Now the oldest Ceylon Chronicle, the Dīpavaŋsa, which contains the only account as yet published of what occurred at the Great Council, says as follows:[69]-- “The monks of the Great Council turned the religion upside down; They broke up the original Scriptures, and made a new recension; A discourse put in one place they put in another; They distorted the sense and the teaching of the Five Nikāyas. Those monks--knowing not what had been spoken at length, and what concisely, What was the obvious, and what was the higher meaning-- Attached new meaning to new words, as if spoken by the Buddha, And destroyed much of the spirit by holding to the shadow of the letter. In part they cast aside the Sutta and the Vinaya so deep, And made an imitation Sutta and Vinaya, changing this to that. The Pariwāra abstract, and the Six Books of Abhidhamma; The Paṭisambhidā, the Niddesa, _and a portion of the Jātaka_-- So much they put aside, and made others in their place!”... The animus of this description is sufficiently evident; and the Dīpavaŋsa, which cannot have been written earlier than the fourth century after the commencement of our era, is but poor evidence of the events of seven centuries before. But it is the best we have; it is acknowledged to have been based on earlier sources, and it is at least reliable evidence that, according to Ceylon tradition, a book called the Jātaka existed at the time of the Councils of Vesāli. As the Northern Buddhists are the successors of those who held the Great Council, we may hope before long to have the account of it from the other side, either from the Sanskrit or from the Chinese.[70] Meanwhile it is important to notice that the fact of a Book of Birth Stories having existed at a very early date is confirmed, not only by such stories being found in other parts of the Pāli Piṭakas, but also by ancient monuments.