Devadatta a mountain. As this also failed he decided to have the elephant Nāḷāgiri intoxicated and let him loose on the Buddha while he was on almsround. However, the power of the Buddha’s loving-kindness overcame the elephant. Devadatta then decided to create a schism in the order, and collected a few monk friends and demanded that the Buddha accede to the following rules for the monks: they should dwell all their lives in the forest, live entirely on alms obtained by begging, wear only robes made of discarded rags, dwell at the foot of a tree and abstain completely from fish
Devadatta sleeping under a tree during the rainy season – but he refused to make the rules obligatory. They are among the 13 ascetic practices (dhutanga). His followers (including bhikkhus and bhikkhunis) were new monks from the Vajjī clan. According to Jacqueline Stone and Stephen F. Teiser, Devadatta was "well known to the sutra's early devotees as the Buddhist archetype of an evildoer." In the context of the "promise of buddhahood for everyone, this chapter became widely understood as illustrating the potential for enlightenment even in evil persons." In the Lotus Sūtra, chapter 12, found in the Mahāyāna Buddhist tradition, the