The Ten Points of the Second Buddhist Council

The account in the Cullavagga begins with a monk named Yasa arriving at Vesali and finding the resident monks holding out a bowl of water on observance day and inviting the laity to drop coins in for the community. He tells the laity this is not allowable. The monks move to discipline him for insulting their supporters; he appeals to elders elsewhere; and an assembly is convened.

The assembly considers ten claimed allowances. Nine are small and technical, and reading them is a useful corrective to the idea that monastic law is about grand principle. May salt be carried in a horn against a day when the food is unsalted? May a meal be eaten when the sun has moved two fingers' breadth past noon? May a monk who has eaten go to another village and eat again? May unfermented palm juice be drunk? May a sitting cloth be made without the prescribed border? To each the assembly answers that it is not allowable, citing the rule it offends.

The tenth is different in kind. May a monk accept gold and silver? The rule against it is explicit and old, and the practice at Vesali had made the community's finances depend on breaching it. The assembly rejected it with the rest.

The doctrinal weight of the case lies in the method rather than the outcome. Each answer is given by citing the text of the rule and the case that generated it, which establishes that the discipline is not to be adjusted by local convenience.

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.