May all beings achieve happiness. May all beings be free from all suffering.

This is Part 1 of an overview on Buddhist scriptures. This part will give an overview of the textual landscape, and list the Theravada scriptures. In a few days I'll post about the Mahāyāna (and Vajrayana) ones; it was too long for one post.

First, let's think about 'scripture' in general. Islam has the most centralised canon of any of the big world religions, but even then, Muslims debate endlessly on which hadith are important and how important they are.

Christian scripture is messier than Islamic, for example Meqabyan is considered part of the Bible by Ethiopian Christians but not non-Ethiopian Christians; the same book can be considered scripture and not by two branches of one religion.

Buddhist scripture is messier than Christian: there are thousands of texts that can be considered 'Buddhist scripture' (or rejected as scripture), across places from Tibet to Indonesia to China, Japan to Nepal, in Sanskrit, Pāli, Burmese, Chinese, Tibetan, Sinhalese (Sri Lankan) and other languages.

The Tipiṭaka is emphasised in Theravada Buddhism, which generally rejects the Mahāyāna scriptures. Mahāyāna Buddhism emerged maybe four centuries after the Buddha, and has its own scriptures, forming a very patchy situation across the many schools of Mahāyāna. Mahāyāna arguably deëmphasises the Tipiṭaka. Zen is part of Mahāyāna but very different from things like Tibetan Mahāyāna, and while Zenners always say they favour direct experience over scripture, they do have their collections.

This messy decentralised canon allows for adventure stories like Atiśa adventuring across the sea from Bengal to the island of Sumatra on a quest for the lojong trainings. Call him Lojong Silver. The Tibetans have done something to make the scriptural canon situation really exotic. They believe in a tradition of hiding treasures in hiding in remote caves in Tibet, or on the astral plane. These hidden texts are called terma and a discoverer of them is called tertön. So there are Buddhist scriptures still lying undiscovered. In coming years, artificial intelligence will open up new texts by translation and cross-linguistic comparison and other methods. It's an exciting time.

I am emphasising the messy decentralised canonical situation to warn against comparing 'Buddhist scripture' too directly to the concept of 'Islamic scripture' or 'Christian scripture'; a different kind of thinking is needed.

Authenticity

There probably was a historical Buddha (just like there probably was a historical Jesus). The word buddha-vacana means the words the Buddha spoke, and there has been debate over which of the scriptures are buddha-vacana. Probably no book existing today is a 100% accurate repetition of words that came from his lips 26 centuries ago. But some were written down pretty close to his time.

Does 'authentic' only mean buddha-vacana? We could argue that any text containing correct philosophy is authentic. We could argue that commentaries on buddha-vacana are authentic scriptures. Believers in multiple Buddhas like Maitreya and Amitabha could say an authentic text is one that is the words of any Buddha. Authenticity is subjective.

Different languages can have different canons

The Buddha spoke Pāli 25 or 26 centuries ago, and gave oral teachings. (One of my teachers used to say the three most influential philosophers of all time were Jesus, Socrates, and Buddha, and none of them ever wrote a book.) As his discourses got preserved, passed on, translated, and memorised, differences emerged between different language-areas:

• The Pāli Tipiṭaka is now partial. It's the most original but bits have been lost. (English is another example of a language with an incomplete Tipiṭaka.)
• In Burma, they have worked hard to preserve the Tipiṭaka in the Burmese language. Burmese canon-memorisers have to memorise superhuman amounts of text; the Tipiṭaka is probably about a 22,000-page book. In the mid-1800s the king of Burma put the Buddhist canon on stone tablets in Mandalay in pagodas, recognised by UNESCO as the world's biggest book.
• The East Asian canon is maintained by Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and Vietnamese monastics. There's a collection of 81,352 wooden blocks in Korea that were carved in the Classical Chinese language (spoken by educated Koreans then) in the 13th century; this collection has the Three Baskets we will look at below with a lot of additional commentary and material.
• In the 20th century, the Department of Sanskrit and Indian Studies at Tokyo Imperial University started the Taishō Tripiṭaka, an attempt to create a definitive Chinese-language Buddhist canon, including commmentaries.
• The Tibetan canon is different again, with an altered Tipiṭaka and many added texts. It consists of the Kangyur + Tengyur. We will look at this in Part 2.
• The Sinhalese canon is different again

The point is that the canons in different languages differ. e.g. the Khuddaka Nikāya includes Nettipakaraṇa and Peṭakopadesa in Burmese and Sinhalese, but not in Thai, and includes Milindapañha in Burmese, but not Sinhalese and Thai.

The Tipiṭaka is the Three Baskets

Tipiṭaka means 'three baskets'. This collection was originally in Pāli, and has been passed down and translated and doubtlessly altered.

The early Buddhist community split into two main Nikāyas (divisions) around the reign of Aśoka (circa 268-232 BC) and then the traditional eighteen early schools. Some schools had more than three baskets of texts, which might include magical incantations, baskets called Vidyādhāra Piṭaka, Mantra Piṭaka or Dhāraṇī Piṭaka. The Dharmaguptaka school is said to have contained a Dhāraṇī Piṭaka. But that's purely historical now.

The three baskets are –

• Vinaya Piṭaka (monastic code, the Buddha trying to set up a religious order)
• Sutta Piṭaka (Discourse Basket, the Buddha teaching philosophy and mystical techniqe)
• Abhidhamma Piṭaka (not the words of the Buddha. Attempts to systematise his philosophy)

Vinaya Piṭaka

According to tradition, the Vinaya Piṭaka was compiled by the direct disciples of the Buddha just after he died. Remember he never wrote a book. Upon his death they started codifying and writing his oral teachings. This basket includes three books –

• Suttavibhaṅga: the list of 227 rules for monks (Mahāvibhaṅga) and 311 rules for nuns (Bhikkhunīvibhaṅga)
• Khandhaka: the 10-chapter Mahavagga plus the 12-chapter Cullavagga. Contents here; it deals with the Buddha's struggles to set up a well-functioning monastic order and dealing with all the drama that running an org entails.
• Parivāra: analyses of monastic rules

Remember I said the Pāli Tipiṭaka does not survive in full? I believe the Vinaya Basket does survive in full in the original language, so we don't have to rely on translations.

Sutta Piṭaka

Sutta Piṭaka is the suttas (discourses) of the Buddha. (Pāli 'sutta' = Sanskrit 'sutra'). It is broken up into five nikāyas (divisions) –

1. Dīgha Nikāya, a collection of 34 long (Pāḷi: dīgha) discourses. (Notable is Dīgha Nikāya 22, the Satipaṭṭhāna Sutta, which forms the basis of much meditation as we practice it today.)
2. Majjhima Nikāya, a collection of 152 middle-length (majjhima) discourses. Ñāṇamoli and Bhikkhu Bodhi did a recent (1st edition 1995, subsequent editions since then) translation into English that has been praised; it weighs in about 1900 pages.
3. Samyutta Nikāya, the collection of thematically linked (samyutta) discourses. The number of suttas varies among the different language-canons we already discussed, and also depends on whether texts are grouped into one sutta or multiple. But there's a lot: numbers between 2889 and 7762 have been given.
4. Anguttara Nikāya, the "gradual collection" (discourses grouped by content enumerations)
5. Khuddaka Nikāya has 15 suttas in Thailand, 15 in Sri Lanka (Sinhalese), 18 in Burma, and in Chinese and Tibetan the whole Khuddaka Nikāya is replaced with the Kṣudraka Āgama. Its contents are listed here. It includes the very famous Dhammapada, the Jātaka tales (previous incarnations of the Buddha), the Paṭisambhidāmagga (by Śāriputra, the Buddha's main disciple) which deals with important bits of Buddhist philosophy like the aggregates and emptiness, the early Aṭṭhakavagga (PDF) and Pārāyanavagga, and the Khaggavisānasutta (Rhinoceros Sutra) which praises solitary mystics.

You'll see suttas referred to by abbreviations e.g. DN22 means the 22nd discourse in the Dīgha Nikāya. MN118 is the Ānāpānasati Sutta, on mindfulness of breathing.

Abhidhamma Piṭaka

The third basket, the Abhidhamma Piṭaka, is a few centuries later than the Buddha, systematising and standardising his philosophy. The Abhidhamma likes being systematic and making lists. It consists of seven books:

• Dhammasaṅgaṇī – a manual of ethics for monks
• Vibhaṅga
• Dhātukathā
• Puggalapaññatti
• Kathāvatthu is an interesting one, debating wrong views like the question of whether a soul exists. Have a browse: https://suttacentral.net/kv?view=normal&lang=en
• Yamaka
• Paṭṭhāna

Theravada commentaries on the Tipiṭaka

Aṭṭhakathā refers to Pāli-language Theravada commentaries on the Pāli Tipitaka.

'Abhidhamma texts' do not necessarily refer to the Abhidhamma Basket we looked at above! When we say 'Abhidhamma texts', that means texts in that tradition, including later secondary texts.

Visuddhimagga (Path of Purification) is an Abhidhamma text written by Buddhaghosa in Sri Lanka in the 5th century (so 1000 years after the Buddha) in the Pāli language. It's clearly based on the Vimuttimagga (Path of Freedom) from the 1st or 2nd century. The Vimuttimagga was written in Pāli but only survives in Chinese.

So are the Visuddhimagga and Vimuttimagga scriptures? Or are they just dharma books like the paperbacks Snow Lion Publishers are printing today?

Some people are now advocating 'early Buddhism', trying to strip away later innovations like all Mahāyāna. !buddhadhamma@lemmy.world for example. Does that mean only using the Tipiṭaka? Or maybe only the first two baskets, discarding the later Abdidamma basket? Should we accept the Visuddhimagga as 'Abdidamma-style' even though it's 1000 years after the Buddha? All open questions.

Summary: the Theravada scriptures definitely include the Tipiṭaka, and also debateably some commentaries on the Tipiṭaka. The Abhidhamma is a few centuries later than the other two baskets.

May all beings achieve happiness. May all beings be free from all suffering. Next post will look at Mahāyāna scriptures.