tional splits were much the more numerous, and that divergence among intel-
lectual positions is about what one would expect from the law of small
numbers.
For the period down to the beginning of the Common Era, our ability to
reconstruct a network is very imprecise. The names of significant individual
thinkers are only occasionally known. Figure 5.3 shows the approximate
structure of the organizational fractionation, subject to some disagreement over
dates and genealogical connections and to spelling variants.
The first great schism occurred at the Second Council, about 100 years
after the death of the Buddha. The issues were not at all philosophical or even
theological, but matters of discipline. At issue was a crisis of institutionaliza-
tion for a newly successful movement. The Mahasanghikas, or “majority of
the council,” favored loosening the ascetic rules and allowing monasteries to
accumulate property. The Sthaviras, followers of the “way of the Elders,”
upheld the tradition of the wandering alms men. The Buddhist movement had
no headquarters or hierocratic succession; councils were general meetings
among the independent monasteries, without means of enforcing church unity.
Both the Mahasanghikas and Sthaviras underwent a series of fractionations
over the next 200 years. We may group the outcomes into four main camps
which acquired distinctive intellectual lines.
- The Pudgalavadins, branching off from the side of the Elders, held that
there is a pudgala, or “person,” over and above the bundle of aggregates which
makes up human experience. This was a first-order heresy in Buddhism, since
a basic tenet was the non-existence of a self. The Pudgalavadins, however, did
provide an answer to a favorite early debating point: If there is no soul, what
is it that is reincarnated from one life to another? The Pudgalavadins seem to
have undergone a number of short-lived organizational sub-splits, or perhaps
they are merely referred to by one well-known leader after another. Neverthe-
less, their main doctrine remained constant throughout the life of the sect. The
Pudgalavada was one of the longest-lived Buddhist sects; it was still one of the
four largest during the 600s c.e., and members remained down to the end of
Indian Buddhism around 1200. - The root-lineage Sthaviras, under their Pali name Theravadins, also
remained stable and conservative in doctrine. Originally the Theravadins were
strong in western India (the home of the Pali dialect); they owed their survival,
as well as their doctrinal conservatism, to the fact that they were the sect which
had colonized Sri Lanka about 250 b.c.e., where they remained entrenched,
despite various political vicissitudes, down to the 1900s (Gombrich, 1988).
Their philosophical doctrine, the basis of which they shared with the Sarvasti-
vadins, was an Abhidharma scholasticism. - Another large set of sects branches from the Sthaviras. The best known
External and Internal Politics: India • 215