Mention is made in the Kathâ-vatthu of heretics who held that the Buddha remained in the Tusita heaven and that the law was preached on earth not by him but by Ananda and the commentary[46] ascribes these views to the Vetulyakas. The reticence of the Sinhalese chronicles makes it doubtful whether the Vetulyakas of Ceylon and these heretics are identical but probably the monks of the Abhayagiri, if not strictly speaking Mahayanist, were an off-shoot of an ancient sect which contained some germs of the Mahayana. Hsüan Chuang in his narrative[47] states (probably from hearsay) that the monks of the Mahâvihâra were Hinayanists but that both vehicles were studied at the Abhayagiri. I-Ching on the contrary says expressly that all the Sinhalese belonged to the Âryasthavira Nikâya. Fa-Hsien describes the Buddhism of Ceylon as he saw it about 412 A.D., but does not apply to it the terms Hina or Mahayana. He evidently regarded the Abhayagiri as the principal religious centre and says it had 5000 monks as against 3000 in the Mahâvihâra, but though he dwells on the gorgeous ceremonial, the veneration of the sacred tooth, the representations of Gotama's previous lives, and the images of Maitreya, he does not allude to the worship of Avalokita and Mañjusrî or to anything that can be called definitely Mahayanist. He describes a florid and somewhat superstitious worship which may have tended to regard the Buddha as superhuman, but the relics of Gotama's body were its chief visible symbols and we have no ground for assuming that such teaching as is found in the Lotus sûtra was its theological basis. Yet we may legitimately suspect that the traditions of the Abhayagiri remount to early prototypes of that teaching.