Treatise on Wisdom - 12
Gathering the Sangha
Description:... The best gift ever given to the Māra was given to him by the mortal enemy of the Buddha, King Ajatasattu of Maghada when he organized, after the Master's death and without his having suspected it, a council to leave to posterity the corrupted teachings of the Buddha, kept and administered by an idle clergy that flourished in the heat of populist rulers who used it in their economic disputes with the Brahmins.
It had never happened that the Sāsana of a Buddha survived him, let alone corrupted. The success of Buddhism and its expansion will drown like a fireproof blanket any paccekhabuddhas that might have arisen. And without solitary Buddhas there is no Sammasambuddha.
And this is because a Buddha must take refuge exclusively in himself, without any external influence and all external contamination in the form of ideas, concepts, doctrines, visions represent an obstacle that can become insurmountable. The Māra with that movement not only succeeded in not bringing forth Buddhas, but also in turning millions of people away from the path, henceforth, and made unscrupulous, lazy and idle individuals, parasites living on the devotion of the people the public face of liberation. A liberation that was impossible.
Only in the most remote place, not only geographically but ideologically, the most refractory to Buddhism, in the most unsuspected time could Metteyya emerge. And they go and build there, in that place, those same corrupt people, an immense monastery. Nothing like this has ever happened. We will see how it goes on...
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