Tripitaka

The Vinaya Pitaka holds the rules of the monastic order, each framed as a case history: an incident occurs, a complaint reaches the Buddha, a rule is laid down. Read as legal material it is unusually candid about the misbehaviour that prompted it. The Sutta Pitaka holds the discourses, divided into five collections or nikayas, long discourses, middle-length discourses, discourses grouped by topic, discourses grouped by number, and a miscellany, the Khuddaka Nikaya, which gathered the verse anthologies including the Dhammapada and the Jataka birth stories. The Abhidhamma Pitaka is later and different in kind: not narrative at all but a systematic taxonomy of mental and physical events, the technical foundation of Theravada psychology.

That threefold shape is where the name stops being straightforward. Tripitaka describes an arrangement, and the Buddhist canons that use it do not contain the same texts. The Pali Canon is the scripture of Theravada, dominant in Sri Lanka, Burma, Thailand, Laos and Cambodia. The Chinese canon, printed in its standard twentieth-century Taisho edition in a hundred volumes, includes translations of discourse collections parallel to the Pali nikayas, the Agamas, rendered from Sanskrit and Prakrit originals now largely lost, but adds the whole Mahayana sutra literature, several complete Vinayas from different Indian schools, and Chinese commentary and history. The Tibetan canon is split by authorship rather than by basket: the Kangyur, the translated word of the Buddha, runs to around a hundred volumes in the Derge edition, and the Tengyur, translated Indian treatises and commentaries, to about two hundred more. A reader told that Buddhists have a Tripitaka, and picturing one book, has the scale wrong by two orders of magnitude.

Nothing was written for a long time, and the tradition does not treat that as a weakness. Memorisation was the technology. Monks specialised as bhanakas, reciters assigned to a particular collection, one lineage carrying the long discourses, another the middle-length, so that no individual held the whole canon and no single failure could lose it. The formulaic repetition that makes the discourses tedious to read is the machinery of that system: stock phrases and numbered lists are what allowed groups to check each other line by line.

The canon's own account of its fixing runs through councils. Theravada tradition places the first at Rajagaha shortly after the Buddha's death, where Ananda is said to have recited the discourses and Upali the discipline; a second a century later at Vesali over disputed monastic practice; and a third at Pataliputta under the emperor Ashoka, at which the Abhidhamma is said to have been settled and missions dispatched, including one to Sri Lanka. Historians treat the first two as legendary in detail while accepting that recitation assemblies of some kind lie behind them, and regard the third as a Theravada account not shared by other schools.

Writing came in Sri Lanka. The Sri Lankan chronicles record that during the reign of King Vattagamani Abhaya, in the face of famine and war that threatened the reciter lineages, monks assembled at Aluvihare near Matale and committed the canon and its commentary to palm leaf, conventionally dated to about 29 BCE. Theravada counts this as the fourth council. The original manuscripts do not survive, the Aluvihare library was destroyed in the nineteenth century, and scholars caution that the event marks the first complete written set rather than the first use of writing for Buddhist texts.

Burma took the work of fixing the text furthest. King Mindon convened what Burmese Buddhism counts as the fifth council at Mandalay, with recitation by around 2,400 monks in 1871, and had the agreed text cut into stone: 729 marble slabs, each housed in its own small white shrine in the grounds of the Kuthodaw Pagoda, an edition that took from 1860 to 1868 to inscribe and is often described as the largest book in the world. Stone was chosen for the reason palm leaf had failed, it does not rot, and it cannot be quietly emended.

The Kuthodaw recension became the working standard until Burma did it again. The sixth council met in a purpose-built cave-shaped hall at Kaba Aye in Yangon from 1954 to 1956, timed to the 2,500th anniversary of the Buddha's death as Theravada reckons it, and drew monks from Burma, Sri Lanka, Thailand, Laos, Cambodia and India. Its product was a printed critical edition, the Chattha Sangayana text, collating the Burmese manuscripts, the marble slabs and other Asian recensions. That edition, later digitised, is the version most often cited today.

Authority within Theravada is a matter of degree. The Vinaya and the Sutta Pitaka are held to be the Buddha's word. The Abhidhamma is canonical, but its ascription to the Buddha is a Theravada doctrinal position rather than a historical claim other Buddhist schools accept, and the great fifth-century commentator Buddhaghosa, whose Visuddhimagga and running commentaries shape how the canon is actually read, is authoritative without being scripture. Outside Theravada the picture changes again: for most East Asian and Tibetan Buddhists the discourse collections in this basket are genuine but preliminary, superseded in emphasis by the Mahayana sutras that the Pali Canon does not contain.