Buddhist Scriptures
The unanimous tradition of all Buddhist schools records that shortly after the death of the Master a great Council (Sangiti) was held at Rajagriha to compile the Dharma (religious doctrine) and the Vinaya (monastic code). A century later a dispute arose regarding the code of discipline as the monks of Vaisali wanted a relaxation of the rules in respect of ten points. A second council was convoked at Vaisali which condemned the ten heresies and revised the scriptures. A fresh condemnation of heresy is said to have taken place in the reign of Asoka Maurya, under whose patronage a third council was summoned at Pataliputra by a learned monk, Tissa Moggaliputta, 236 years after the death of the Buddha, to make a final compilation of the scriptures. The council of Pataliputra was probably not a plenary assembly of all Buddhists, but a party meeting of the school of Vibhajjavadins. A fourth council was held under Kanishka which prepared elaborate commentaries (Upadesa Sastras and Vibhasha Sastras) on the sacred texts. This council was also not a general assembly but probably a gathering of only the Hinayanists of Northern India.
The tradition about some of the earlier councils is not accepted by all scholars. But the unanimity of tradition about the first two assemblies and Asoka’s decrees against heretical monks indicate that there must have been a substratum of truth behind the stories narrated by the Chroniclers. The canon as we have it at present may not be as old as the first or even the second council. One text, the Kathavatthu, is admittedly a work of the third century B.C. But quotations from scriptures in the Asokan edicts, and references to persons well read in the sacred texts in inscriptions of the second century B.C., suggest that works on doctrine and discipline were current before the rise of the Maurya and Sunga dynasties, though such works may not be exactly identical with any of the extant texts.
According to the Ceylonese tradition, the sacred texts and commentaries were written down in books in the first century B.C. during the reign of King Vattagamani Abhaya. In the fifth century A.D. the texts, as distinguished from the commentaries, came to be known as Pali. The use of the term Pali to denote the language in which the texts were written is not warranted by any early evidence. The language was called Magadhanam Nirutti or the idiom of the people of Magadha, which was probably a dialect spoken in Magadha in the early days of Buddhism and which had ceased to be the current speech in the days of Asoka who used a somewhat different idiom in his inscriptions.
The Pali Canon is divided into three Pitakas or baskets, viz. the Sutta, the Vinaya, and the Abhidhamma. The first consists of five Nikayas or collections of Suttas or Suttantas, i.e. religious discourses. The second contains rules of monastic discipline, and the third contains disquisitions of a philosophical character. The fifth Nikaya of the Sutta-Pitaka includes the famous Dhammapada, the psalms of the brethren and of the sisters (Theragatha and Therigatha) and the still more celebrated Jatakas or Buddhist Birth Stories. The extant Jataka commentaries belong to a period much later than the rise of the Maurya dynasty, but the original stories are fairly old and are often illustrated in bas-reliefs of the second and first centuries B.C. They were apparently not so well-known in the second as in the first century B.C. The Jatakas belong to a class of literature which foreshadows the epic, and there are indications that the epic itself was assuming coherent shape during the early days of the Megadhan ascendancy.
The Beginnings of Epic Poetry
In Vedic literature we come across lays in praise of heroes and tales about the deeds of princes and sages. These hero-lauds (gatha narasamsi) and narrative stories (akhyana) formed an important feature of great sacrifices like the Rajasuya (royal consecration) and the Asvamedha (horse-sacrifice). In the horse sacrifice, a priest recited the pariplava akhydna (circling narrative) and tales of ancient kings, while a Kshatriya lute-player (vina gathin) sang to the lute extempore verses which referred to victories connected with the sacrificer. Among such sacrificers were many kings of the Kuru and Kosala realms. It is, therefore, not surprising that some of the most famous lays and tales found in the Vedic texts celebrated the benevolence and prowess of Kuru kings like Parikshit and Janamejaya, and of Ikshviku and Kosalan monarchs like Harischandra and Para Atnara. The narration of the Akhyana of the Ikshviku Harischandra formed a part of the ritual of the Rajasuya, and another rite of the same sacrifice was connected with an important episode of Kuru history.
The popularity of such stories is attested by Buddhist scriptures, and the Buddha strongly reprobated the practice of narrating tales of kings, of war, and of terror, in which certain Brahmans and even ascetics indulged. Some of the Ikshvaku and Kuru lays and tales centred round heroes not explicitly mentioned in the extant Vedic texts. One such story, that of Dasaratha and his son Rama of the Ikshvaku family, is alluded to in the Jataka gathas and illustrated in bas-reliefs of the second century B.C. Another tale, that of the Pandus, is also known to the Jataka gathas and is hinted at by Greek writers of the fourth century B.C. in the confused legends about the Indian Herakles and Pandia. Moreover, it is alluded to by the grammarians Panini, Katyayana and Patanjali. The last-mentioned writer also shows some acquaintance with the Kishkindhya episode of the Rama story. It is, however, difficult to say when the ballads about Rama’s adventures or the Pandus’ victory first assumed the form of a full-fledged heroic Kavya or epic. The names of Valmiki and Vyasa, son of Parasara, the reputed authors of the Ramayana and the Pandu epic, the Mahabharata, seem to occur in certain later Vedic or Vedanga texts.
The first dated reference to the Ramayana as an epic is contained in the works of Buddhist and Jaina writers of the earliest centuries of the Christian era. But even then it contained only 12,000 verses, i.e. only half of its present size. The Mahabharata is first mentioned by Asvalayana in his Grihya Sutra and by Panini in his Ashtadhyayi. It was admittedly at first only about a quarter of its present size. The complete Mahabharata of 100,000 verses is mentioned for the first time in an inscription of the Gupta period. By the sixth century A.D. the fame of both the epics had spread to far-off Cambodia. Both the poems contain a good deal of pseudo-epic or didactic material which came to be included at a comparatively late date. The genuine epic refers to a powerful Magadhan military State with its capital at Girivraja. There is no reference to Pataliputra. This probably points to a date before the later Haryanka-Saisunaga kings for the early epic. The age of the epic cannot be pushed much farther back because the knowledge, however inadequate, of Southern India beyond the Godavari, and of Eastern India beyond the land of the Pundras and the Vahgas, betrays a geographical outlook that is distinctly wider than that of the entire Vedic canon and the early Buddhist Nikayas. Of the two ancient Sanskrit epics the Ramayana is alluded to in, and was probably completed before, the extant Mahabharata. But while the Mahabharata was known to Asvalayan and Panini, there is no early reference to the Ramayana. The latter epic, moreover, mentions Janamejaya and “Vishnu who upraised a mountain with his hands “, i.e. probably Krishna. The latest books refer to Vasudeva of the Yadu family and his close associate, the incarnation of Nara, i.e. Arjuna.
