Part 2 – Kashmir

Following our visit to Ajanta and Ellora, we visited a Buddhist ruin in Kashmir which may have been the site of the Fourth Buddhist Council. Maybe. Nobody is quite sure where it occurred. It might have been here. Or it might have been in what is now the Punjab. We aren’t sure when it occurred either, since it is associated with the patronage of a Kushan king whom historians are unable to place in time, but somewhere between the first century BC to first century AD – after the monasteries at Ajanta were founded. The place we visited is to the northeast of Dal Lake in Srinagar, the summer capital of Kashmir. The site is simply referred to by a dilapidated sign as ‘Ancient Buddhist Stupa’.

The 4th council was one of the most controversial, and there were two of them, at least. The one which may have taken place in Kashmir, perhaps at the site we visited, is chronicled in Mahayana texts, and is where that school chose to record the Buddhist teachings in Sanskrit instead of Pali. 

However another 4th council is reported to have taken place quite distant from this spot by monks of the school of Buddhism which eventually became the Theravada lineage, which informs the mediation practice at VIMS. The 4th council meeting in the Thervadin tradition is chronicled as taking place in Sri Lanka. It is recorded to have been assembled due to a famine which had been decimating the population of the island, as well as the monks and nuns who required the support of the population to survive. It is written that surviving monastics called the 4th council meeting to write down the Buddhist teachings in the newly developed Sinhala script, as they were afraid not enough monks were surviving the famine to remember all the sutras by verbal recitation. We are told that they did get it all down in writing while it was all still remembered. Direct links to the texts written at that time aren’t known to exist, although it is generally put forward that some centuries later those precise Buddhist teachings were carried by traders and monks to Burma where it has since survived in Burmese Pali language, which is generally considered the most authoritative version by Pali scholars.

Theravadins do not recognize the 4th Council which took place in Kashmir or the Punjab. The records of the Mahayana 4th Buddhist Council were supposedly engraved on copper tablets and place under a stupa. These are yet to be found.

By Yeshua Moser-Puangsuwan – Winter 2013-14