Taking up the suggestion of @SeriousFun136 I’ve read the article too and found it a very interesting piece, especially in the mixture of styles of being-involved in the real-life aspect of trading, stealing, etc (and even the aspects of style of cultural and political repression in the east-asean countries/regions Laos vs. Yunnan) and the scholarly aspects. I surely have to take this to memory! 
By this I got curious about that man and looked for more articles, my first other find was “Dissent from the top (Eisel Mazard, 2012, also in his blog)” but this piece made me sceptic about his grip on one important aspect of early-sangha- and early-buddhism-matters.
That is the question of a heir(?) for the Buddha in regard of leading the Sangha. I feel it to be very light-weighted how he deals with this (general) idea, for instance terming this as “taking over power” (either by Sariputta, or Mahamoggalana, or Mahakassapa) while I remember that the Buddha said explicitely (in the sutta about the controversy with Devadatta) “I even would not ‘hand over’ the sangha to Sariputta, so of course not to you(…)” (I’ll add the reference later when I’ve located it)
Besides of this one explicite remark of the Buddha I’ve felt his framing of this issue in his whole article even more general alienating to my own take of the transmission of the Buddha and Sangha history, but which I cannot make more explicite at the moment. (So I’ve put “I feel” etc in my comment here).
Just a doubt, so, and also a suggestion for to read another interesting article of Eisel Mazard … 
Update 1
- Hmm, I tried to find the story of the rejection of Devadatta and found it in Palicanon.com under vinaya/cullavagga/. But it seems a short piece/extract in translation/compression of Klaus Mylius and not useful for crossreferencing to suttacentral
- An english reference by Hellmuth Hecker to this story I found at ATI : “When Devadatta voiced his claim to lead the Order, the Buddha said that he would not entrust anybody with the leadership of the Sangha, not even his two chief disciples, let alone Devadatta (C. V. VII, 3).”
That “C.V.VII.3” means again “cullavagga” and still does not help for reference into Suttacentral. - But I seem to be unable to find this in suttacentral, sorry … (searching for cullavagga (no results) looking in index of vinaya (no matching entry); searching for devadatta and/or devadatta sariputta (too many and nothing seems to match, search-result is overwhelming filled with references to jatakas…)) so I gave up there
Update 2
- Found it in suttacentral using explanations about the location of the Cullavagga in the vinaya/khandhaka (with offset in numbering) in another thread, pointing to KD 17 in SC. The german version is by Fritz Schaefer.