About a century after the Buddha's death, monks of the Vajji country at Vaishali were found to be following ten practices that visiting elders judged contrary to the discipline. The list is small and concrete: carrying salt in a horn for later use, eating after the shadow had passed the mark by two finger widths, drinking unfermented palm juice, using a sitting mat of the wrong size, and, the item the accounts dwell on, accepting gold and silver from lay donors.
A monk named Yasa objected publicly, was disciplined for objecting, appealed to elders elsewhere, and the dispute was settled by a committee of eight who found all ten points unlawful. That gathering is the Second Council, and unlike the first it is generally accepted by historians as an event rather than a charter story, because the several surviving Vinaya recensions describe it in broadly compatible terms.
What followed is disputed. Some accounts join the Vaishali dispute directly to the division between the Sthavira and Mahasanghika communities, the first lasting split in Buddhism; others separate the two, placing the schism later and attributing it to a quarrel over the status of an arhat rather than over monastic money. The atlas records both readings and does not choose between them, because the surviving accounts were written by parties with an interest in the outcome.