Mahâ-Parinibbâna-Suttanta: The Book of the Great Decease

If further proof were needed, we have it in the fact that the Dîpavamsa actually contains the details of another calculation--based not on the lists of kings (Râga-paramparâ), but on a list of Theras (Thera-paramparâ) stretching back from Asoka's time to the time of the great Teacher--which contradicts this calculation of 236 years. The Thera-paramparâ gives the name of the member of the Buddhist Order of Mendicants, that is, the Thera, who ordained Mahinda (the son of Asoka), then the name of the Thera who ordained that Thera, and so on. There are only five of them from Upâli, who was ordained sixteen years after Buddha's death, down to Mahinda inclusive. This would account not for 236, but only for about 150 years. For let the reader take the case of any clergyman in the present day. The Bishop who ordains him would have been ordained thirty or forty years before; and four such intervals would fill out, not 236 years, but about a century and a half; and a similar argument applies with reasonable certainty to the case in point. An examination of the details of the List of Theras confirms this conclusion strongly on every essential point. An examination also of the List of Kings shows that the period of 236 years is wrong by being too long. The shorter period of 150 years between Asoka and the Great Decease agrees much better with what we know of the literary history of Buddhism during that interval. And it also agrees with the tradition of the northern Buddhists as preserved by Hiouen Thsang, and in Kashmir and Tibet[1]. In the 'Questions of Milinda' also--a work of unknown date, preserved only in its Pâli form, but