No one has yet questioned the dates of the Dipavamsa, about 400 A.D., or of the first part of the Mahavamsa, between 459-477 A.D., and though no doubt there is an interval of nearly 600 years between the composition of the Mahavamsa and the recorded writing down of the Buddhist canon under Vattagamani, yet we must remember that the Ceylonese chronicles were confessedly founded on an older Atthakatha preserved in the monasteries of the island, and representing an unbroken line of local tradition.

My own argument therefore, so long as the question was only whether we could assign a pre-Christian date to the Pali Buddhist canon, has always been this. We have the commentaries on the Pali canon translated from Sinhalese into Pali, or actually composed, it may be, by Buddhaghosa. Buddhaghosa confessedly consulted various

[1. Mahavamsa, p. 37; Dipavamsa VII, 28-31; Buddhaghosha's Parables, p. xviii.

2. Bigandet, Life of Gaudama, p. 351.

3. Dr. E. Muller (Indian Antiquary, Nov. 1880, p. 270) has discovered inscriptions in Ceylon, belonging to Devanapiya Maharaga Gamini Tissa, whom he identifes with Vattagamani.

4. The same account is given in the Dipavamsa XX, 20, and in the Sarasangraha, as quoted by Spence Hardy, Legends, p. 192. As throwing light on the completeness of the Buddhist canon at the time of King Vattagamani, it should be mentioned that, according to the commentary on the Mahavamsa (Turnour, p. liii), the sect of the Dhammarukikas established itself at the Abhayavihara, which had been constructed by Vattagamani, and that one of the grounds of their secession was their refusing to acknowledge the Parivara (thus I read instead of Pariwana) as part of the Vinaya-pitaka. According to the Dipavamsa (VII, 42) Mahinda knew the Parivara.]

p. xiv MSS., and gives various readings, just as any modern scholar might do. This was in the beginning of the fifth century A.D., and there is nothing improbable, though I would say no more, in supposing that some of the MSS., consulted by Buddhaghosa, dated from the first century B.C., when Vattagamani ordered the sacred canon to be reduced to writing.

There is one other event with reference to the existence of the sacred canon in Ceylon, recorded in the Mahavamsa, between the time of Buddhaghosa and Vattagamani, viz. the translation of the Suttas from Pali into the language of Ceylon, during the reign of Buddhadasa, 339-368 A.D. If MSS. of that ancient translation still existed, they would, no doubt, be very useful for detrmining the exact state of the Pali originals at that time[1]. But even without them there seems no reason to doubt that Buddhaghosa had before him old MSS. of the Pali canon, and that these were in the main the same as those written down at the time of Vattagamani.

BUDDHAGHOSA'S AGE.