Points of Controversy
OR
Subjects of Discourse
BEING A TRANSLATION OF THE KATHAVATTHU
FROM THE ABHIDHAMMA-PITAKA
BY
SHWE ZAN AUNG, B.A
AND
MRS. RHYS DAVIDS, M.A
PREFATORY NOTES
THE original of this work—the Katha-vatthu—is the
fifth among the seven books, making up the third, or
Abhidhamma Pitaka of the Buddhist Canon. Its numerical
order has been traditional from Buddhaghosa's days till the
present time.
1
The Mahabodhivangsa ranks it third,
but was that in order to make such clumsy verse-materials
as book-titles scan ?
2
Dr. Winternitz ranks it as' the seventh
book,' in good German prose, and thus without poetic
excuse.
3
According to Ledi Sadaw Mahathera, it holds a
nearly midway position in its Pitaka in virtue of the nature
of its contents. Such, at least, is his explanation of the
position of the next or sixth book—the Y a m a k a. The
task of this work was to clear up difficulties left by the
Katha-vatthu . There would seem, then, to be nothing
of chronological significance in the position of the latter.
It is true that it refers apparently to passages in the first
t wo Abhidhamma books:—the Dhammasangani and
Vibhanga. But then it does not quote from the third
and fourth books,
4
and it does refer to subjects belong-
ing peculiarly to the matters treated of in the seventh book
1
Atthasalinl (PTS ed.), p. 8; K. V. Comy., p. 1 ; Ledi Sadaw
Yamaka (PTS ed.), ii. 220 ; JPTS, 1914, p. 116.
3
P, 94 (PTS ed.):
'Dhammasangani-Vibhangan ca Kathavatthun ca Puggalang . .,
Dhatu-Yamaka-Patthanam Abhidhammo ti vuccati.'
Gesch. d. Indischen Litteratur, ii, I. 187.
4
Dhatu-Katha, Puggala-Pannatti,
(Patt h ana).
1
We are, therefore, entitled to conclude,
as to its date relative to its own Pitaka, only thus much:
that the Katha-vatth u was compiled when the contents
of at least parts of the first, second and last books of the
Abhidhamma Pitaka were already established as orthodox
doctrine in the Sasana. Whether those works were, in
Asoka's time, the completed compilations we now know as
Dhamma-sangani , Vibhanga , Patthana , is a
further question.
But as to the other two Pitakas—Vinaya, Sutta—there
can be no question as to our volume being a much younger
compilation. Other canonical books, notably the Nid -
d e s a
5
s , the Patisambhidamagga , the T h e r a -
t herigatha , and even the Sai j yutta-Nikaya , all
of them in the Sutta-Pitaka, quote, from other works in
that same Pitaka, passages given as authoritative doctrine,
and hence belonging to a canonical stock o f records. But the
Katha-vatth u quotes from a greater number of Sutta
books than any o f them, and from the Vinaya, It does not
trouble to specify the sources it draws from. All, even the
"Vinaya, are for its compiler [s],
4
Suttanta,' just as we would
say, not Leviticus, or Luke, or King John, but ' the Bible,'
' Shakspeare.'
2
So that, i f we accept the tradition followed
by Buddhaghosa, the putative author of our Commentary,
and assign Asoka's Council of Patna as the date when the
Katha-vatth u was completed, we can not only place
this work in time—rare luxury for Indologists !—but assign
a considerable, if indefinite priority in time to those literary
sources (so accurately quoted),
3
which it invests with such
constraining authority for all Sasana disputants.
1
See below, pp. 182, 294, 862. It does not refer to the sixth book,
Yamaka, but it uses vokar a for khandha , which occurs, in the
Pitakas, perhaps only in these two works—very frequently in the
Yamaha.
2
The Vibhanga- also refers to 'Suttanta' only.
3
It is worthy of note that, while the citations from the ' Suttanta'
are in almost perfect verbal agreement with the originals, as they are
shown in the modern MSS.—I cannot of course vouch for the agree-
Finally, as to the book's own inner chronology, I have
used above the term 'completed,' namely, at and for the
Council of Patna, held approximately B.C. 246.
1
The orthodox
tradition (see below, 1 p. f.) maintains that the outlines or
heads of the discourses, 216, more or less, were drawn up
by the far-seeing Founder himself, in anticipation of the
warring opinions that would arise eventually within the
Sangha or Sasana, and threaten its disruption. The truth
underlying, for me, this legend is the slow growth, by accre-
tions, of the work itself. No work put together for a special
occasion, or to meet an entirely new need,
2
could conceiv-
ably have assumed the ' patchwork-quilt' appearance of the
Katha-vatthu . I am not assuming that such a work
would have grouped its discourses or Katha' s on the plan
I have adopted in the
£
Table of Contents grouped according
to the Subjects of Discourse.' Many other ways o f arrang-
ing might be selected. But that there would have been some
plan is almost certain. The most plausible design would,
perhaps, have been that of dealing with the views o f each
of the dissenting 'schools.'
3
This would have involved
some overlapping and repetition, but repetition never had
terrors for a Pitaka-compiler ! And this plan, according to
the Commentary, teas followed here and there to a limited
extent. Thus we get a little series of debates on views
ascribed to the Andhakas and others. But these series are
never exhaustive of such views. Not even the late irrupting
names of Hetuvadins and Yetulyakas got dealt with in
uninterrupted sequence. On the other hand, we have such
great subjects as Buddha, Arahant, insight (nana) ,
emancipation, sense, consciousness,
4
assurance,' the uncon-
ditioned, showing, in the geological phrase, an outcrop that
re-appears erratically in now this, now that, Yagga, or
ment in the untraced quotations—there is here and there a discrepancy.
See, e.g., that on p. 206 (vii. 7).
1
See C. M. Duff's (Mrs. W. R. Rickmers') Chronology of India.
2
I am not dealing with the cheap, unhistorical hypothesis of
'faked' books.
3
See Table of Contents grouped according to the schools.
division, none of which Yaggas has a title. Now, i f we
imagine that (1) each Katha (or, at times, each two or more
Ji a t h a' s) was framed by, or by order of , the heads o f the
Sangha at the time when each seceding school newly-
systematized and taught this and that heresy, or gave it
occasional and special prominence, and that (2) such a new
Katha, or sub-group o f them, was added, by memorial or
scriptural registration, to the existing stock o f Katha ' s ,
then the puzzle o f the Katha - v a 11 h u' s asymmetry re-
solves itself into a relatively simple matter. It would not be
easy to insert each new Katha under a subject-heading. For
memory and manuscript, new editions are even more incon-
venient than in the case of printed books. Established
sequences in the association of ideas are living growths, as
hard to alter as the contents of palm-leaf MSS. Let any-
one try to graft on memory, e.g., by an interpolated clause
in the Lord's Prayer. And just as the full Anglican
' morning service ' of my young days had its four Lord's
Prayers, and its three prayers for the Queen and family,
because the ritual was an old accretion of 'offices,' so, in
the Katha - vatthu , we get a five-fold outcrop of Buddha-
questions, and a six-fold outcrop about the Arahant, etc.,
scattered broadcast about the book, and including, now and
then, even duplicated arguments. Even had the inclina-
tion to systematize been ready to overcome the inconvenience
of re-arrangement, we may be very sure that ecclesiastical
conservatism would have vetoed it.
To leave the Katha' s for the sects or groups—I prefer
to call them ' Schools'—on whom the opinions debated about
are fathered by the Commentary :—our translation includes
no positive addition to existing research on that perplexing
subject. It can, at best, claim to facilitate in some measure
such additions in the future. It may prove helpful to the
baffled historical inquirer to place on one side (if not far-
away) the separate, and often grotesquely mispunctuated
PTS edition of the Commentary,1 and, in these pages, to
1
The great service rendered bv Minayeff's edition is not hurt by
captious remarks.
read first the Comment, giving the little A k h y a n a, or
occasion of the debate, followed at once by the debate itself,
as if he were supping of f Jatakas. This is, after all, the
way in which the Pali tradition was taught from generation
to generation: a kernel of doctrine enshrined in narrative
and exegesis. The method of all Abhidhamma compilations
involves elimination of everything particular, contingent,
ad-kominem, and retention only of the more general, abstract,
schematic urbi-et-orbi statements.
1
Hence the silence, in
the Katha-vatth u itself, as to the opinions or move-
ments which, in the Commentary, are shown to have led
to so many essays in controversy. And hence the dish of
relatively dry and indigestible fare presented by the
Katha-vatthu , when we try to cope with it apart from
its Commentary.
It is true, alas! that the commentator lacks either the
will, or the power to enlighten us much regarding the schools
he names. It may be that his superficial references partake
of the characteristic negligence of the orthodox with res-
pect to the non-conformist. It may be that his interest
is chiefly engaged, not by the history of external move-
ments, but rather by the varieties and evolution of ideas.
Certainly the distinctions he draws among terms and their
import are often interesting and valuable. Or it may be
that, for him, most of the schools he names were mere
names and no more. To which of these three possible
causes, if to any of them, is the threadbare quality of his
information due ?
As I read him, it is the ideas that he finds living and
interesting, not the human secessions. Only by one word
does he here and there infuse life into his dissentient dum-
mies :—the word etarahi, 'at the present day, now.' Of
some of the contested points he writes, 'held now (or at
present) by' M. or N. This expression occurs frequently
up to the end of the fourth book (va gga) ; it then dis-
appears till Books XVII.,.XVIII., when it re-appears con-
cerning the Vetulyakas only. The following is a complete
table of reference:—
1 Cf. Ledi Sadaw, JPTS, 1914, pp. 116, 124.
6
Held at the present day by the"—
Sammitiyas, I., 4, 5 ; II., 9.
Sabbatthivadins, L, 6 ; II., 9.
Andhakas, I., 9, 10; EL, 1-7,
1
9; III , 1-8, 5-7, 11-13;
IV., 8, 9.
(xokulikas, II , 8.
Bhadrayanikas, II., 9.
Uttarapathakas, IY., 1-4, 6-8.
Vetulyakas,
2
XVIL, 6; XVIII., 1.
It is true that the phrase icch an ti , rendered on p. 64
by ' incline to [the belief] '—c
will have it that' or ' accept'
had been less literal—is in the present tense. And where
it occurs (in a few early katha' s only), it applies to other
schools also:—Vajjiputtiyas, Mahasanghikas. Again, ma n-
nanti , 'imagine,' 'deem,' applied to the Kassapikas, in
one passage only, is in the present. But then the ' his-
torical present
5
is too common a feature in Pali idiom to
lend reliable significance to the Commentator's usage here.
Since, nevertheless, both the earlier and the later Chinese
pilgrim chroniclers, Fa-Hian and Yuan-Chwang, testify to
the existence of Mahasanghika groups, the use of the present
tense may after all be no mere rhetoric.
Those same pilgrims allude also to the survival in their
day of another school, the Mahiijsasakas. Adding these
two with the Kassapikas and the Vajjiputtakas, to those o f
the original seventeen seceders named in the foregoing list,
we get only eight out of the seventeen who, by the verbal testi-
mony of the Commentary and the pilgrims, were, or were
possibly actually surviving when this work was written :—
Sammitiyas, Sabbatthivadins, Gokulikas, Bhadrayanikas,
1
Held by the Pubbaseliya Andhakas only. By a regrettable over-
sight, for which my colleague is not responsible, etarahi has not been
translated in our excerpts from the Corny, in II. 1, 5, 7; III. 5 ;
IV. 1, 2, 7, 9. I hope that readers will correct the omissions for
themselves.
2
This body is twice mentioned in the Mahdvaysa as specially
needing and receiving drastic repression at the hands of two kings in
Ceylon, but at dates not later than the third and fourth centuries A.D.
See Greiger's translation (PTS.), cf. pp. 259, 264 with xxxviii.
as 'at present holding,' etc.; Kassapikas, as ' imagining '
such and such a view; Yajjiputtakas and Mahasanghikas,
as ' insisting on' such and such a view; and the last named,
with the Mahigsasakas, as met with by the Chinese pilgrims,
the former in North India (Kashmir, Patna), the latter in
Ceylon.
1
Hence it may possibly be that, for our practical and un-
historical Commentator, the names of the nine non-surviving
schools were simply convenient labels for certain ideas,
which were useful only as additional exercises in doctrine
and dialectic. And as to the names of the eight survivors,
it may have seemed as unnecessary to give an account of
them as it would seem to a modern exegesist to say anything
about Lutherans or Independents as such.
I" have indicated in the accompanying genealogical tree
of the Sasana (according to the Pali authorities) the rela-
tive surviving power discussed above. I have not attempted
to make use of the Dipavaijs a simile of a banyan tree
(nigrodha).
2
Excellent in its context, it would have
proved, graphically, too complicated. And in the figure
'kantaka, ' used for the 'sects,', which is usually trans-
lated 'thorns,' it is not clear whether the offshoots of the
banyan are meant, or other obnoxious growth. It is just
conceivable that the author's botanical knowledge as to
banyans was not strong. If on the other hand the « run-
ners ' put forth by banyans, so beautifully illustrated in
the seal of the Royal Asiatic Society, with its approximately
true rune, Quot rami tot arbores, were properly covered by
the term kantaka , thei* it is our lexieographists who
are at fault.
To aid, it is hoped, further inquiry into the complicated
problem of the Sasana's history, I have drawn up two
other diagrams illustrating the varying accounts of the
1
The pilgrims testify also to the existence of Sammitiyas and
Sabbatthivadins. On the whole subject cf. Rhys Davids, JRAS,
' The Sects of the Buddhists,' 1891, p. 409 ff. He points out that only
three of the eighteen' schools are named in inscriptions of the second
and third centuries AJD.
2
See p. 5.
secessions to be found in the sister epic of the Mahavagsa,
and in the Sanskrit works assigned to Vasumitra and
Bhavya.
In that of the Mahavaijsa, agreeing in most respects with
the Dipavaijsa , we note these differences:—The first
secedents are not the Yajjiputtakas broadening out into the
Mahasanghikas, but are the latter only. The former are
given as independently seceding, and the Mahiijsasakas
as the third original seceders. The epic then states that
' thence there were born ' Dhammuttariyas, Bhadrayanikas,
Chandagarikas {sic),
1
Sammiti's {sic), and Vajjiputtiyas.
And 'from the Mahigsasakas arose Sabbatthivadins, etc.,'
as in the Dipavaijsa . Further we read that whereas
the Theravada and seventeen schools, with the six later
ones, Hemavat[ik]as, etc.,
2
were located in India, two other
secessions, Dhammarucis and Sagaliyas, arose in Ceylon.
The account.in the Mahabodhivagsa,
3
ascribed by
Professor G-eiger to the period A.D. 975-1000, follows the
Mahavags a in making the Mahasanghikas the original
seceders, and merely classes Mahiqsasakas and Vajjiputta-
kas (not -p u 11 i y a s)
4
with their nine offshoots, without
distinguishing. It also restores the spelling: Channaga-
rika—the Six-Towners—and elaborates the Dipavaijs a
similes, calling the Theravada a Bo-tree, a sandalwood tree,
and the offshoots parasitic, poisonous clusters and the like.
And it identifies the terms Theravada and Vibhajjavada as
the spoken doctrine collected by the Theras at the First
Council: —Theravada' because it was the collective doctrine
of the Theras; ' sambandha-vacanatta'; ' Vibhajjavada'
because the Lord of Sages was a ' Vibhajjavadin.'
Much more striking are the discrepancies in the account
contained in Yasumitra's works surviving in Chinese and
1
The Dipavangsa MSS. read either Chandagarika or Channagarik".
Our text (p. 4) has not got this quite correctly.
2
See below, p. 5.
3 p.95. Edited for PTS by A. Strong, 1891. W. Geiger, Dtyavaysa
and Mahavangsa, Colombo, 1908.
4
Our Commentary has Vajjiputtiyas (MSS. sic) only in I. 2.
modern Tibetan translations.
1
Here we see no Mother-Thera-
vada-tree afflicted by' parasites' or 'runners,' but a Sangha
splitting in two through disputes led by four groups, three
of whom are recognizable:—Theras (Sthavira),Nagas, Bahus-
sutiyas (one of the sects in the Pali account) and Pracchyas :—
(?) the Eastern or Pacinaka bhikkhus of the Second Council
disputes.
2
Thus the orthodox Theravada is reduced to one
of two mutually dissentient halves. The Third or Patna
Council is confused with the second. And in the offshoots
we see variants of interest. The Lokottara (or Lokuttara)
school appears. Gokulikas are Kukkulikas (or Kukkutikas).
The Cetiyas become complex. The Hemavatas (the Hima-
layan folk), otiose in our Commentary (p. 5), now stand as
the conservative Sthavira or Thera school. The Hetuvadins,
irruptive in the K a t h a-v a 11 h u, are identified with the
Sabbatthivadins:—' They maintained that everything exists,'
Vasumitra is made to say. The Suttavadins (Suttanta-, or
Sau11rantika-vadins) are considered to be not different from
the Sankantikas. Four schools which, in our Commentary,
split of f from the Mahasanghikas, are here made offshoots
from the Sabbatthivadins. And whereas there is no
mention of Yajjiputtaka s as either the first seceders,
or seceding with the Mahasanghikas, we here find a school
of Yatsiputriyas among those that split of f from the
Sabbatthivadins.
Finally we have the account given by Bhavya in a work
on the Schools, also known to us from a Tibetan source.
3
This is in substantial agreement with Yasumitra's, but
Bhavya is less concerned to locate the secessions in
successive centuries. He simply starts with one great
schism in ' Dharmasoka's reign,' ' 160 years after the
Parinibbana,' and states that, after that, all the remaining
sixteen secessions took place 'gradually.' Among these,
1
Wassiljew, Buddhismus, 244 f . Bunyiu Nanjio's Catalogue, App. I..
No. 33.
2
Vinaya, Texts, iii. 401 (Cullav., xii. % 2).
3
I take this from W. W. Bockhill's The Life of the Buddha (from
Tibetan works), London, 1884, p. 181 f .
the Kukkulikas are dropped from the Mahasanghika
offspring, and the Channagarikas from that of the
Sthaviras. The number (eighteen) is made up by re-
introducing the Mahisasakas, and by insertion of a Sans-
kritized form of the word Vibhajjavadins. The Hetuvadins,
not derived from the Sabbatthivadins, appear as Hetu-
vidyas, or as Muruntakas (or Muduntakas).
Bhavya further quotes a few discrepant opinions con-
cerning one or more of the secessions current in his own
day, but I cannot here dwell upon these. Nor am I out
to maintain that versions of the movement among these
dim old Dissenters, surviving only in relatively modern
translations from Tibet and China, are quite so approxi-
mately trustworthy as those in the oldest Buddhist records.
Seeing, however, that as the latter are slightly discrepant
inter se, a comparative view in the growth of discrepancy,
obtained from other than orthodox sources, becomes o f
considerable interest.
Beyond the having given such a view, I wish only to make
one or two passing comments on these different records.
First (to work backwards), with regard to the curious
emergence of a Vibhajjavadin school 'gradually5
seceding
from the Theravadins:—The reader will see, in the Com-
mentator's opening narrative (p. 7),
1
that the Sangha-
Centre had taken as their shibboleth or password a certain
prevailing tendency in their Founder's teaching. To be an
utterer-in-detail (vibha j javadi ) was, according to the
Nikayas,
2
one of the four rational ways o f answering
enquiries:—Your reply was (1) a universal proposition, or
(2) a number of particular propositions replying in detail,
or (8. ) a counter-question,
3
or (4) a waiving aside an un-
intelligible or irrelevant question. Each kind of answer
was, when apposite, equally commendable. Nevertheless,
it is easy to discern that, whether established' generaliza--
1
The narrative in the Mahavangsa gives a similar testimony. See
also Oldenberg's Vinaya, Introduction, p. xli f.'
2
Anguttara-Nikaya, i. 197; repeated in Milinda, p. 145.
3
Cf. that of Christ, Mark xi. 29.
tions were being arraigned by criticism, or whether, as in
the Asokan age, errors springing from uncritical interpreta-
tions of doctrine were to be expunged, the 'Visuddhi-
magga'—' the path to purity'—of views, and the hall-mark
of sagacious exposition lay chiefly in the
£
Distinguo'
of the second mode o f reply. And so we find Gotama
Buddha, on one or two occasions in the Suttas, expressly
repudiating the reply in universal terms, awaited by the
interlocutor, and declaring,' Herein am I a particularizer; I
am no generalizes'
1
Many, too, of the views debated in
the Katha-va tthu , are declared, in the Commentary, to
arise through a lack of distinction in meanings.
We see, however, that even after a week's priming in
doctrine by Tissa, the king was unacquainted with the term
as an equivalent for the new ' State Church.' On hearing
it, he turned to his preceptor for confirmation as to the
Buddha having been a Vibhaj javadin. (The Mahavags a
naively adds that the king was pleased, perhaps at the
convenience of having a distinctive label for the special
objects of his patronage.) Moreover, the Commentary, in
assigning the speakers in the discourses, never calls the
orthodox or Theravada speaker Vibhajjavadin , but
simply S a k ava din, ' own-adherent/ ' one of ours.' Hence
the name may have remained throughout an occasional
appellation only, like ' Methodists ' for Wesleyans, till some
local revival of it, past or current, misled Bhavya, or his
informants. Why precisely the intellectual tendency, in-
dicated by the name Vibhajjavadin, should have come to
distinguish the orthodox from such standpoints as ' Eter-
nalism,' ' Annihilationism' and the rest, instead of such
terms as Aniccavadin , Anattavadin , we do not
know, nor ever shall. But a faked chronicle would almost
certainly have chosen one of these.
1
E.g., M. ii. (Subha-Sutta). This is nearer the Buddhist distinction
than to define Vibhajjavada as ' religion of logic or reason,' as Childers
(Diet) does. He makes amends by an excellent explanation. A
universal predication is not as such less ' logical' than a particular
judgment.
The case of the Yajjiputtakas,Yaj jiputtiyas, Yatsiputriyas
1
may possibly be somewhat analogous. The
4
Yajjiputtaka
bhikkhus,' as we know from the Yinaya of the Canon
itself, are said to have been the arch-disturbers o f Sangha-
concord a century after the Founder's death. On account
of them the second or Yesali Council was called together.
According to our Commentary they amalgamated, after
that, with the stronger growth of dissentients called
Mahasanghikas (Dipararjsa : Mabasangitika). Yet, judging
by the introduction to the second debate, they were still
considered as a distinct group, siding with the Mahasan-
ghikas and two other schools in holding a certain view.
There is no difference of meaning in the affixes -ak a, -iy a.
They are like our
£
New Zealander' and ' Etonian.' The
Mahclvagsa account juxtaposes both forms with an am-
biguous result that is noticeable in Professor Geiger's
translation (p. 26). This ambiguity may have misled Asiatic
chroniclers. In the Sanskrit accounts,
2
as translated, the
original move by Vajjiputtakas has been lost sight of , and,
as with the term Yibhajjavadin, Vatsiputriyas figure as an
offshoot only. As such, nothing whatever is recorded of
them in other documents.
The Gokulikas in the debates play the single role of
pessimists. 'All the world,' they said, is, not a stage, but
a fiery mass of misery—a kukkula.
On fire is all the world, is wrapt in smoke !
Ablaze is all the world, the heav'ns do quake . . .
3
And the question suggests itself, as my friend Mr. B. M,
Barua pointed out to me, whether one of the two Sanskrit
versions of their name—Kukkulika—is not very likely the
original, derived from their favourite text, and not from any
1
On this last name see De la Valine Poussin, 'Councils (Buddhist),'
Ency. Beligion and Ethics, 184, n. 1.
2
Vatsiputriyas is merely a Sanskritized form ol the Pali.
Ps$. of the Sisters (from the Sangyutta and Therigatha), pp. 101;
187. The simile is applied to the five khandhas, Sayyutta, iii. 117;
cf. i. 209.
teacher's or other family name. No Pali record that I have
seen, however, departs from the ' Gokulika ' reading.
Concerning the Cetiyavadins (pron : Chay'tiya), or School
of the Shrine, there are interesting, if somewhat legendary,
materials for the historian to sift. These are collected in
Professor de la Vallee Poussin's able discussion on ' The
Five Points of Mahadeva,' JRAS., April, 1910, p. 413 ff.
Sanskrit and late Tibetan writers there quoted have some-
thing to tell about one Mahadeva, who founded the School
of the Caitika ( = Cetiya), and put forward five heretical
points, concerning which a council was held. There is
possibly a confusion here with the Second Council, that of
Yesali, convened to decide concerning the ten indulgences
1
claimed by the Vajjiputtakas (Vin. Texts, iii. 401 f.). Mahade-
va's points were purely speculative. As M. de la Yall6e
Poussin points out, they approximate to (though they do
not coincide with) the points controverted below in II. 1-5
and 6. These points are all alleged to have been held
by that leading sub-sect of the Andhaka school, called
Pubbaseliyas, or East-Cliffmen. The Opposite Cliffmen
(Aparaseliyas) share in one, ' others ' in another of the
points.
Now for our Commentary, these Clif f schools are of the
Andhakas. And the Andhakas have been located about
Kanchipura and Amaravati on the South-East Coast.
Yuan-chwang travelled to that district, 'An-te-lo,' far south
from Kosala. And I understand that the two opposite cliffs,
with the deep gully between and the terraced caves above,
have been practically identified.
2
But no connection between-
Andhakas and Cetiyavadins is made out in the Commentary.
On the other hand, if we consult the Yasumitra and
Bhavya plans, we see in the one, Cetiyas, Uttaracetiyas and
Aparacetiyas (North and South Shrinemen) ranged as par-
allel offshoots of the Mahasanghikas, and Caityikas, Pur-
1
Bee below, p. 2: bases' or 'subjects,' vatthuni, as in Katha-
vatthu. ' The Sects of the Buddhists,' JRAS, July, 1891, p. 411, n.
2
Cf. Watters's On Yuan Chwang, London, 1905, ii. 209 1, 214 f.;
Rhys Davids.
vasailas and Avarasailas (= Pubbaseliyas, Aparaseliyas)
ranged in a similar relation in the other.
The presumption is, I think, fairly sound, first that there
was a historical connection between the Cetiyavadins and
the two Andhakas schools of the Commentary, secondly
that, in the range of the Commentator's knowledge, both
Cetiyavadin and the Andhaka schools were merely names,
remote, provincial, standing for certain doctrines. Of
Mahadeva he had apparently not heard. Anyway it is his
method, however much or little he knew, to assign opinions
exclusively to groups. But Vasumitra and Bhavya traced
several schools to an individual teacher :—Bahussutiyas to
Bahussutiya (the learned [doctor]); similarly the Dham-
muttariyas (the ' Extraordinary or Super-normal'), the
Bhadrayanikas ('LuckyVehicle'), the Sammitiyas (Sammata,
the complete), the Dhammaguttikas (Norm-guard), the
Kassapikas (Kassapa, a common gens name). By the Com-
mentary all this, whether history or word-myth, was
severely let alone. Nevertheless the Pali word we have
rendered by school is acariya-kula , 'teacher-clan,'
1
which may refer to one or several teachers. And teachers
there will unquestionably have been.
Places figured largely as the putative origin o f group-names,
presumably where the school was small, or at least unilocal
only. It will ever probably remain a mystery how the con-
servative stock of Theravadins came to be connected with the
Himalaya (Hemavata) regions. No one knows after which
six towns the Channagarikas were called. And who shall
reveal which divergent group or groups were covered by the
intrusive name Uttarapathakas :—' Northern-districters' ?
Equally mysterious are the intrusive Vetulyakas belonging
to a group called the Great-Voiders—Maha-sunnava-
din s.
2
Here we come to the bodies not confined to one locality
and named by some variety of credo :—Mahimsasakas, the
' Earth-propagand-ers,'
3
Hetuvadin, Sabbatthivadin, etc. If
1
See p. 3, n.
2
Great Merit-ites (-punnavada ) is another reading.
3
According to Wassiljew (ojp. cit, p. 254, n. 5), of missionary origin.
I do not attach much weight to Yasumitra's identification
of these last two with each other, it is partly because the
latter were surviving when the Commentary was written, and
partly because the heretical doctrines ascribed to each have
nothing in common. It is true that neither have the con-
troversies with the Hetuvadins anything to do with con-
dition or cause or motive (hetu). But it is not essential
that bodies named after some doctrinal emphasis should on
just that point think heretically. The Hetuvadins may
have been especially sound on hetu as against 'fortuitous
origination,' or moral indeterminism.
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