第二結集記事における『摩訶僧祇律』の特殊性 — なぜ十事が現れないのか —=The Distinguishing Characteristics of the Mahāsāṃghika Vinaya in its Account of the Second Council: Why Do the Ten Points Not Appear?
The Vinaya, or Buddhist law, contains the account of an event that took place at a Buddhist Saṃgha after the Buddha’s parinirvāṇa. This is an account of the First Council convened immediately after the death of the Buddha to compile the Sutras and the Vinaya. The Second Council was convened around 100 years after the death of the Buddha. Accounts in the Vinaya relating to the Second Council differ in content, which has led to various arguments throughout Buddhist academic circles ever since. The most conflicting discrepancy is with respect to the Council agenda. According to the Pali Vinaya and other Vinayas of Sthavira Sects, the Second Council was convened to discuss the rights and wrongs of ten regulations, whereas the Mahāsāṃghika Vinaya alone states that the agenda of the Second Council was to discuss only one regulation, i.e., whether the Council should be permitted to receive money, and to take the opportunity to compile a new Vinaya. While many researchers have hypothesized on the cause of this discrepancy between the Vinayas of Sthavira Sects and the Mahāsāṃghika Vinaya, there has been no definite answer to date. This paper examines each Vinaya’s account of the Second Council in detail in order to ascertain the cause of this mystery. The discrepancy between the Vinayas of Sthavira Sects and the Mahāsāṃghika Vinaya is because of the fact that the compilers of the Mahāsāṃghika Vinaya based their position on the assertion that “the Vinaya was compiled at the Second Council, thus resulting in the Mahāsāṃghika Vinaya.” They altered the original account stating that the Second Council discussed all the ten points and changed the content to say that “the Second Council was convened to discuss the point on the propriety of receiving money, namely, the tenth of the ten points, and the Vinaya was thus compiled for the second time.” The issue of the propriety of receiving money remained in the account solely because of literary manipulation to preserve continuity in the story and bears no historical significance whatsoever. Therefore, there is actually no point in claiming that “the Mahāsāṃghika Vinaya is the legitimate Vinaya completed at the Second Council” or even undertaking a historic examination of whether the Council’s agenda was to discuss the ten points or just one point (receiving money). This paper also asks the question of why the compilers of the Mahāsāṃghika Vinaya found it necessary to claim that the Mahāsāṃghika Vinaya was completed as a result of the Second Council. This question inevitably came about as a result of a previous study published by an author on saṃghabheda, or institutional schisms in Buddhism. Originally, the Mahāsāṃghika Vinaya was structured similarly to the Pali Vinaya and other Vinayas of Sthavira Sects. However, in the later iterations, it was recompiled into a differently structured Vinaya through large-scale, artificial structural modifications. In order to uphold the authority of the Mahāsāṃghika Vinaya, the compilers had to claim that “the compilation of the Vinaya was completed in two stages by the First Council and the Second Council.”
