nt in the world, but it is not easy either to define the limits of
the Canon or to say when it was put together. According to a common
tradition Kanishka played for the Church of the Great Vehicle much the
same part as Asoka for the Theravadins and summoned a Council which
wrote commentaries on the Tripitaka. This may be reasonably held to
include a recension of the text commented on but we do not know what
that text was, and the brief and perplexing accounts of the Council
which we possess indicate not that it gave its imprimatur to
Mahayanist sutras but that it was specially concerned with the
Abhidharma works of the Sarvastivadin school.

In any case no Canon formed in the time of Kanishka can have been
equivalent to the collections of writings accepted to-day in China and
Tibet, for they contain works later than any date which can be
assigned to his reign, as do also the nine sacred books revered in
Nepal. It was agreed among Indian Buddhists that the scriptures were
divided among the three Pitakas or baskets, but we may surmise that
there was no unanimity as to the precise contents of each basket. In
India the need for unanimity in such matters is not felt. The Brahmans
always recognized that the most holy and most jealously preserved
scriptures could exist in various recensions and the Mahabharata shows
how generations of respectful and uncritical hearers may allow
adventitious matter of all sorts to be incorporated in a work.
Something of the same kind happened with the Pitakas. We know that the
Pali recension which we possess was not the only one, for fragments of
a Sanskrit version have been discovered.

There was probably a large floating literature of sutras, often
presenting several recensions of the same document worked up in
different ways. Just as additions were made to the list of Upanishads
up to the middle ages, although the character of the later works was
different from that of the earlier, so new sutras, modern in date and
in tone, were received in the capacious basket. And just as the
Puranas were accepted as sacred books without undermining the
authority of the Vedas, so new Buddhist scriptures superseded without
condemning the old ones. Various Mahayanist schools had their own
versions of the Vinaya which apparently contain the same rules as the
Pali text but also much additional narrative, and Asanga quotes from
works corresponding to the Pali Nikayas, though his doctrine belongs
to another ag