The Fourth Buddhist Council in Kashmir

The northern Buddhist traditions record a council held under the Kushan king Kanishka, at which five hundred arhats assembled and produced a definitive commentary on the Sarvastivada Abhidharma. That commentary, the Mahavibhasa, is enormous, it survives in Chinese translation, and it is the most important single work the Sarvastivada school left behind.

The Sarvastivada was for centuries the dominant Buddhist school across the north-west of the subcontinent and into Central Asia, and its Abhidharma is one of the great systematic projects in Indian thought: an attempt to specify exhaustively what actually exists, moment by moment, once persons and objects have been analysed away. The school's name means the doctrine that all exists, and refers to its distinctive claim that past and future dharmas are real in some sense as well as present ones. The Mahavibhasa is where that position is worked out against every objection its authors could find.

Kanishka is a real king with real coins and real dated inscriptions, and his patronage of Buddhism is not in question. Whether he convened this council is a different claim from whether he supported the school, and the accounts that make it are all later and all northern.

Whatever the assembly was, the commentary is not in doubt. It exists, it was translated, and it is the reason a school that has no living community anywhere can still be studied in detail. That does not depend on the council story, which is worth keeping in mind while reading the council story.

No account of this council survives from anyone who claims to have been at it. The earliest witnesses are Chinese pilgrims and translators writing centuries afterwards, working from what they were told in monasteries in the north-west, and they do not agree with one another about the basic details. Where it met is the clearest example: the sources that name a place do not name the same one, and no site has ever been identified on the ground.

That leaves historians with a choice between two readings and no decisive evidence for either. On one, a king convened an assembly which produced the Mahavibhasa, and the details blurred in transmission the way details do. On the other, a school's collective work over generations was later given a founding moment and a royal patron, which is a thing traditions do routinely and which is easiest to do once everyone who could contradict it is dead.

The Theravada tradition does not recognise the council at all, which is not evidence either way: it had no reason to record a northern school's assembly and every reason not to. Nor is the absence of a site decisive on its own, since a great deal of the archaeology of Buddhist Kashmir and Gandhara has been lost to later building, war and looting.

The atlas records this as unsettled rather than choosing. It also records the location as a genuine gap rather than a disagreement, because no scholar defends a site: the question has not been answered and it has not really been fought over either.