Vaishali

Vaishali was the seat of the Licchavis, the leading people of the Vajji confederacy, and early Buddhist texts treat their assembly as a model. The Buddha is shown telling a minister of Ajatashatru that the Vajjis cannot be conquered while they meet in full and frequent assembly, and then applying the same conditions to his own monastic community, which is why the passage is quoted in modern Indian writing as an early instance of republican government, a reading that goes well beyond what the texts themselves claim. The Buddha visited repeatedly. He accepted a mango grove from the courtesan Ambapali, and the account of her invitation, in which the Licchavi nobles try to buy the honour from her and are refused, is one of the few places in the canon where a woman of her profession is treated with unqualified respect.

Tradition also places at Vaishali the admission of women to the monastic order at the request of Mahapajapati, although the recensions locate that episode differently. On his last journey the Buddha turned to look back at the city, said he would not see it again, and announced at a shrine outside it that he would die within three months. The Chinese pilgrim Xuanzang, arriving a thousand years later, was shown the ruins of Ambapali's house and the stupa the Licchavis were said to have built over their share of the relics, so the sites the texts name were still being pointed out to visitors in the seventh century.

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.