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We are not however told that they revised the Sutta or Abhidhamma. Here ends the account of the Cullavagga but the Dîpavaṃsa adds that the wicked Vajjian monks, to whom it ascribes wrong doctrines as well as errors in discipline, collected a strong faction and held a schismatic council called the Mahâsangîti.
The Cullavagga is similar in construction but less connected in style . The Vinaya contains several important and curious narratives and is a mine of information about the social conditions of ancient India, but much of it has the same literary value as the book of Leviticus. Of greater general interest is the Sutta Pitaka, in which the sermons and discourses of the Buddha are collected.
The feebleness of the historical sense may be seen in the account of Devadatta's doings in the Cullavagga where the compiler seems unable to give a clear account of what he must have regarded as momentous incidents. Yet the same treatise is copious and lucid in dealing with monastic rules, and the sayings recorded have an air of authenticity.
Even as we have it, the text of the canon contains some anomalous forms which are generally considered to be Magadhisms . The Cullavagga relates how two monks who were Brahmans represented to the Buddha that "monks of different lineage ... corrupt the word of the Buddha by repeating it in their own dialect.
The text of the Pâtimokkha is in the Vinaya combined with a very ancient commentary called the Sutta-vibhanga. The Vinaya also contains two treatises known collectively as the Khandakas but more frequently cited by their separate names as Mahâvagga and Cullavagga.
The version given in the Cullavagga is abrupt and does not entirely agree with other narratives of what followed on the death of the Buddha . It seems to be a combination of two documents, for it opens as a narrative by Kassapa, but it soon turns into a narrative about him.
Brief and confused as the story in the Cullavagga is, there is nothing improbable in its outline—namely that a resolution was taken at Kusinârâ where he died to hold a synod during the next rains at Râjagaha, a more central place where alms and lodgings were plentiful, and there come to an agreement as to what should be accepted as the true doctrine and discipline.
The accounts of the second Council are as abrupt as those of the first and do not connect it with previous events. The circumstances said to have led to its meeting are, however, probable. According to the Cullavagga, a hundred years after the death of the Buddha certain Bhikkhus of Vajjian lineage resident at Vesâlî upheld ten theses involving relaxations of the older discipline.
The contents of it are not quite the same in Ceylon, Burma and Siam, and only a small portion of them has been identified in the Chinese Tripitaka. Nevertheless the word pañcanekâyika, one who knows the five Nikâyas, is found in the inscriptions of Sanchi and five Nikâyas are mentioned in the last books of the Cullavagga. Thus a fifth Nikâya of some kind must have been known fairly early.
An account of the formation of the canon is given in the last two chapters of the Cullavagga . After the death of the Buddha his disciples met to decide what should be regarded as the correct doctrine and discipline.
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