Dear list members,

Just a  brief reminder that our October seminar will be held on Friday 26th at 5.30 pm.  Please note that that we will be in the Rogers Room, Woolley Building, University of Sydney.  Please refer to Map (Ref 12E) for details.

We do hope you can attend
AABS Executive Committee

The presenter will be Bhante Sujato presenting on the topic of 'Sects & Sectarianism: The First Schism'.

The first schism in the Buddhist community was that between the Mahasanghikas and the Theriyas. Like so much of the historical situation of early Buddhism, the date and circumstances of the split are difficult to ascertain. Ancient sources are late, biased, and contradictory; and modern studies have often not taken into account all the relevant information, and have tended to evaluate the sources as history, rather than as myth. But myth is what they are, an attempt by struggling communities to tell the story of their origins, and to find in that story a meaning relevant to the issues of their own times. I have revisited the original sources, uncovered some texts hitherto underutilized, and evaluated them in terms of what the stories meant for the communities that told them. The result of this is that the schism would appear to have arisen much later, in the post-Ashokan era, while most modern scholars place it before Ashoka. This finding has important implications for the early history of Buddhism.