A very high antiquity, however, is claimed by Buddhists for these collections. According to the Dipavanso, their earliest available chronicle, dating only from the fifth century A.D., the doctrines orally communicated by Buddha to his disciples were by them immediately after his death revised and classified under the three divisions of Vinaya, Abhidharma, and Sutta, in which they have always since then been preserved. This collection having passed through the crucible of a council held at Vaisali a hundred years later, was fixed as canonical at another held in the reign of Asoka about 242 B.C. It is urged that a canon, to be authoritative, does not require to be written, and that Indians claim for one orally transmitted higher authority than for one transcribed. The art of writing was probably unknown in India in Buddha’s time, and so, thrown back upon their resources, memory was by the Indians cultivated to an extent which enabled them to dispense with methods deemed by nearly all other peoples to be essential to accuracy. Eminent Orientalists therefore, while regarding the account of the first council as apocryphal, are yet inclined to admit—from the identity of the threefold division in all the schools that have been tested, from the similarity of the titles of the contents of all the various collections, and especially from the quality of the writings themselves—that the tradition recorded in the Dipavanso is well founded, and that considerable portions of the Vinaya and Sutta literature may date from a hundred years after the death of Buddha. In assuming so much, however, these scholars by no means believe that they have found in these texts the actual teaching of Buddha in an unadulterated condition. While not thinking it possible to impugn the substantial accuracy of the Vinaya texts, though given in Pali translations of the lost dialect in which they were originally preached, they tell us that the oldest of the Sutta texts are “not his teachings nor the teachings of his immediate disciples, who could not have spoken of him in the manner in which he is there described. They are only founded on his teachings, and record existing beliefs as to the doctrines which he actually taught.”[72] For “the fundamental and original doctrines they may be accepted as fairly trustworthy authorities,” but for the facts of his life they are even at the best very questionable guides. Nearer to the origin of Buddhism and of the person of its founder we are not likely to get than in the book entitled by its translator the Sutta of the Great Decease; but he confesses that even in it we are standing on anything but solid ground, and that we are only able to catch a distant and most uncertain glimpse of the figure of the great Teacher as he comes out at rare intervals from the mist of legends which, designed to adorn and magnify, have in reality diminished and obscured his real personality.