The Second Council and the
First Schism within the Buddhist Order

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The second council was convened about a hundred years after the Buddha’s passing in response to growing dissatisfaction with the rules on conduct. As a result, seven hundred monks, including Yasa, assembled at the Great Grove Monastery in Vaishali with the primary goal of amending the code of conduct. The Council at Vaishali, sometimes called the Assembly of the Seven Hundred Monks, convened for eight months.

Monks in the Vaishali region at that time tended to interpret the precepts with a leaning toward tolerance, as a result of which, they allowed ten theretofore unacceptable practices, including the receiving of alms in the form of money and the use of salt. When the seven hundred monks gathered from east and west to deliberate on these ten new practices, they found them contrary to the Buddha’s instructions and therefore banned them all once again. At the same time, there were combined recitations of the precepts and the sutras.

Thereafter, the monks who favored the practices banned by the council held their own conclave. This schism within the Buddhist order caused the formation of two conflicting schools, the Theravada school, which interpreted doctrine and the code of conduct according to tradition, and the Mahasamghika School, which took a more lenient stand on the code of conduct. This rift within the Buddhist order is referred to as the original schism. Buddhism before this schism is referred to as original Buddhism, while post-schism Buddhism is called sectarian Buddhism. The Third Council

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