Sthavira and Mahasamghika:
Why did they split?
In the last episode, we discussed
the Second Council, where a single copper coin
tore Buddhism in two.
But that was just a surface crack.
The real Great Schism
occurred over the following one or two centuries.
The essence of this split
went far beyond a matter of money.
It asked a question that remains unanswered to this day:
After the Buddha passed away,
who is qualified to define the Dharma?
Hello,
everyone.
I am Wang Lijie.
Today, we are going to talk about
the most pivotal split in Buddhist history:
The formation of the Sthavira and Mahasamghika schools.
If you consult traditional Buddhist historical records,
most books will tell you a very dramatic story.
The protagonist of the story is named Mahadeva.
This man, Mahadeva,
in the records of the Sthavira school,
is depicted as the ultimate villain of Buddhism.
Legend has it that he committed three heinous crimes:
killing his father, his mother, and an Arhat.
Later, he joined the monastic order,
but he stirred up an ideological earthquake within the Sangha.
He proposed five very bold claims,
later known as the "Five Points of Mahadeva."
What were these five points about?
The core message can be summed up in one sentence:
Arhats are not as perfect as you think.
Specifically:
First,
an Arhat can still be tempted by celestial demons in dreams,
leading to impurity.
Second,
an Arhat may still have ignorance regarding things they don't know.
Third,
an Arhat can still experience doubt on certain matters.
Fourth,
an Arhat's enlightenment needs validation from others,
as they might not be fully certain on their own.
Fifth,
the path to enlightenment can be advanced through vocalization,
such as shouting "What suffering!" during practice;
this exclamation can serve as a catalyst for entering the Path.
Hearing this, you might think,
"These five points don't seem like a big deal."
But in the Buddhist world at the time,
these five points were like a bomb.
Why?
Because in traditional understanding,
the Arhat was the ultimate achievement of spiritual practice.
All afflictions were severed,
the cycle of birth and death was ended,
and there would be no more rebirth.
He was the living proof of the Buddha's teachings,
the absolute ceiling of the entire system.
If an Arhat still has impurity, ignorance, and doubt,
then can the methods the Buddha taught
actually solve the problem?
It's like a company advertising that
using their product guaranteed a complete cure,
only for someone to stand up and say,
"Actually, there's a 5% residual symptom after use."
Wouldn't that company be panicked?
And this wasn't just a theoretical issue.
For monks who staked their whole lives on practice,
becoming an Arhat was their only goal.
When you tell them
that even upon reaching this goal, flaws remain,
it's like telling a mountain climber,
"You've exhausted yourself to reach what you thought was the peak,
but it isn't the true summit;
there is another level above that you can't even see."
You can imagine the panic.
This was more than just an academic debate.
This is life's ultimate gamble.
According to the Mahavibhasha of the Sarvastivada school,
after Mahadeva proposed his Five Points,
the monastic community fell into total chaos.
The majority supported Mahadeva.
Those who opposed him were the senior elders.
The majority faction eventually became the Mahasamghika,
while the minority of elders formed the Sthavira school.
A debate over the perfection of Arhats
ended up splitting the entirety of Buddhism.
Thus far,
the story seems complete,
and quite dramatic.
However,
modern academic research suggests
this story may not be the whole truth.
Since the 20th century,
scholars like Master Yin Shun, Akira Hirakawa, and Lu Cheng
have compared texts from different schools
and reached an important conclusion.
The Five Points of Mahadeva did happen,
but they likely weren't the cause of the Great Schism.
They were more likely a trigger for a later internal split in the Mahasamghika,
which later generations traced back
and pinned onto the original schism.
This is actually common in history.
People like to find a simple,
dramatic starting point for complex historical processes.
A traitor,
an argument,
a single catalyst.
Like the later Protestant Reformation,
many remember the image of Martin Luther nailing
the Ninety-five Theses to the church door.
But the actual process of the split was far more complex.
The Great Schism of Buddhism was the same.
Real history
is the slow accumulation of many forces over a long period,
eventually manifesting as a specific event in a single moment.
That event is the effect,
not the cause.
So, what caused the actual Great Schism?
The answer might surprise you.
It wasn't doctrinal differences,
it was over the monastic code (Vinaya).
More accurately,
it were about a question of principle:
For rules not explicitly set by the Buddha,
did the elders have the right to add them?
The "Ten Unlawful Points" we discussed last time,
outwardly about using copper coins,
was fundamentally about this logic.
One group of elders believed
the precepts set by the Buddha were the baseline.
But as times changed and geography varied,
they felt elders had the right to add new rules above this baseline
to make the sangha more disciplined and standardized.
Another group believed
that if the Buddha didn't say it,
you cannot add it.
The Buddha's precepts were a closed system,
not an open one.
Do you see the tension here?
Both sides felt they were protecting the Buddha's legacy.
One side said,
"I am perfecting it."
The other side said,
"Your 'perfecting' process is actually tampering."
This gets interesting.
Guess which side ultimately added more rules?
The answer is the Sthavira school.
If you compare the Vinaya texts of different schools,
you'll find a counterintuitive fact.
The Mahasamghika code,
specifically the Pratimoksha,
has only 67 rules in the Saikhadharma section.
Yet in the Sthavira system,
the same section has 75 or even more.
In other words,
the Sthavira, known as the conservatives,
was actually the party that added new rules
to the Buddha's original precepts.
Meanwhile, the Mahāsāṃghika, labeled as reformers,
maintained fewer disciplinary rules.
They might actually be closer to the original version from the Buddha's time.
The side claiming to be conservative
actually made the most changes.
The gap between labels and facts
can sometimes be quite ironic.
Moreover, there is a deeper issue hidden within this.
The name 'Sthaviravāda'—
'Sthavira' means Elder,
referring to monks with age and seniority.
While 'Mahāsāṃghika'—
means 'The Great Assembly' or the majority.
So, from their names alone,
the essence of this split was
a confrontation between a few authoritative elders and the majority of ordinary monks.
The elders felt they were qualified to establish rules
because they were closer to the Buddha.
They had heard the Buddha's teachings in person,
or their teachers had.
But the majority felt that
the Buddha's Dharma was meant for everyone,
not just a select few.
Your seniority doesn't mean your understanding is more correct than others'.
This tension between the elite and the masses
has still not disappeared 2,500 years later.
Today, pick any field—
technology, politics, education—
the tug-of-war between expert authority and public voice
is the same structural problem faced by those monks long ago.
This reminds me of a common paradox in modern organizational management.
After a founder leaves,
the faction claiming to be most loyal to the founder's legacy
is often not the one that changes nothing,
but the one that actively adds new systems and standards.
Their logic is that
the founder's spirit must be institutionalized to endure.
The other side's logic is,
'What the founder left behind is everything.'
Every new rule you add
is secretly altering his original intent.
Both sides believe they are the orthodox ones,
and both have their reasons.
This deadlock
has remained unresolved
for 2,500 years.
But the split didn't stop at the level of precepts.
Over time,
the two camps began to move in completely different theological directions.
The Sthavira lineage later developed the highly intricate Abhidharma philosophy,
the Buddha's teachings into the smallest analytical units,
trying to describe the mechanics of all things using a pseudo-scientific method.
Its most important branch was the Sarvāstivāda.
Their core claim was that 'all exists in the three periods of time'
and that the essence of dharmas is eternal.
Meaning all 'dharmas'—past, present, and future—
the fundamental elements that constitute the world,
possess a real, intrinsic existence.
This is similar to the approach of ancient Greek atomism,
where there's a set of unchanging basic particles at the base of everything.
And what about the Mahāsāṃghika?
They took a completely different path.
Their understanding of the Buddha himself
began to undergo a fundamental change.
In the records of Early Buddhism,
the Buddha was a human being;
an enlightened human,
but human nonetheless.
He would get sick,
have back pain,
get indigestion,
and eventually die of old age at eighty.
The Agamas contain many details of the Buddha as an ordinary man.
The disciples remembered his greatness,
but also his humanity.
However, the Mahāsāṃghika began to propose a very different view of the Buddha.
This change didn't happen overnight.
After the Buddha passed away,
For later generations of monks and lay followers who never met him,
memory of the Buddha relied increasingly on oral storytelling.
As these stories spread,
they naturally drifted toward the divine and the supernatural.
Because when you have never met someone in person,
you can only understand them through narratives,
and stories, by nature, condense and amplify.
Ordinary details are forgotten,
while extraordinary moments are told repeatedly.
Slowly,
Siddhartha the human, who had backaches and digestive issues,
began to transform into a completely different being in the collective memory.
The Mahāsāṃghika school systematized this shift in collective memory.
They claimed
that the Buddha was supramundane (lokottara).
The Buddha's physical body,
the flesh-and-blood form seen with the naked eye,
was merely a manifestation.
His true existence transcended time and space.
The Buddha's lifespan was infinite,
his divine power limitless.
Every word he spoke turned the Wheel of Dharma.
He could preach with a single voice,
yet all beings would understand it according to their own nature.
Meaning, when he spoke a single sentence,
different people would hear different Teachings,
and exactly what they needed to hear most.
Do you see?
This is no longer describing an awakened human being.
It is describing an omniscient, omnipotent, and transcendent entity.
This shift was extremely significant
because it meant that,
starting with the Mahāsāṃghika,
a force to deify the Buddha emerged within Buddhism.
And this force,
centuries later,
would flow directly into Mahayana ideals of the Bodhisattva and the Trikaya theory.
The complex system of the Dharmakāya, Saṃbhogakāya,
and Nirmāṇakāya—the Three Bodies of Buddha—
had its seeds planted in this Mahāsāṃghika shift.
Meanwhile,
though Mahādeva's Five Points may not be the cause of the Great Schism,
the core question they raised—
is an Arhat truly perfect?—
became an underlying theme in Mahāsāṃghika thought.
Think about it:
If an Arhat is still imperfect,
should becoming one still be the ultimate goal of practice?
Is there a higher spiritual attainment than Arhatship?
Centuries later,
Mahayana Buddhism gave a clear answer:
Yes.
Don't just be an Arhat.
Be a Bodhisattva.
Don't just seek personal liberation.
Strive to save all sentient beings.
Don't stop at the stillness of Nirvana.
Seek the 'Non-Abiding Nirvana.'
This trajectory,
starting from the theory of the Arhat's imperfection,
stretched all the way to the explosion of the Mahayana revolution.
The seeds were already sown here.
Think about it.
The Mahāsāṃghika did two things:
First,
they elevated the Buddha from a human to a transcendent being.
Second,
they demoted the Arhat from the finish line to a mere waypoint.
Between this elevation and demotion,
room was created for the Bodhisattva ideal.
The Buddha became the unattainable ultimate height,
while the Arhat became just a stage along the way.
The vast distance in between
is the path the Bodhisattva must travel.
Interestingly,
the Sthavira school did not move in this direction at all.
They insisted
there is no essential difference in liberation between a Buddha and an Arhat.
The only difference is that the Buddha discovered the path himself,
whereas the Arhat is one who follows it.
The destination is the same.
The only difference is who arrives first.
These two understandings—
one elevates the Buddha to the height of a god,
the other keeps the Buddha in the place of a human.
Which one do you think is closer to the Buddha's own intent?
There is no rush to answer this question.
Just keep it in mind for now.
So you see,
the split between Sthavira and Mahasanghika
was a dispute over precepts on the surface,
but underneath, it was a struggle for power—
specifically, the power to interpret the Dharma.
And deeper still, it was a struggle over direction:
Where exactly should Buddhism go?
Should the Buddha's teachings be locked in a precise analytical system
to ensure they remain unchanged word-for-word,
or should they evolve with the needs of the times,
even evolving things the Buddha himself might not have explicitly said?
Between these two directions,
there is no right or wrong.
Each responds to a genuine need.
The Sthavira responds to the need for purity.
"Don't change it;
original flavor is best."
The Mahasanghika responds to the need for vitality.
A living teaching must respond to new questions from living people.
We discussed this in the episode on Buddhist "factory settings."
Distinguishing between original and aftermarket isn't about ranking them.
Think about your phone.
The few super apps you use most every day
were not part of the original settings.
The factory-installed calls and text messaging
are likely the functions you use least now.
But you wouldn't dismiss a super app just because it isn't original,
nor would you call calling superior just because it's a factory feature.
Originality and utility
are two different dimensions.
But what truly fascinates me is something else.
Remember?
Before his passing, the Buddha said,
"Be an island unto yourself,
be an island unto the Dharma."
Rely on yourself;
rely on the Dharma.
He did not appoint a successor.
He left no unalterable dogmas.
He didn't even clarify what he meant to Ananda
when he said "minor precepts could be abolished."
Have you ever wondered?
This might not have been an oversight by the Buddha,
but perhaps his deepest teaching.
How could someone who truly understands Dependent Origination
believe that a fixed system could apply eternally
to all eras
and all places?
The gray areas he left behind
might be his final act of trust in future generations.
Judge for yourselves,
practice for yourselves,
make mistakes for yourselves,
and correct them for yourselves.
The Buddha-Dharma is not preserved;
it is lived anew by each generation.
Of course,
this also means
that schism is inevitable.
It is not a tragedy,
nor a fall from grace.
It is the natural result of Dependent Origination.
A seed falling into different soils
will grow into different shapes.
This isn't betrayal;
this is being alive.
But the split didn't stop at two camps.
Once the Sthavira and Mahasanghika stabilized,
a new round of internal division began.
From two to four,
from four to eight,
traditionally ending with eighteen schools.
In reality, there may have been more.
Each new branch
addressed a new aspect of the same core question.
How did this forest grow, step by step?
What understanding of Dharma did each branch represent?
In the next episode,
we will map out the full panorama of Nikaya Buddhism.
Within the ambiguity left by the Buddha,
between Sthavira's preservation and Mahasamghika's adaptation,
which do you think is closer to the Buddha's original intent?
Or perhaps,
the question itself is flawed.
Tell me your thoughts in the comments.
I'm Wang Lijie.
See you next time.