In Ceylon versions of the scriptures other than that of the Mahavihara were current until the twelfth century when uniformity was enforced by Parakrama Bahu.  Some of these, for instance the Pitaka of the Vetulyakas, were decidedly heretical according to the standard of local orthodoxy but others probably presented variations of reading and arrangement rather than of doctrine.  Anesaki[638] has compared with the received Pali text a portion of the Samyuktagama translated by Gunabhadra into Chinese.  He thinks that the original was the text used by the Abhayagiri monastery and brought to China by Fa Hsien.

The Sinhalese ecclesiastical history, Nikaya-Sangrahawa, relates[639] that 235 years after the Buddha’s death nine heretical fraternities were formed who proceeded to compose scriptures of their own such as the Varnapitaka and Angulimala-Pitaka.  Though this treatise is late (c. 1400 A.D.) its statements merit attention as showing that even in orthodox Ceylon tradition regarded the authorized Pitaka as one of several versions.  But many of the works mentioned sound like late tantric texts rather than compositions of the early heretics to whom they are attributed.

Ecclesiastical opinion in Ceylon after centuries of discussion ended by accepting the edition of the Mahavihara as the best, and we have no grounds for rejecting or suspecting this opinion.  According to tradition Buddhaghosa was well versed in Sanskrit but deliberately preferred the southern canon.  The Mahayanist doctor Asanga cites texts found in the Pali version, but not in the Sanskrit[640].  The monks of the Mahavihara were probably too indulgent in admitting late scholastic treatises, such as the Parivara.  On the other hand they often showed a critical instinct in rejecting legendary matter.  Thus the Sanskrit Vinayas contain many more miraculous narratives than the Pali Vinaya.

4

European critics have rarely occasion to discuss the credibility of Sanskrit literature, for most of it is so poetic or so speculative that no such question arises.  But the Pitakas raise this question as directly as the Gospels, for they give the portrait of a man and the story of a life, in which an overgrowth of the miraculous has not hidden or destroyed the human substratum.  How far can we accept them as a true picture of what Gotama was and taught?

Their credibility must be judged by the standard of Indian oral tradition.  Its greatest fault comes from that deficiency in historic sense which we have repeatedly noticed.  Hindu chroniclers ignore important events and what they record drifts by in a haze in which proportion, connection, and dates are lost.  They frequently raise a structure of fiction on a slight basis of fact or on no basis at all.  But the fiction is generally so obvious that the danger of historians in the past has been not to be misled by it but to ignore the elements of truth which it may contain.  For the Hindus have