree On

The ten points are among the most stable pieces of early Buddhist tradition. The disciplinary collections of the Theravada, the Mahasanghika, the Mahisasaka, the Dharmaguptaka, the Sarvastivada and the Mulasarvastivada schools all preserve the account, and they agree substantially on the list and on the verdict. That agreement across lineages that separated early is why historians treat the council itself as a real event rather than as a legend, and it makes this one of the few institutional facts of early Buddhism that can be argued from more than one independent tradition.

What the sources do not settle is the date and the consequence. The Pali tradition places the council a hundred years after the Buddha's death, which on the long chronology gives a date near 383 BCE and on the short chronology a date more than a century later. The Buddha's own dates are disputed, so the council floats with them.

The consequence is more contested still. Later Theravada tradition connects the dispute to the first schism, out of which the Mahasanghika school emerged. The Mahasanghika's own account of that schism does not turn on the ten points at all but on a dispute about the status of an arhat. Charles Prebish and others have argued that the two events have been run together in the later literature, and that the council on the discipline and the schism on doctrine were separate. The atlas records the ruling, which is well attested, and not the schism narrative, which is not.

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