ABSTRACT
The chief events of the next years up to the Enlightenment are recorded in the Scriptures, and we have again parallel and more developed accounts in the commentaries and Sanskrit works. It may be asked whether the variations and additions in the latter really are accretions, or whether the canonical accounts have selected certain events from a longer story then existing, which we only get complete in the commentaries. This can only be properly seen after the events have been given, but it may be said that a continuous account
of the period occurs more than once in the Scriptures,1 and that several of the most striking of the events known to the commentaries are not once mentioned in the four Nikayas. Some of the events in both are developed later in different ways, or inserted in different chronological order, and the probability is that the canonical accounts tell all that was known as legend at the time when the narratives now included in the suttas were compiled.
