Buddhist Councils, the First Schism and the First Nuns

The early saṅgha in one paragraph

After the Buddha’s death the saṅgha, the order of monks and nuns, had no leader and no book. It held together through a set of shared rules, recited aloud every fortnight, and a body of teachings kept in memory by groups of specialist reciters. Over the next century and a half it grew, spread, and argued about its rules. Buddhist tradition remembers this period through three councils, at Rājagaha, Vesālī and Pāṭaliputra. The first is best read as a founding story, the second as a real dispute about discipline, and the third as one school’s account of its own origins. Somewhere in the same period the order divided, probably over monastic rules rather than doctrine, into the Sthaviras and the Mahāsāṃghikas, the ancestors of every later school. Majority

The order of nuns belongs to this earliest layer too. Its founding story, as the Vinaya tells it, includes the Buddha’s reluctance, eight rules subordinating nuns to monks, and a prediction that admitting women would halve the teaching’s lifespan. Comparison of the different schools’ versions suggests that much of this was added later. The voices of the early nuns survive directly in the Therīgāthā. Majority

Timeline of the early saṅgha

Dates follow the median chronology (the Buddha’s death c. 400 BCE, §2). The intervals come from Buddhist sources and are themselves conventional.

Where: from Rājagaha to Vesālī and beyond

The councils are placed in the cities where the Buddha had taught. Rājagaha (Rajgir), the old capital of Magadha ringed by hills, is the setting of the First Council. Vesālī (Vaishali), capital of the Vajjian confederacy north of the Ganga, is the setting of the Second. Pāṭaliputra (Patna), the Mauryan capital, is the setting of the Third.

The geography of the dispute at Vesālī is telling. The Vinaya describes monks travelling from the west, from Pāvā, Avanti and the southern region (dakkhiṇāpatha), gathered at Yasa’s call to oppose the eastern monks of Vesālī.^[4] Within a century of the Buddha’s death the saṅgha had spread far enough along the trade routes that its members came from different regions with different habits, and that alone could produce disputes about how the rules should be kept. Majority

The evidence ledger for the early saṅgha

Keeping the teaching: recitation, rules and the rains

The saṅgha was held together by two practices of recitation. One kept the rules, the other kept the teachings. Both were communal and both were checked by the group.

The fortnightly recitation of the rules. On the new-moon and full-moon days all monks of a district met for the uposatha and recited the pātimokkha, the list of monastic rules, and any monk who had broken a rule confessed it.^[2] The nuns did the same with their own, longer list. In the Theravāda version there are 227 rules for monks and 311 for nuns; other schools’ lists run to roughly 250 and 350.^[22]​^[7] The recitation was a legal act, and it defined the community. Monks who recited the pātimokkha together within a boundary (sīmā) were one saṅgha; monks who recited separately were not. That is why, in Buddhist law, a schism is defined not as a disagreement about doctrine but as holding a separate uposatha (see the Debates).^[2]​^[23] Consensus

The rains retreat. For three months of the monsoon, monks and nuns stopped wandering and stayed in one place, a rule the Vinaya says was adopted after lay people complained that wandering monks trampled the green grass and harmed small creatures.^[3] The retreat turned temporary shelters into permanent residences. Over generations, rains residences given by lay patrons became the first monasteries. Majority

The reciters of the teachings. The commentaries say that at the First Council each collection was entrusted to a lineage of pupils: the Dīgha Nikāya to Ānanda’s, the Majjhima to the pupils of Sāriputta, and so on.^[24]​^[14] Whatever the truth of the attribution, specialised reciters, called bhāṇaka, are real. A pillar at Bharhut, from about the late second century BCE, is in Lüders’s translation “the gift of Nadagiri (Nandagiri), the reciter, the Selapuraka (inhabitant of Sailapura),” and several other Bharhut donors are called reciters.^[10]​^[25] Sanchi donors describe themselves as knowing the five collections (§0).^[26] By the second century BCE, knowing the texts by heart was a recognised title. Consensus

This system explains the shape of the texts described in §0. It was good at preserving wording, which is why parallel versions agree so closely. It was not designed to stop texts from being added, which is why the canon kept growing.^[14]​^[27]

The First Council: a charter for the canon

The Vinaya says that soon after the Buddha’s death five hundred arahants met at Rājagaha, Upāli recited the rules and Ānanda the discourses, and the canon was fixed. Most historians read the account as a founding story rather than a record of an event.

The story is told in the eleventh chapter of the Pali Cullavagga, and every surviving Vinaya has a version.^[1] Mahākassapa, the senior disciple, calls the council after hearing a monk say that, now the Buddha is dead, they can do as they like. Upāli is questioned on the rules and Ānanda on the discourses, and the assembly recites them together. Consensus that the story is shared by all schools

Several details in the story are revealing:

• Ānanda on trial. After the recitation the elders charge Ānanda with five faults. He did not ask the Buddha which were the “minor rules” that could be abolished; he stepped on the Buddha’s robe while sewing it; he let women pay respects to the Buddha’s body first, so their tears stained it; he did not ask the Buddha to remain alive; and he pleaded for women to be allowed to go forth.^[1] He replies that he sees no fault in any of them, but confesses out of respect. The episode reads less like a record than like a later argument, conducted through the figure of Ānanda, about women and about who had authority to interpret the rules.
• The minor rules. The Buddha had said the saṅgha could abolish the minor rules after his death, but nobody had asked which ones. Mahākassapa proposes that the saṅgha neither add nor remove any rule. The council accepts.^[1] This is the conservative principle on which the Theravāda tradition still rests.
• The dissenter. A monk called Purāṇa arrives with his followers after the council is over. Asked to accept its recitation, he answers:

susaṅgītāvuso, therehi dhammo ca vinayo ca. api ca yatheva mayā bhagavato sammukhā sutaṃ, sammukhā paṭiggahitaṃ, tathevāhaṃ dhāressāmi.

“The Teaching and the Monastic Law have been well-recited by the senior monks. Nevertheless, I’ll remember what I myself have received from the Buddha.” (trans. Bhikkhu Brahmali; the Pali says more literally that he will keep them as he heard and received them “face to face” with the Buddha)^[1]

What it proves. The story was told to give the canon its authority: these are the Buddha’s words, recited by the people who heard them. That a council-founding text preserves a dissenter who kept his own version suggests a memory that the canon was never as uniform as the story claims. Historians do not deny that the disciples gathered after the Buddha’s death, but the claim that the canon was fixed there is contradicted by the evidence of §0, which shows texts being added for centuries.^[16]​^[28] Majority

The Second Council: a dispute about money

The Second Council, at Vesālī, is more plausibly historical. It is told in all the Vinayas, it is about a specific dispute, and it concerns discipline, not doctrine.

The Pali account opens: “One hundred years after the Buddha had attained final extinguishment” (trans. Bhikkhu Brahmali).^[4] The monk Yasa Kākaṇḍakaputta, visiting Vesālī, found the local Vajjian monks setting a bronze bowl of water in the middle of the assembly on uposatha days and asking lay supporters to put coins in it. When Yasa objected, publicly, they carried out a formal “legal procedure of reconciliation” against him, charging him with abusing the lay followers and requiring him to apologise to them. He went west to gather support, and a council of seven hundred monks was eventually convened at Vesālī. A committee of four monks from the east and four from Pāvā in the west judged ten practices:^[4]

The council condemned all ten.^[4] Majority

What it proves. That a century or so after the Buddha the saṅgha’s main disputes were about how to live by the rules, and that one of the hottest was money. A community that relied on gifts was growing richer, and the rule against handling gold and silver was under pressure. The same tension runs through the whole history of Buddhist monasticism, and in later centuries monasteries became substantial owners of land and money (§4, §8). Majority

The Second Council also shows how the saṅgha resolved a dispute: through formal procedure, a committee and consensus, not through a ruling by a single leader. The Buddha appointed no successor. The tradition remembers him saying that the teaching and the discipline would be the community’s teacher after him.^[29] Consensus

The first schism: elders and the great community

At some point in the century after the Second Council the saṅgha divided into two bodies, the Sthaviras (“elders,” Pali Thera) and the Mahāsāṃghikas (“the great community”). Every later school descends from one or the other. Why they divided is told differently by different sources.

There are three main accounts:

• The Theravāda chronicles. The Dīpavaṃsa says that the Vajjian monks defeated at Vesālī refused to accept the verdict, held their own council, and became the Mahāsaṃgītikas, distorting the texts.^[6] This connects the schism to the money dispute, from the side of the winners.
• The five points of Mahādeva. Northern sources, especially the treatise on the schools attributed to Vasumitra, say a monk called Mahādeva proposed five theses about arhats: that they can have nocturnal emissions, can have ignorance, can have doubts, can be taught by others, and can reach the path through an exclamation. The dispute over these is said to have split the saṅgha.^[17] On this account the split concerned doctrine, specifically how perfect an arhat is.
• The Mahāsāṃghika account. The Śāriputraparipṛcchā, preserved in Chinese, says that an elder had added rules to the Vinaya, and that the majority, the “great community,” refused to accept the expanded code.^[30]​^[5]

In a 1977 study Jan Nattier and Charles Prebish argued that the third account is the most plausible. The schism was about whether the Vinaya could be expanded, and the Sthaviras were the innovators, not the conservatives. The Mahādeva controversy, they argued, came later and divided the Mahāsāṃghikas internally.^[5] This reading is widely cited, though not universally accepted, and the exact date and details remain uncertain. Akira Hirakawa, for example, follows the Vinayas and the chronicles in treating the dispute over the ten points at Vesālī as the cause of the “basic schism,” with Mahādeva’s five points at most adding to it.^[7] Contested

What it proves. That the first split followed the line of what the Vinaya defines as schism: a disagreement about the rules and their recitation, not about what the Buddha taught. The Mahāsāṃghika Vinaya, translated into Chinese in 416 CE, survives, and some of its sections are less elaborated than the Sthavira codes, which fits a community that refused additions.^[31]​^[5] Doctrinal differences between the schools are real, but they developed after the institutional split. Majority

The “eighteen schools”

Buddhist sources say the early saṅgha divided into eighteen schools. The number is a convention. The lists disagree with each other, and more than thirty school names are known from texts and inscriptions.^[16]​^[7]​^[23] Consensus

What can be said with confidence is that within a few centuries there were several distinct lineages, each with its own Vinaya and, often, its own collection of discourses and Abhidharma:

A “school” here is mainly a Vinaya lineage: a group of monastic communities that ordained by the same rules and recited the same pātimokkha. Monks of different schools could live in the same monastery and hold different doctrinal views, as the Chinese pilgrims later reported.^[33] The schools are not denominations in the modern sense, and the habit of treating them as rival churches comes from later histories (§10).^[23] Majority

The Third Council: one school’s history

The Theravāda chronicles describe a Third Council at Pāṭaliputra, about 250 BCE, under Ashoka’s patronage and led by the monk Moggaliputta Tissa. No other school records it.

On the Theravāda account, the saṅgha’s uposatha had been suspended for seven years because heretics had joined the order for the sake of royal gifts. Moggaliputta Tissa questioned the monks, the king expelled those who did not hold the correct view, defined as vibhajjavāda (“teaching of distinctions”), and Moggaliputta Tissa composed the Kathāvatthu (“Points of Controversy”), a book refuting more than two hundred wrong views. Missionaries were then sent to the borderlands, including Mahinda to Sri Lanka (§4).^[34]​^[9]​^[16]

Three points make historians cautious:

• It is a Theravāda-only story. No other school’s history mentions this council or gives Moggaliputta Tissa such a role, and other schools place their councils at different times and places.^[16] Consensus
• The Kathāvatthu is later in parts. It refutes positions held by schools that, on any reckoning, did not exist in 250 BCE. It is a growing text attributed to a founding figure.^[27] Majority
• Ashoka says something close but not the same. His edicts at Sarnath, Sanchi and Kauśāmbī do order that monks or nuns who divide the saṅgha be dressed in white and expelled.^[8] So a king did intervene against schism in Ashoka’s time. What the edicts do not mention is a council, Moggaliputta Tissa or a doctrinal test. Consensus

What it proves. That royal patronage brought royal interference, and that by the mid-third century BCE schism was a political matter as well as a monastic one. The Third Council narrative is best read as the Mahāvihāra tradition of Sri Lanka explaining how its own lineage became the orthodox one and how it reached the island (§10). Majority

The order of nuns

The order of nuns (bhikkhunī saṅgha) existed from the early period in every school. Its founding story, as the Vinaya tells it, was shaped over time, and the version known today contains layers.

The founding story

The story is told in the Cullavagga’s chapter on nuns and, almost word for word, in the Aṅguttara Nikāya.^[35]​^[18] Mahāpajāpatī Gotamī, the Buddha’s aunt and foster-mother, asks three times to be allowed to go forth and is refused. She cuts off her hair, puts on robes and follows him with other Śākyan women to Vesālī, where she stands outside the gate,

sūnehi pādehi rajokiṇṇena gattena dukkhī dummanā assumukhī rudamānā

“her feet swollen, her limbs covered with dust, miserable and sad, with tearful face,” crying (trans. Bhikkhu Sujato).^[18]

Ānanda asks the Buddha on her behalf, and when refused he changes the question. Are women able, after going forth, to realise stream-entry, once-return, non-return and arahantship? The Buddha says they are. Ānanda then reminds him of what Mahāpajāpatī did for him as a child, and the Buddha agrees, on condition that she accept eight “heavy rules” (garudhamma). The first is:

vassasatūpasampannāya bhikkhuniyā tadahūpasampannassa bhikkhuno abhivādanaṃ paccuṭṭhānaṃ añjalikammaṃ sāmīcikammaṃ kattabbaṃ.

“A nun, even if she has been ordained for a hundred years, should bow down to a monk who was ordained that very day. She should rise up for him, greet him with cupped palms, and observe proper etiquette toward him.” (trans. Bhikkhu Sujato)^[18]

Others require nuns to spend the rains retreat near monks, to receive instruction from them, to be ordained by both orders, and never to admonish a monk. The story ends with a prediction. Had women not gone forth, the true teaching would have lasted a thousand years; now it will last only five hundred.^[18]

Which parts are early?

The answer the Buddha gives to Ānanda, that women can reach every stage of awakening, is the doctrinal centre of the story, and it is shared by every version. The founding of a nuns’ order is not in doubt. What scholars have questioned is the frame around it.^[20] Majority

Bhikkhu Anālayo, comparing the account across the Pali, Chinese, Sanskrit and Tibetan Vinayas, argues that the refusal, the eight heavy rules and the decline prediction grew into the story over time:

• The heavy rules assume an existing order. One requires that a woman train as a probationer (sikkhamānā) for two years and then be ordained by both orders. That cannot have applied to the first nuns, because there was no order of nuns to ordain them, and the Vinaya itself has to explain how Mahāpajāpatī’s companions were ordained without it.^[35]​^[20]
• The versions disagree. The rules are not listed in the same order or with the same content across the schools, which suggests they were assembled separately.^[20]
• The prediction looks back on decline. A prophecy that the teaching would last five hundred years makes most sense when written by people worrying about decline, and later traditions had to reinterpret it when the five hundred years passed.^[20]​^[36]

Anālayo also argues, from the Madhyama Āgama and other parallels, that in some versions the Buddha offers Mahāpajāpatī an alternative, a celibate life with shaven head and robes at home, so that the refusal concerned the hardships of homeless wandering rather than women’s ordination in principle.^[21] The opposing case, found in standard histories such as Hirakawa’s, takes the reluctance and the heavy rules as the Buddha’s own arrangements, made to keep monks and nuns chaste and above suspicion; and features shared by every school’s Vinaya are, on any reckoning, old.^[7] Both readings agree that the founding story as it stands expresses the interests of a monastic community run by men, and that it was used for centuries to justify the nuns’ subordination. Contested

The nuns in their own words: the Therīgāthā

The Therīgāthā, “Verses of the Senior Nuns,” is a collection of about 520 verses attributed to early nuns, preserved in the Khuddaka Nikāya of the Pali canon. It is often described as the oldest anthology of women’s religious poetry in India.^[14]​^[15] Its poems are about specific lives: a mother who has lost a child, a woman worn out by poverty and a cruel husband, a courtesan, an old woman looking at her aging body.^[15] Majority

Therīgāthā 1.11, attributed to a nun called Muttā (“Freed”):

sumuttā sādhumuttāmhi, tīhi khujjehi muttiyā; udukkhalena musalena, patinā khujjakena ca; muttāmhi jātimaraṇā, bhavanetti samūhatā.

“I’m well freed, so very well freed, freed from the three things that humped me: the mortar, the pestle, and my humpbacked husband. I’m freed from birth and death; the leash to existence is eradicated.” (trans. Bhikkhu Sujato)^[13]

Therīgāthā 2.4, attributed to Aḍḍhakāsī, a former courtesan:

“The price for my services amounted to the nation of Kāsi. By setting that price, the townsfolk made me priceless. Then, growing disillusioned with my form, I became dispassionate. … I’ve realized the three knowledges, and fulfilled the Buddha’s instructions.” (trans. Bhikkhu Sujato)^[37]

What it proves. The collection keeps the nuns’ own concerns: release from household drudgery and marriage as well as from rebirth. The poems were transmitted within the monastic community and were edited, and the life stories attached to the named nuns come from the commentary, compiled centuries later.^[15]​^[19] But the voices are distinct, and a tradition that preserved them evidently valued women’s attainment as real. Majority

Nuns in stone

Inscriptions show nuns as an active, propertied part of the saṅgha. At Sanchi and Bharhut, in the second and first centuries BCE, nuns appear among the donors of railings, pillars and gateways in large numbers, alongside monks, and they give in their own names.^[11]​^[19] Some are recorded with their pupils or with titles of learning.^[12] This is the same pattern Schopen found for monks (§0): the inscriptions show renunciants with means of their own, which the texts’ ideal of possessionless mendicancy hides.^[26]​^[38] Consensus

The later history of the nuns’ order, its disappearance in Sri Lanka in the eleventh century and in Burma by the thirteenth, its survival in East Asia and its modern revival, belongs to §10 and §13.

What is absent in the early saṅgha

• A head of the order. The Buddha appointed no successor, and no early source describes a patriarch with authority over all monks.^[29] Later lineages of “patriarchs” are reconstructions (§7). Consensus
• A written canon. Everything was recited; writing comes later (§0, §5). Consensus
• Doctrinal heresy trials. Until the Third Council narrative, which is late, disputes are about rules, procedure and practice. Majority
• Mahāyāna. No bodhisattva path for followers, no Mahāyāna sūtras (§6). Consensus
• Large monasteries with endowments. Rains residences existed; the great endowed monasteries of stone and brick come with Ashoka and after (§4). Majority

Debates about the councils and the nuns

Did the First Council happen?

Some gathering of disciples after the Buddha’s death is likely, and every school remembers one. That the canon was recited and closed there is not credible: the canon kept growing, and the schools’ versions of the council disagree about what was recited. Most scholars treat the account as a charter story that gave authority to each school’s canon. A minority read it as substantially historical, with later elaboration.^[16]​^[28] Majority

Did schisms concern doctrine?

In Buddhist law, no: a schism (saṅghabheda) is defined by separate legal acts within one boundary, whatever the participants believe. Historically, the first split seems to have been about the Vinaya, and doctrinal differences developed within and between the resulting lineages afterwards. Sources that put doctrine first, such as the Mahādeva story, are later and come from one side.^[5]​^[23] Majority

Was the Buddha reluctant to ordain women?

All versions of the founding story report an initial refusal, which means it is old within the tradition, though in some versions it comes with an offer of a renunciant life at home.^[21] Whether it goes back to the Buddha, and what it refused, is another question. The comparative evidence suggests that the eight heavy rules and the prediction of decline were shaped later, and the doctrinal heart of the story, that women can reach awakening, is not in doubt. The question matters today because the eight heavy rules and the absence of a Theravāda nuns’ order are central to modern arguments over women’s ordination (§13).^[20] Contested

Was the Mahāsāṃghika split about lax monks?

That is the Theravāda account. The Mahāsāṃghika account says the opposite, that the elders added rules. Each side tells the story in a way that makes the other the innovator. Nattier and Prebish’s reading favours the Mahāsāṃghika version, partly because the Mahāsāṃghika Vinaya is shorter, but it is an inference from late sources on all sides.^[5] Contested

Further reading

• Étienne Lamotte, History of Indian Buddhism: From the Origins to the Śaka Era (trans. Sara Webb-Boin, Louvain, 1988) — the councils and schools in detail.
• Janice J. Nattier and Charles S. Prebish, “Mahāsāṃghika Origins: The Beginnings of Buddhist Sectarianism,” History of Religions 16 (1977).
• Bhikkhu Sujato, Sects and Sectarianism: The Origins of Buddhist Schools (Santipada, 2006).
• Bhikkhu Anālayo, The Foundation History of the Nuns’ Order (Hamburg Buddhist Studies 6, 2016).
• Charles Hallisey, trans., Therigatha: Poems of the First Buddhist Women (Murty Classical Library of India, 2015).
• Alice Collett, Lives of Early Buddhist Nuns: Biographies as History (Oxford, 2016).
• Vidya Dehejia, “The Collective and Popular Basis of Early Buddhist Patronage,” in The Powers of Art, ed. Barbara Stoler Miller (Oxford, 1992).