The Foundations of Buddhism

The Buddhist Community

wanderer. Schopen takes this as reason to conclude that the Vinaya

texts as we h;we them reflect a state of affairs long after the death

of the Buddha and in their present form must belong to a rather

later period than is usually assumed-the early centuries of the

Christian era. And yet, as Steven Collins has pointed out in his

introduction, Wijayaratna's study of the early Pali sources brings

out the extent to which they contain a coherent, developed, and

well-integrated conception of monastic life, and this suggests that

we must redraw our picture of the Buddhist monk as exclusively

a homeless forest dweller even in the lifetime of the Buddha.

Schopen might respond that in pushing the existence of a settled

monastic way of life too far back in time, we assume too much

development in too short a period of time and deny the Sangha

any history.^30 But the fact remains that we are still unclear of

the extent to which the Sangha can be regarded as having a

'pre-Buddhist' history. That is, a comparison with Jain monastic

organization indicates that certain rules and principles, includ-

ing the institution of a residential rains, are held in common. This

suggests that either Buddhism and Jainism have borrowed from

each other or that both have drawn on a common heritage. It

may well be the case that the varied 'renouncer' tradition from

which both Jainism and Buddhism emerge had already devel-

oped certain institutional patterns by the time of the Buddha,

and that these have been drawn upon and adapted to suit the

characteristically Buddhist vision of a mendicant order.

Again as Gregory Schopen has made clear, if we want to form

some idea of the reality of ancient Buddhism, in addition to the

evidence of ancient texts, we must take into account the archaeo-

logical evidence of ancient inscriptions and other artefacts. Dating

from the third or second centuries BCE, these reflect the reality

of how Buddhism was actually practised less problematically than
the ideals of the texts. Once again the picture that can be drawn
on the basis of these makes it clear that the homeless mendicant
wanderer, meditating in the forest, intent on nirval).a, was nei-

ther the only, nor probably the numerically dominant, actuality.

For a general picture of Buddhist monastic life in ancient
India and Sri Lanka through the centuries of the first millennium