User:Peter jackson/Sources for early Buddhism

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This page is for collecting together scholars' statements. This is to serve as a resource for deciding how to summarize scholarly opinion in appropriate articles. Please add material, preferably in the scholar's own words, especially on sensitive questions. Summaries can act as placeholders. It would be helpful to give date of original publication (of most recent update by author), not just unchanged reprint, to show how up-to-/out-of-date it is. Also, publisher to show how reputable it is. & author's academic posts &c to show how important they are. But words 1st.

Contents 1 Preliminary 2 General (including general Sutta Pitaka) 3 Vinaya Pitaka(s) 4 Digha Nikaya 5 Majjhima Nikaya 6 Samyutta Nikaya 7 Anguttara Nikaya 8 Khuddaka Nikaya 9 Abhidhamma/Abhidharma Pitakas 10 Other pitakas ascribed by some sources to some schools 11 Mahayana 12 Commentarial traditions 13 Inscriptions 14 References 15 Sandbox for Pali Canon#Origins

[edit] Preliminary

Bronkhorst 1998:

p4: "This is not to say that it is easy to identify the views of the Buddha in the early texts. The many different opinions that have been expressed during the last century or so on the original teaching of the Buddha should make us extremely cautious ..."

p11: "The scholars concerned [Vetter & Enomoto have been mentioned] apparently believe that traces of the teachings of the Buddha, or of earliest Buddhism if you like, can only be found in passages that do not fit in well with the generally recognized canonical points of view. Many earlier scholars, too, have started from this assumption, and they have produced an impressive collection of mutually differing views about earliest Buddhism. ... Can we really expect to make any progress in this direction? I would think not.

Equally useless seems to me the postulate that earliest Buddhism – i.e., the teaching of the Buddha – must have been more or less identical with what we find in the relevant Vedic and Jaina texts."

Gombrich 1990:

p5: "... I had to prepare a paper ... without being clear what my fellow-participants would assume ... "earliest Buddhism" to be ... many scholars have been prepared to argue either that we no longer have the Buddha's authentic teachings or that we have only a very few, the rest of the purported teachings being garbled or distorted by the later tradition. ... On reading the papers of my colleagues, I realized that, like me, they all (except Professor Aramaki?) assumed that the main body of soteriological teachings found in the Pāli Canon does go back to the Buddha himself."

Gombrich 2003:

I am saying that there was a person called the Buddha, that the preachings probably go back to him individually - very few scholars actually say that - that we can learn more about what he meant, and that he was saying some very precise things.

Gómez 1987:

vol 2 p354: "No Western scholar today would claim to know the exact details of the founder's biography, or for that matter the exact content of his teaching."

Groner 1990:

page VIII: "Hirakawa's historical interpretation is representative of Indian Buddhism as it is viewed by many, but certainly not all, Japanese scholars."

page IX: "... English-language surveys of Indian Buddhism have relied predominantly on Sanskrit and Pāli primary source materials, often ignoring important primary source materials available in Chinese and Tibetan translation. In contrast, Hirakawa has utilized materials from Chinese and Tibetan as well as Sanskrit and Pāli."

"Modern Japanese scholars have published more on Buddhism than the rest of the world combined."

page X: "Unfortunately, few of these studies are known to Western scholars ... This work [Hirakawa 1974] thus serves as more than a record of Hirakawa's own views on Buddhism; along with Nakamura Hajime's Indian Buddhism [1980], it introduces the Western audience to the issues that Japanese scholars have considered important and to some of their conclusions."

Lopez 1995:

p16: "Scholars are increasingly reluctant to make unqualified claims about the historical facts of the Buddha's life and teachings."

Nakamura 1980:

preface: "Originally this work was intended to introduce recent studies carried on especially by the Japanese scholars; but in order to evaluate them the author had to pay due attention to the works of the Western and Asian, especially Indian scholars, hence they have also been included."

[edit] General (including general Sutta Pitaka)

Bronkhorst 1998:

p12: "... in principle the canon preserves the teachings of the Buddha, but in practice certain ideas and practices presented in it have to be discarded for specifiable reasons."

Brough 1962:

p xiv: "We can see that the scriptures of the various schools preserved much of an earlier inheritance of scriptural verses, even although there is no means of determining how much could justifiably be ascribed to a period of 'primitive' Buddhism, if this term is understood to mean, for example, the teachings of the founder and his near contemporaries ... It has long been understood that the surviving early Buddhist literature is to a large extent secondary and often composite ..."

Cousins 1982/3:

p2: "It is quite evident that if we compare the Pali recension of the nikayas with other surviving versions, the differences we find are exactly those we might expect to discover between different performances of oral works. The titles tend to change, the location may alter, material is abridged here, expanded there."

p3: [reference to authorities as in Gethin 1998 pp47f cited here] "... something should be rejected if it does not enter into sutta (sutte otaranti). This is an unusual expression; it is best interpreted in the light of the Peṭakopadesa tradition where otaraṇā is one of the sixteen hāras. ...

It may there be taken as a particular method of exegesis which links a given discourse into the teaching as a whole by means of one of the general categories of the teaching. The Petakopadesa in fact specifies six possibilities: aggregates, elements, spheres, faculties, truths, dependent origination. ... Any of these can be used to analyse the content of a discourse and their use will automatically place it in its context in the teaching as a whole. Something on these lines, if perhaps a little less defined, is surely intended in the mahapadesa passages.

What is envisaged for sutta is not then a set body of literature, but rather a traditional pattern of teaching. Authenticity lies not in historical truth although this is not doubted, but rather in whether something can accord with the essential structure of the dhamma as a whole. If it cannot, it should be rejected. If it can, then it is to be accepted as the utterance of the Buddha. We may compare from the later commentarial tradition: 'Whosoever ... might teach and proclaim the dhamma, all of that is accounted as actually taught and proclaimed by the Teacher.'

...

It may be suggested that a number of ancient attempts were made to fix the tradition, already during the sutta period. One of the earliest of these may have come down to us as the Saṅgīti-suttanta ... It can be viewed as [p4] a ... summary of the ... nikayas. ... It is obviously a work of some authority; it is used as the basis for one of the ... abhidharma works of the Sarvāstivāda. ... So far as I know, it has not actually been suggested that it may well have been recited at one of the Councils. Yet its name clearly indicates that it is intended for chanting togther and this surely means at a Saṅgīti.

... One might venture rather tentatively to suggest that the Second Council would seem particularly appropriate. This does seem to have been a period in which an attempt was being made to define some aspects of the tradition more precisely. ... Even if the tradition of the Councils which we have is rejected in toto, it would still seem that the procedure ... is firmly fixed in oral consciousness. Presumably this has some historical basis. Perhaps then the Sangiti-suttanta is the best evidence we have as to what one such council actually did?

The process ... did not stop here."

p5: "... [Anguttara & Samyutta] ... probably did not take an absolutely fixed form until ... they were set in writing. In fact one might expect a considerable transitional period with both oral and lterary approaches remaining concurrent. No doubt the oral tradition had by this time become rather fixed in comparison to the earlier period. Even so we should assume that the same monk would not have set a given work down in writing in the same way on two successsive occasions.

This model ... is well in accord with the historical evidence. The kind of divergence and variation .. suggested here is not simply an inference from the pattern of most but not all forms of oral literature so far studied. ... It has a much firmer basis. It is precisely this kind of variation which is actually found in the different versions ... extant today ... These divergencesare typically greatest in matters of little importance ... Only very rarey are they founded on doctrinal or sectarian differences. They are too frequent to arise from the [p6] natural variation of a manuscript tradition or even from a rigidly memorized oral tradition. Yet the works concerned are clearly not independent compositions. They are very similar in their substantive content.

This kind of divergence must go back to an early period, probably the time of the first sectarian divisions ... or soon thereafter. By contrast there is much less divergence within the later ... traditions. Evidently by the time of the later canonical abhidharma works ... the precise content of the nikayas had become much more firmly fixed. This would suggest a subsequent stage ...in which a relatively rigid memorization becomes established ..."

Cousins 1984a:

p288: "... the Pali Canon ... appears to have been written down rather earlier than elsewhere ... by a conservative group ... Although there are differences as to details and many variations of arrangement, the four nikayas contain more or less the same fundamental ideas in all recensions. such variation as exists is probably due to chance rather than sectarian differences. Indeed this is wholly to be expected in an oral literature. ... such oral works ... [p289] ... are rarely recited identically. Their content, however, is very traditional and conservative."

Cousins 1984b:

p56: "... I shall treat the earliest stratum of Pali literature as consisting of the Vinaya texts (excluding the Parivāra), the first four Nikāyas and the Sutta-Nipāta. It is, of course, obvious that there is some historical stratification within these works. However, I do not accept that there are adequate criteria available for a convincing analysis into different periods. Nor is sufficient historical information available to determine the likely time-scale for such periods."

p67: "I am, of course, aware that a number of attempts at such historico-critical analysis have been made, some of them involving impressive and detailed scholarship. I remain, as yet, unconvinced. It seems to me that all the attempts suffer from serious flaws. Firstly and most importantly, they do not take sufficient account of the nature of oral literature ... Secondly, they seem to me to be guilty of an error in method.

In order to construct a chronological analysis of the literature, a series of decisions have to be taken on such matters as the likely dating of particular texts or discourses, their analysis into earlier or later components, the probable stages at which particular formulae came into use, the length of time which it would take for miraculous elements to develop, etc. etc. Unfortunately these elements are often dependent upon one another in complex ways. As a result a series of assumptions have to be made. The consequence is that later decisions are made upon the basis of earlier ones, which were themselves based upon even earlier decisions. In the present state of our knowledge conclusions reached in this way can have little probability. ... A third objection is that such analyses tend to depend at important points upon the detection of inconsistencies and contradictions in the literature. It seems to me that too much can be made of this. In spiritual traditions the world over, instructors have frequently employed apparent contradictions as part of their teaching method – perhaps to induce greater awareness in the pupil or to bring about a deeper and wider view of the subject in hand. The Pali Canon contains many explicit examples of such methods. ... There are, undoubtedly, many cases where a different or apparently contradictory statement is simply a more implicit use of them. Any attempt to analyse all such 'contradictions' as representing different historical or textual strata is puerile. Such features musthave been present from the beginning.

For fear of misunderstanding, let me add that I by no means wish to wholly deny the value of text-critical approaches to the literature. It is rather a question of caution in the application of techniques derived from the study of the devlopment of written manuscript literature to the somewhat different situation of an oral literature and in the absence of some external historical context. May I add that I certainly consider the attempts which have been made to be productive of useful insights (especially in the case of the work of Erich Frauwallner."

Gethin 1992:

p11: "A number of attempts have been made at providing a detailed chronology of the evolution of the Pāli Nikāyas. ... they have not really succeeded in their aim of satisfactorilly distinguishing earlier material from later with any degree of certainty."

p15: "... even if we think we know that certain passages and certain suttas are definitely older than certain others, it would be unsound simply to isolate them. Why? Because we do not know whether the Buddhist tradition ever regarded precisely these texts as embodying a proper or meaningful expression of 'Buddhism'."

Gethin 1998:

"... the original north Indian provenance and relative antiquity of much of the Pali canon seems to be guaranteed on linguistic grounds... Significant portions of the material it contains must go back to the third century BCE.

How many other versions or recensions of the canon of Buddhist scriptures existed in partially or more fully sanskritized Middle Indian dialects is unclear. The Pali canon is the only one to survive apparently complete in an Indian language. Of the other ancient Indian versions of the canon, we have only isolated fragments and portions in the original Indian languages. More substantial portions are, however, preserved in translation especially in the Chinese Tripiṭaka. This, along with what Buddhist literature as a whole reveals about its own history, allows us to know something of the content of these other ancient Indian canons and also to identify the generally more archaic material—material that must be relatively close in time to the ancient Rājagrha recitation. This material takes the form of the four primary Nikāyas or 'collections' of the Buddha's discourses[p43]—also known as the four Āgamas or books of textual 'tradition'—along with the Vinaya or Buddhist monastic rule. These texts constitute the essential common heritage of Buddhist thought... like the Pali canon as a whole, it is impossible to date the Pali Nikäyas in their present form with any degree of precision."

p44: "... as Étienne Lamotte pointed out forty years ago, the doctrinal basis common to the Chinese Āgamas and Pali Nikāyas is remarkably uniform; such variations as exist affect only the mode of expression or the arrangement of topics."

p46: "... 'the word of the Buddha' ... It is clear that from a very early date there is a tacit understanding that to claim this status for a text is not exactly to claim that it represents only what has actually been uttered by the Buddha in person. ... that each and every collection of textual material should correspond exactly was not regarded by the early community as the critical issue.

This state of affairs is reflected in the discussion of 'the ... authorities' ... to which a monk might appeal for accepting a particular teaching as authentic ... In each case the Buddha is recorded as having instructed the monks [p47] to examine and consider the teaching in order to see if it conforms to what they already know the teaching to be. ... This is not quite as subjective as it sounds. The discourses of the Buddha as preserved in the Nikāyas do not of themselves constitute a systematic exposition of Buddhist thought with a beginning, middle, and end. ... the discourses as a whole do contain quite explicit indications of how ... various themes relate to each other and fit together to form an overall structure and pattern. ... The final criterion for judging a teaching lies in an appreciation and understanding of this ... Thus at times the question of who originally spoke the words appears irrelevant to the tradition ... Nevertheless the principle that certain texts represent the primary 'word of the Buddha', while others are the secondary work of commentators and scholars, remains significant to the Buddhist tradition. And the question of just which texts are to be counted as the word of the Buddha has, at particular points in the history of Buddhism, been a critical one."

p224: "The dating of ... all ancient Indian texts ... is extremely problematic."

Gombrich 1984:

p79: "The function of the First Communal Recitation was to establish the Canon for the first time ...

The situation with the more central part of the Canon, the Discipline and Discourses, the modern historian sees as more complicated. Broadly speaking, the essential contents of both are shared by all early Buddhist traditions ... Comparison between the various versions of texts that have survived ... shows that in both the Vinaya and the Sūtra one can distinguish between a shared core which is much the larger part, and a divergent periphery. For example, traditions disagree about the occasions on which particular sermons were delivered, while keeping the sermons themselves intact."

Gombrich 1988:

p20: "Buddhists hold that the whole Canon is 'the word of the Buddha', but some of the canonical texts themselves state that they are by disciples ... so even orthodox Buddhsits do not take this blanket term literally. On the other hand, the first external evidence for the existence of Buddhist scriptural texts occurs in an Asokan inscription c.250 BCE. For this and other reasons, some western scholars have been extremely sceptical about the authenticity of the Canon, and consequently about how much we can know about the Buddha or his teachings.

My own position is this. In the precise form in which we have them, the Pali texts are undoubtedly much later than the Buddha ... On the other hand, I have the greatest difficulty in accepting that the main edifice is not the work of one genius. By 'the main edifice' I mean the content ["content" italicized in the 2006 ed] of the main body of sermons, the four Nikāyas, and of the main body of monastic rules. ... I find ... that the central part of the Canon (as I have just defined it) presents such originality, intelligence, grandeur and—most relevantly—coherence, that it is hard to see it as a composite work."

p21: "I consider extreme scepticism to be a faulty method. If we are too rigorous, we can doubt most of our knowledge about the past, certainly about ancient India, where the evidence is sparse and rarely dated. I am not saying that we should claim certainty when we do not have it, but that we should provisionally accept tradition till we have something to put in its place—all the while presering a modest awareness of our uncertainty."

Gombrich 1990:

p8: "While it is perfectly possible that some of the texts (perhaps some poetry?) were composed by the Buddha himself, we cannot know this with any certainty, and almost all the texts are, strictly speaking, anonymous compositions. The one important exception to this may be the Thera- and Therī-gāthās, which may be by the individual monks and nuns whom tradition holds to have been the authors.

There is however a principle that we may learn from the critical study of written texs, for its validity does not depend on the medium. This is the principle known as difficilior potior, that it is the more difficult reading which is to be prefered. Colleagues have written on the assumption that the Buddha, since he was a great thinker, must have been consistent, so that inconsistencies must have been introduced later by the less intelligent men who followed him. But that is the reverse of how we should normally look at it. A tradition, whether scribal or oral, always tends to iron out inconsistencies; when in any doubt, it goes for the obvious. It is this tendency to which difficilior potior refers. If our texts preserve something awkward, it is most unlikely to have been introduced by later generations of Buddhists who had been taught to accept the generally neat and uniform doctrine expounded in the commentaries."

Gombrich 2003:

I am saying that there was a person called the Buddha, that the preachings probably go back to him individually - very few scholars actually say that - that we can learn more about what he meant, and that he was saying some very precise things.

Gómez 1976:

p155: "The religion which rose out of the Buddha's silence is no doubt one of the most verbose, abstruse and pedantic of them all."

Gómez 1987:

vol 2 p355: "... it is difficult, if not impossible, to surmise which, if any, among the many doctrines attributed by tradition to the founder are veritably his."

Hartmann 2004:

p10: "According to tradition, the Buddha's discourses were already collected by the time of the first council, held shortly after the Buddha's death ... Scholars, however, see the texts as continually growing in number and size from an unknown nucleus, thereby undergoing various changes in language and content ..."

Harvey 1990:

p.3: "Our knowledge of the teachings of the Buddha is based on several canons of scripture ... The ... 'Pali Canon' ... is the most complete extant early canon, and contains some of the earliest material. Most of the texts are in fact the common property of all Buddhist schools, being simply the teachings which the Theravādins preserved from the early common stock. While parts of the Pali Canon clearly originated after the time of the Buddha, much must derive from his teaching. There is an overall harmony to the Canon, suggesting 'authorship' of its system of thought by one mind"

Wynne 2003:

If some of the material is so old, it might be possible to establish what texts go back to the very beginning of Buddhism, texts which perhaps include the substance of the Buddha’s teaching, and in some cases, maybe even his words

Hinüber 1996:

p5: "... the Theravāda canon is much later than the Buddha. ... the texts as found in the Theravāda canon, though the oldest Buddhist texts surviving, are the result of a lengthy and complicated development."

p24: "... the Buddhist canon belongs to the class of anonymous literature. It has not been shaped by one single author, but it has been growing over a long period of time."

p26: "... the cultural environment of the first four Nikāyas ... is markedly older than that of the Vinayapiṭaka. ...

It is obvious that research has a long way to go to [explore the development of the texts]."

Hirakawa 1974:

page 38: "The teachings the Buddha had preached ... were recited at the First Council ... As the teachings were committed to memory and passed down from one generation to the next, explanations reflecting the understanding and interpretations of later generations were incorporated into the scriptures. The sūtras were expanded and changes were inevitably introduced into the original teachings. Although the teachings found in the Āgamas (or sūtras) include much more than the teachings of the historical Buddha, many of the Āgamas are closely related to the historical Buddha's teachings. Any attempt to ascertain the original teachings of the historical Buddha must be based on this literature. As shall be discussed subsequently, earlier and later passages in the Āgamas have been distinguished by modern scholars."

p39: "Scholars have been unable to distinguish the teachings of the Buddha from those of his immediate disciples."

p69: "... First Council ... Although many scholars have expressed doubts about whether this council was actually held, since it is mentioned in many sources a meeting of some kind must have been held at this time.

At the First Council, ... Ānanda recited the Buddha's teachings (Dharma). The rules regulating monastic discipline were recited by Upāli ... (Their recitations were probably based on early versions of the Sūtra-piṭaka and Vinaya-piṭaka; the Abhidharma-piṭaka was compiled later.) To facilitate memorization, the monks assembled short prose passages (sūtra) or verses ... that expressed important doctrines. These short expositions of doctrine were supplemented with explanatory passages. For example, stories ... explaining the circumstances of the composition of verses were created, [p70] memorized, and transmitted from person to person. Later, transitional passages were added to tie these texts together. Eventually, longer passages ... were compiled. Still later, lengthy sūtras were produced. ... During the century following the death of the Buddha, a number of lengthy sūtras were compiled.

... The development of the Sūtra-piṭaka and the Vinaya-piṭaka from the time of the First Council until the canon assumed its present form cannot be traced in much detail. It is clear, however, that during the first century after the Buddha's death, his teachings had been compiled into a Sūtra-piṭaka and that the rules on monastic discipline had been collected into a Vinaya-piṭaka .

About one century after the Buddha's death, the early order split into two schools ... These schools subsequently suffered schisms that eventually resulted in at least eighteen schools. During this time the canons maintained by the various schools were expanded and changed. The texts in Pāli transmitted to Sri Lanka and the Chinese translation of the Vinaya- and Sūtra-piṭakas extant today are from this period of sectarian or Nikāya Buddhism. Since a long period elapsed between the time of the original compilations of the Sūtra-piṭaka and Vinaya-piṭaka and the time when they came to exist in their present form, they cannot be restored to their original form. Older and newer sections of texts have clearly been mixed together in the canons in use today."

p74: "Many modern scholars believe that before early Buddhist teachings ... were collected into the four Āgamas or five Nikāyas, the teachings were organized into nine ... or twelve ... divisions. ... No decisive proof has been found for determining which of these two classifications is earlier, but scholars generally believe that the ninefold classification was formulated first. ... A number of problematic points remain in efforts to determine whether the above two classification systems are older than the [p75] divisions into four Āgamas or five Nikāyas, but most scholars consider the ninefold and twelvefold classifications to be earlier. Although the ninefold and twelvefold lists certainly do contain some very early elements, the jātakas were compiled reatively late, indicating that the ninefold and twelvefold lists as they are now constituted should not be readily judged to be early lists."

p127: The Sarvāstivādin School argued that the abhidharma was preached by the Buddha. Sarvāstivādins thus believed that the entire Tripiṭaka was, in a broad sense, the Buddha's preaching. ... However, the similarities in the texts of the Sūtra-piṭakas and Vinaya-piṭakas followed by the various schools reveal that the basic contents of these two collections were deter-[p128]mined before the divisions of Nikāya Buddhism had occurred. In contrast, the contentsof abhidharma literature varies with each of the schools, indicating that this class of literature was compiled after the basic divisions of the schools had occurred. The Abhidharma-piṭakas of most of the schools were probably compiled during a perod beginning in 250 B.C.E. (after the first major schism) and ending around the start of the common era.

"

De Jong 1993:

It would be hypocritical to assert that nothing can be said about the doctrine of earliest Buddhism ... the basic ideas of Buddhism found in the canonical writings could very well have been proclaimed by him [the Buddha], transmitted and developed by his disciples and, finally, codified in fixed formulas.

Lang 2007:

p584: "It is impossible to know the extent to which this Tipiṭaka written down in the first century BCE resembles the present Pāli Canon. The selection and order of texts within the extant Pāli Canon owes much to the work of the fifth-century Pāli translator and commentator Buddhaghosa."

Lopez 1995 page 4

"The original teachings of the historical Buddha are extremely difficult, if not impossible, to recover or reconstruct."

Lopez 2001:

p7: "... it is impossible to know precisely what the Buddha taught."

p103: "... strictly speaking all Buddhist sūtras ... are apocryphal because none can be identified with complete certainty as a record of the teaching of the historical Buddha."

Manné 1995:

p19: "It seems a good idea to say that there is no evidence that could prove that the Buddha ever spoke a word among all those attributed to him by any text whatever ... What we can do is examine the texts on their individual merits and make judgements on the plausibility of their contexts."

Mus 1935:

p146: "... the Buddhism of the Buddha ... is linked to all the later developments, that which Pāli Buddhism ... exemplifies, then ... the Mahāyāna, then finally to Tantrism ..."

Nakamura 1980:

pp26f: "The earlier portions of the Pali scriptures have been classified in several groups according to their chronological order:...(citation from Ui)

1. Parayana (of the Suttanipata)
   1. The first four vaggas of the Suttanipata,and the first Sagathavagga of the Samyutta-nikaya
   2. Itivuttaka, Udana
   3. The first eight vaggas of Nidana-samyutta of the Samyutta-nikaya II and Vedalla...
2. The twenty-eight Jātakas which are found at Bharhut and Abbhutadhamma ...

p32: "It is likely that the four Nikāyas were compiled simultaneously after the reign of king Aśoka."

p45: "...the Atthaka-vagga and the Parayana-vagga are very old; it is likely that they existed even in the lifetime of Gotama Buddha."

p46: "The Suttanipāta is quite unique in describing the earliest stage of Buddhism when monks spent their lives as hermits prior to the days of monasteries, and philosophical speculations were barred..."

p57: "It is generally admitted that early Buddhist philosophy is set forth in the Pāli Nikāyas and their corresponding Chinese texts. But the Pāli Nikāyas temselves consist of various earlier and later layers which are derived from different periods... in the Buddhist texts there is no word that can be traced with unquestionable authority to Gotama Śākyamuni as a historical personage, although there must be some sayings or phrases derived from him. So, selecting older parts among the voluminous scriptures of Early Buddhism, scholars of critical approach try to elucidate the true purport of the teachings of the Buddha, or what is closest to his virtual teachings.

In this sense we shall distinguish between I) Original Buddhism and II) Early Buddhism. The former can be known only from older portions of the Pali scriptures, whereas the latter can be known chiefly from the most portions of the Pali scriptures that are in common with Sanskrit and Chinese Āgamas."

"it has been made clear that some poem (Gāthā) portions and some phrases represent earlier layers ... Based upon these portions of the scriptures we can construe aspects of original Buddhism. The picture which we can get therefrom is fairly different from that as we get from the Pali scriptures in general. Buddhism as appears in earlier portions of the scriptures is fairly different from what is explained by many scholars as earlier Buddhism or primitive Buddhism"

Norman 1983:

p31: "... the collections [nikayas] had begun to be formed while the schools were still in contact, i.e. before the schisms which started after the second council."

Scmithausen 1981:

p201: "... the Suttas are to be treated as anonymous literature (the extent to which they contain elements which can safely be ascribed to the Buddha himself being still undecided). ... [ref to Cousins 1982/3] ... There must have been ... preachers ..., and it is hardly conceivable that such persons did not develop new ideas – even though they themselves need not have taken these ideas to be new in substance – and that they did not try to incorporate them into tradition by means of modification, supplementation, etc., of the already existing material, a part of which seems to have acquired a rather fixed literary form quite early. ... the Sūtra<->piṭaka as we have it is the result of change, ..., i.e. is in fact "anonymous literature" ..."

Schopen 1991 (1997 pagination):

p1: "The way in which the history of Indian Buddhism has been studied by modern scholars is decidedly peculiar. ...

When Europeans first began to study Indian Buddhism systematically there were already two bodies of data available to them, and the same is true today. There was, and is, a large body of archaeological and epigraphical material, material that can be reasonably well located in time and space ... There was, and is, an equally large body of literary material that in most cases cannot actually be dated ... and that survives only in very recent manuscript traditions. ... It has been heavily edited ..."

Schopen 1985 (1997 pagination):

p23: "We know ... that the Pāli canon as we have it—and it is generally conceded to be our oldest source—cannot be taken back further than the last quarter of the first centurt B.C.E., the date of the Alu-vihāra redaction, the earliest redaction that we can have some knowledge of ... and that—for a critical history—it can serve, at the very most, only as a source for ... this period. But we also know that even this is problematic [p24] since, as Malalasekera has pointed out: "... how far the Tipiṭaka and its comentary reduced to writing at Alu-vihāra resembled them as they have come down to us now, no one can say." ... it is not until the time of the commentaries of Buddhaghosa, Dhammapāla, and others—that is to say, the fifth to sixth centuries C.E.—that we can know anything definite about the actual contents of this canon.

We also know that there is no evidence to indicate that a canon existed prior to the Alu-vihāra redaction."

p25: "... it has been maintained that "higher criticism" is able to take us back to a point considerably before our earliest known redaction. ... The cardinal tenet of this criticism states ... if all known sectarian versions of a text [page 26] or passage agree, that text or passage must be very old ...

... we do not actually know when the sectarian period began. ... it is not until the second century C.E. that we begin to find references to actual "schools" in inscriptions... They simply do not occur in the earlier periods of known Buddhist inscriptions... there is no actual evidence for the emergence of the schools prior to the second century C.E. ...

In applying the principle ... almost no account has been given to the fact that all the material ... is very late ..."

p27: "The textual critic is ... comparing texts from uniformy late stages of the literary tradition. ... any agreement between the sources is open to a very different, if not the very opposite interpretation. ... If all known versions of a text or passage agree, that text or passage is probably late; that is, it probably represents the results of the conflation and gradual leveling and harmonization of earlier existing traditions."

Schopen 1992 (1997 pagination):

page 80: "To account for ... shared ... elements, two ... theories have been used: one says that common elements must go back to a period which predates the ... schisms; the other says that such ... elements result fro contamination, ... borrowing, and ... leveling, and therefore, are late. ... The first ... depends on the assumption that ... monastic groups can be ... treated as ... sects—this has been repeatedly questioned. ... It depends on the assumption that ... sects existed in isolation, hermetically sealed, with no significant contact or interchange—this is contrary to all ...evidence. ...this theory assumes that "orthodoxy" or uniformity among ... religious groupsis established first and then, only over time, do significant differences develop—this is contrary to almost everything "church historians" and sociologists have discovered: if uniformity is ever achieved it is achieved over more or less long perods of time through a complex process ... that works on originally discrete and competing groups and voices."

Gethin 2005 (2006 pagination):

p83: "... there are other forms of evidence to do with the development of Buddhist doctrine and Indian material culture, for example, that Schopen chooses to ignore."

p84: "In terms of doctrinal development the four primary Nikāyas are clearly older than certaintexts of the Khuddaka-nikāya and the texts of the Abhidhamma Piṭaka, which in turn are clearly older than the Pāli commentaries."

Vetter 1988:

p IX: "... the facts have become so varied that we can no longer explain everything by attributing it to a development in the thinking of the Buddha himself as E. Frauwallner ... tried to do ... the method which counts on a comparison of the different extant versions of a text ... does not just simply lead to the oldest nucleus of the doctrine. The only thing that can be established is that in this way one arrives at a Sthavira canon dating from c. 270 B.C. ... But even then one is not completely certain of reaching an old canon, because the different schools exchanged texts after this period ... I do not want to exclude the possibility that a doctrine which is not found in a common tradition could also be very ancient. But in general by uncovering a common core one does come closer to finding the oldest doctrines than when one does not use such a method. ... Striving to reach a common core which can then be examined for inconsistencies is an arduous task and certainly one which has not yet been completed."

Warder 1982:

p xxix: "The date of an early Buddhist text is not something which is normally susceptible of precise determination. Most of the 'texts' are composite, so that a date can be assigned only to a part of a text or to the final codification of the parts as a whole. For the verse texts in Pali this conclusion was established in [Warder 1967]. It is evidently equally true of the prose suttas, though not so easy to determine the parts. Where a recension of a text belonging to another school is available, parts added on either side can be detected by collation. This exposes the later parts, added presumably after the schism which separated the two schools, but it does not carry us back to detect earlier additions. Only in rare cases wher recensions of several schools are available can we work back to the time of the earliest schism, but still no further than that. Very little work has been done so far on this textual criticism of the Buddhist tradition (most of it is in [2nd edn of Warder 199/2000]). This section consequently is highly tentative.

Warder 1999/2000:

inside flap

a reconstruction of the original Buddhism presupposed by the traditions of the different schools known to us...

there is no evidence to suggest that it was formulated by anyone else than the Buddha and his immediate followers. This kernel of doctrine is presumably common Buddhism of the period "before the schisms of the fourth and third centuries BC. It may be substantially the Buddhism of the Buddha himself,

page x: "The Buddha was a philosopher whose doctrine approximated that set out in our chapters 4 to 6. This is not the 'Theravāda' ... of the Pali 'Canon', though the latter happens to be the most important source now available for reconstructing it. ... Our chapters 3 to 6 present the ground which is common to all known schools of Buddhism. They interpreted this and all of them added new doctrines to it, with varying degrees of justification. ... Of the schools which preserved the philosophy of the Buddha, the Sthaviravāda (Theravāda), Bahuśrutīya and Sautrāntika, among those known to us, appear the most faithful to his ideas. When these three agree, as they usually do, we can say that we have authentic Buddhist tradition. Everything else is part of the history of philosophy and of religion, interesting in its own right and often derivable, with more or less distortion, from some aspect of the original teaching."

page xiii: "... by the second century A.D. there were schools of Buddhism in India which differed very greatly though they all claimed to teach the actual doctrine of the Buddha. ... modern writers, especially scholars, have taken sides ... or, in the name of that extreme caution which some suppose to be the hallmark of the sound academic, have claimed that we do not know what the Buddha taught and cannot now find out."

p4: "... we are on safe ground only with those texts the authenticity of which is admitted by all schools of Buddhism ..."

p5: "... there is a central body of sūtras ... which is so similar in all known versions that we must accept these as so many recensions of the same original texts. ... we shall ... take the text which might be critically edited by comparing their different recensions as the basis of our exposition of the doctrine as it evidently existed before the schisms which divided the schools. It may be noted that whatever textual discrepancies are found hardly affect the doctrine."

p11: "Given the Tripiṭaka as established by the consensus of opinion of the early schools, can we go further and distinguish within it texts which are earlier and later? This might enable us to say that, although the Tripiṭaka we could establish represented the texts recognized by all Buddhists not earlier than a hundred and thirty-seven years after the parinirvāṇa ..., the doctrine had, or had not, undergone some development during that period. ...

Most attempts to outline the history of this collection of texts have been based on largely subjective impressions as to what was early and are of little use."

p196: " ... five āgamas, 'traditions' ... Dīrgha ... Madhyama ... Saṃyukta ... Ekottara... Kṣudraka ... [p197] ... This order ... happens also to be the order of their authenticity ... This is soon ascertained by comparing the various available recensions ..."

p284: "... the Sthaviravāda Tripiṭaka, now preserved in the Pali language ..., is certainly one of the most authentic, in the sense of preserving the discourses of the Buddha in their wording as recognised before the schisms. Unfortunately no other recension is intact ..."

p285: "If they preserved a very authentic body of original Tripiṭaka the Sthaviravāda certainly made substantial additions to this: these, however, took the form of new books rather than of insertions in the old ones, with the probable exception of some of the Kṣudraka texts which in all schools seem to have grown gradually during a much longer period than the rest of the Sūtra. In fact it is likely that this 'Minor Tradition' was for along time not regarded as strictly canonical (in the sense of words of the Buddha himself), was thus a supplement to the Tripiṭaka in which interesting or useful texts which had been produced from doubtful sources, or composed by monks and nuns recently, could be handed down. Even so where we can make a comparison we find the Sthaviravāda has the shortest recension of a text, consequently ceased to make additions to it earlier than other schools ..."

Lopez 2001:

p123: "... the Pali suttas, once considered by some to be the closest approximation of what the Buddha taught ..."

[edit] Vinaya Pitaka(s)

Cousins 1984a:

p288: "The Vinaya-pitaka must be rather early in date as, apart from ... appendices, it is almost identical in the different recensions. Still earlier is the Patimokkha code, which is likely to have been laid down by the Buddha himself, at least in its main portion."

Gethin 2005 (2006 pagination):

p83: "... there are grounds for concluding that the Pāli Vinaya is a more recent document than the four primary Pāli Nikāyas."

Gombrich 1984:

p79: "In the case of the Vinaya Piṭaka, some minor rules have variously been added to a larger body rules which is undoubtedly original. ...

Professor Frauwallner has given us reason to believe that at the Second Council a systematic biography of the Buddha and the beginnings of a Buddhist church history were created ... Each rule and most subsequent adjustments are put in the mouth of the Buddha and related to some exigency ... Clearly the anecdotes are historical fictions; such exigencies may have arisen, but the author of the text before us has no record of what they were. Moreover, the Vinaya Piṭaka documents changes in monastic life and discipline greater than are likely to have occurred during the Buddha's lifetime. It is therefore possible that the Vinaya Piṭaka as we have it owes at least as much to the Second Council as to the First. Many scholars would regard this hypothesis as too bold in its precision, but would be prepared to accept that the Vinaya Piṭaka records, in a rather ahistorical manner, the development of the Sangha over its first one-and-a-half centuries. ... the most sceptical scholars would close this part of the Canon during the reign of the Emperor Aśoka ..."

Hinüber 1996:

p14: "It seems that the commentary on the rules is roughly contemporary with the introduction. [ie story] The anāpatti-formulas ... seem to be still younger."

p20: "A preliminary model of the development of Suttavibhanga and Khandhaka may be sketched as follows: First the Pātimokkhasutta is created ... Then a commentary on this text develops, of which a part survives in the Mahāvagga ... Perhaps roughly contemporary is a first draft of the Khandhaka, possibly having only ten chapters ... by which a growing Suttavibhanga is influenced. The introductory stories are developed ... a certain distance in time between these two parts of the Suttavibhanga. ... At this point there may have been a revision of the Khandhaka, to which the highly technical and later (?) legal chapters are added ... The original introduction to the Suttavibhanga is rteplaced and brought into the Mahāvagga.

Finally, the accounts of the councils ... may have been added as an appendix ... [p21] Only in very general terms might it be conjectured that most if not all of this happened before the Vinaya was brought to Ceylon ... [p22] ... the 1st century AD ... is a most probable terminus post quem ... for the Parivāra."

Hinüber 2000:

p73: "Although it is difficult to date older Pāli literature with any precision, the composition of the Bhikkhunī-Pātimokkha can hardly be later than Aśoka ..."

Hirakawa 1974:

p69: "The ... rules of the vinaya were compiled into a list called the prātimokṣa early in Buddhist history. ... Along with these rules, procedures and ceremonies ... to be used in managing the order were formulated and came to occupy the greater part of the chapters (skandhaka) in the Vinaya-piṭaka. ... The early prātimokṣa and skandhaka were probably composed one century after the Buddha's death."

Hüsken 2000:

p64: "There was a time lapse between the death of the Buddha ... and the final codification of the Vinaya. ... new rules had to be drawn up. These rules were also attributed to the Buddha ..."

Nakamura 1980:

p51: "The Pali Vinaya and the originals of the corresponding Chinese versions ... seem to have been composed, according to a scholar, in the following dates. ...

• Dharmaguptaka-vinaya ... (Mahīśāsaka-vinaya) ... B.C. 100–1
• Daśabhāṇavāra-vinaya [Sarvastivada] ... A.D. 1–100
• Pāli Vinaya-piṭaka ... around A.D. 100 [p52]
• Mahāsānghika-vinaya ... A.D. 100–200
• Mūlasarvāstivāda-vinaya ... A.D. 300–400

...

An opinion has it that by means of comparative studies on various texts, one is led to the conclusion that the chronological order of the texts are as follows: (1) the Pali text represents the earliest form; (2) next comes the Dharmaguptaka-vinaya or the Mahīśāsaka-vinaya; (3) the Mahāsānghika-vinaya; (4) the Daśabhāṇavāra-vinaya; (5) the Vinaya of the Mūlasarvāstivādins.

Norman 1983:

p24: "The section of rules for bhikkhunīs ... is probably an addition, made after the rules for bhikkhus, and was therefore at one time the last section of the Khandhaka. As, however, it is now followed by the accounts of the two councils, and has parallels in the Khandhakas of other sects, it must be presumed that the Bhikkhunī-kkhandhaka predates the schism between the schools. The inclusion of the accounts of the councils ... shows that the Vinaya-piṭaka in its present form is at least 100 years later than the death of the Buddha. Since these accounts are included in all versions of teh Vinaya, it can be concluded that all sects had (approximately) the same Vinaya until the second council ... and the schism that followed it. The fact that part of the Vinaya is late does not, however, mean that all of it is late. The different arrangement of the khandhakas ... shows that there was already the beginning of divergency before the time of the second council."

p26: "It has been claimed ... that the present form of the Parivāra must have been fixed in the first century A.D. ..."

p29: "... the fact that other schools found it necessary to have supplements to their Vinayas supports the view that some, at least, of the Pāli Parivāra was composed in India before the introduction of Buddhism to Ceylon."

Schopen 2004:

p887: "... it is beginning to appear that the Pāli Vinaya is missing some potentially old sections that are found elsewhere ... none of the vinayas as we have them is early. The four vinayas preserved only in Chinese were all translated in the fifth century and consequently can represent only what their originals had become by that time—they do not necessarily tell us anything about what they looked like before then. The shape of the Theravāda-vinaya too cannot be taken back prior to the fifth century—its actual contents can only be dated from BUDDHAGHOSA's roughly fifth-century commentary on it, and even then both this commentary and the canonical text are known almost exclusively only on the basis of extremely late (eighteenth- and nineteenth-century) manuscripts. The Mūlasarvāstivāda-vinaya was not translated into Chinese until the eigth century, and into Tibetan only in the ninth, but it is the only vinaya for which we have significant amounts of actual manuscript material from, perhaps, the fifth, sixth, or seventh centuries. Regardless, then, of how one looks at it, the material we now have represents vinaya literature in a comparatively late stage of its development, and it can tell us very richly what it had become and very poorly what it had earlier been."

p888: "There are two general and opposed theories concerning the development vinaya literature, both of which at least start from one of its most obvious characteristics: Although belonging to different orders or schools, the vinayas that have come down to us have ... a great deal in common ... One theory would see these shared elements as early and argue that they predate the divisions of the Buddhist community into separate orders or schools. Another theory would see these same elements as late, as the result of mutual borrowing, conflation, and a process of leveling. there are of course arguments and evidence to support both theories."

[edit] Digha Nikaya

Hirakawa 1974:

p72: "... (thirty-four long suttas): corresponds to the Ch'ang a-han ching of the Dharmaguptaka School ... with thirty sūtras ...

Nakamura 1980:

p32: "There is an opinion [citations of Otto Strauss, Indische Philosophie, 87, and Warder] that the Dīghanikāya contains the oldest teachings in the Suttapiṭaka ... [p33] we cannot necessarily agree with the opinion. Anyhow, it is undeniable that the Dīghanikāya contains very early portions. [footnote refers to the Sakkapañha]

The original of the Chinese version of the Dīrghāgama ... was a Sanskrit text ..."

Norman 1983:

p32: "The earliest stratum is found mainly in the first vagga, and the latest in the last ..."

p36: Most of the suttas in [Mahavagga] ... have features which show them to be later than the suttas in the first vagga ..."

Warder 1999/2000:

p6: "The affiliation of the Chinese version of the Dīrgha ... seems to be a matter of conjecture. The usual conjecture is that it belongs to the Dharmaguptaka school."

Cousins 1982/3:

p3: "It may be suggested that a number of ancient attempts were made to fix the tradition, already during the sutta period. One of the earliest of these may have come down to us as the Saṅgīti-suttanta ... It can be viewed as [p4] a ... summary of the ... nikayas. ... It is obviously a work of some authority; it is used as the basis for one of the ... abhidharma works of the Sarvāstivāda. ... So far as I know, it has not actually been suggested that it may well have been recited at one of the Councils. Yet its name clearly indicates that it is intended for chanting togther and this surely means at a Saṅgīti.

... One might venture rather tentatively to suggest that the Second Council would seem particularly appropriate. This does seem to have been a period in which an attempt was being made to define some aspects of the tradition more precisely. ... Even if the tradition of the Councils which we have is rejected in toto, it would still seem that the procedure ... is firmly fixed in oral consciousness. Presumably this has some historical basis. Perhaps then the Sangiti-suttanta is the best evidence we have as to what one such council actually did?"

[edit] Majjhima Nikaya

Hirakawa 1974:

p72: "... (152 suttas of medium length): corresponds to the Chung a-han ching (221 sūtras of medium length) of the Sarvāstivādin School ...

Warder 1999/2000:

p6: "The version of the Madhyama (T 26) seems to be agreed to belong to the Sarvāstivāda, since it agrees closely with the extant fragments of the Sanskrit version, which have been ascribed to that school."

[edit] Samyutta Nikaya

Hirakawa 1974:

p72: "... (2,872 suttas organized according to content): corresponds to the Tsa a-han ching (1,362 sūtras) of the Sarvāstivādin School ...

Warder 1999/2000:

p6: "The complete translation of the Saṃyukta (T 99) belongs to the Sarvāstivāda, as is now established by its exact agreement with the fragments of the Sanskrit Saṃyukta ... The incomplete version ... is ascribed by Chinese tradition to the Kāśyapīya school (there seems to be no strong reason to doubt this, though some of the Japanese writers have declared it 'uncertain')."

[edit] Anguttara Nikaya

Hirakawa 1974:

p72: "... (2,198 suttas organized according to the number of items in the doctrinal list under discussion): corresponds to the Tseng-i a-han ching (471 sūtras) of an undetermined school ...

Nakamura 1980:

p38: "It was formerly admitted that the Sanskrit original of the [p39] Chinese version ... was composed in the period between the 2nd century and the beginning of the 4th century A.D. ... Howevwe, there is an opinion that it is likely that the Pali text ... was composed probably in the reign of Menander, 1st B.C., and that the Chinese version ... must have been composed after the rise of Mahāyāna, probably in the 2nd or 3rd century A.D. ... The sect to which the Ekottarāgama belonged is not clear."

Norman 1983:

p56: "It is probable that the whole of the eleventh nipāta is an addition ..."

Warder 1999/2000:

p6: "There has been a great deal of controversy about the Ekottara (T 125), variously attributed to the Dharmaguptakas (e.g. Matsumoto) or to the Mahāsaṃghikas (Akanuma, but then he qualifies this as more precisely the Prajñaptivāda offshoot of that school) or left uncertain. The arguments for assigning it to the Mahāsaṃghikas do not seem very strong: on the contrary the text contradicts certain doctrines of that school ... To assign it to a ssub-school ...does not evade all the difficulties. In fact it seems very likely that this ... is a Dharmaguptaka text, since it shows agreement with known Dharmaguptaka views which appear characteristic of the school so far as our knowledge extends. ... (There have certainly been Mahāyāna interpolations in this Ekottara, as is universally agreed)."

[edit] Khuddaka Nikaya

Cutler 1994:

p29: "It appears more likely, however, that versions of [Pubbakammapilotika apadana] existed before the division into sects took place ..."

Hinüber 1996:

p59: "The age of Nidd hs been discussed at great length by S.Lévi 1925, who arrives at a date in the 2nd century AD ... This date has been disputed recently by Norman 1983 ... who argues for a much earlier date at the time of Aśoka. ... a date after Aśoka does not seem unlikely. ...

... Paṭisambhidāmagga ...[p60] ... perhaps 2nd century AD ... [p61]

... Apadāna ... is one of the last books added to the canon. It seems to be younger than the Buddhavaṃsa ..."

Hirakawa 1974:

p77: "... the Pārāyana-vagga ... Both this chapter and the Aṭṭhaka-vagga ... are written in a very old style of Pāli and are thus thought to belong to the oldest strata of the Āgamas. However, when these chapters are compared with the language used in Aśoka's edicts, it is impossible to determine which is earlier. Thus although the Pārāyana-vagga is written in an early style of Pāli, it cannot be proven that it was composed during the Buddha's lifetime. Moreover, the verses that comprise the prologue of the Pārāyana-vagga were composed later than the verses that the Buddha is said to [p78] have spoken in the Pārāyana-vagga itself."

p128: "With the increase in the volume of abhidharma literature, a special division of the canon, an Abhidharma-piṭaka, was established. Before this, the canon went through a transitional phase in which material was placed in a "mixed basket" ... The Kṣudraka-piṭaka was the repository for materials that had been left out of the four Āgamas ... and thus included both early and later texts. The Mahīśāsaka, Dharmaguptaka, and Mahāsaṅghika were among the schools that included the Kṣudraka-piṭaka in their canon ... Fifteen works are included in the Pāli Khuddaka-nikāya. Among them are very old writings such as the Dhammapada ... Suttanipāta ... Theragāthā ... and Therīgāthā ... Other texts included ... were composed at a later date; among these are the Niddesa ... and the Paṭisambhidāmagga ... In both style and content the latter two works are similar to fully developed abhidhamma literature, and thus represent a literary stage between the Nikāyas and the ... Abhidharma-piṭaka. ... Both texts were compiled around 250 B.C.E., a date that would make them forerunners of abhidhamma literature."

[p129] "Since the five chapters of the Suttanipāta are not explained in the order in which they are found today in the Pāli canon, the Suttanipāta was obviously not edited into its modern format ... until after the Niddesa was compiled. Many elements of the Niddesa, such as its method of defining doctrines and its technical terms, are similar to those found in abhidhamma texts.

The Paṭisambhidāmagga ... contains discussions of the practical applications of many of the topics found in abhidhamma literature. At the beginning of the text is a list of fifty-five topics that are discussed in the work. These topics are called mātikā, a term characteristically used in Theravāda abhidhamma texts. The list of mātikā in the Paṭisambhidāmagga is not as refined or as well organized as those in later Theravāda abhidhamma texts.

The Niddesa and Paṭisambhidāmagga are found only in the Theravāda canon. No texts repesenting this transitional phase from sūtra to abhidharma are found in extant Sarvāstivādin literature."

Nakamura 1980:

p25: "A number of passages from Buddhist Sanskrit works have been translated into Pali and included in works of Pali literature. (Sections of the Anavatapta-gāthā, a Buddhist Sanskrit text of the Sarvāstivāda school, have been inserted in the Apadāna and the Nettipakaraṇa.)"

p27: "... later scriptures may occasionally contain early materials; and a simple classification setting forth a chronology of large blocks of literature is inadequate.2

p40: "Dhammapada ... this is a fairly old text."

p43: "In the extant Pali text of the Udāna those phrases as are cited as udāna are old, and stories were added later."

p44: "In the extant Pali text of the Itivuttaka the second and third chapters are later additions. Which is older between prose and poem sections cannot be decided one-sidedly. ...

Suttanipāta. [p45]

This text as a whole is a very old one. It is likely that parts of this text came into existence chronologically in the following order ...

1. Pārāyana.
2. Aṭṭhaka-vagga.
3. Mahāvagga. [footnote cites Pande as thinking this is the latest]
4. Other chapters. (They are mixtures of older and later layers).

...the Atthaka-vagga and the Pārāyana-vagga are very old ...; it is likely that they existed even in the lifetime of Gotama Buddha."

p46: "The Suttanipāta is quite unique in describing the earliest stage of Buddhism when monks spent their lives as hermits prior to the days of monasteries, and philosophical speculations were barred..."

p48: "The Niddesa is supposed by some scholars to have been composed in the reign of King Aśoka or in a period not much remote from him. ... The Mahāniddesa must not have been composed before the 2nd century A.D. This leads us to the conclusion that the extant corpus of the Pali scripture was composed after it."

Norman 1983:

p32: "... presumably ... the Dīgha-bhāṇakas closed their list ... before [Apadana, Buddhavamsa, Cariyapitaka, Khuddakapatha] were regarded as canonical, while the Majjhima-bhāṇakas closed their list before the Khuddakapāṭha was accepted."

p58: "If we can be certain of our conclusion ... then we can conclude that [Khuddakapatha] is the latest text in the nikāya."

p63: "... suggestion that the [fourth] nipāta as a whole is a later addition to [Itivuttaka] ...

... Suttanipāta ... some of its contents can claim to be among the earliest Buddhist poetry known to us. ... The great age of [Atthaka & Parayana] ... [p64] ... A number of individual suttas from other vaggas are found in ... texts of other traditions, suggesting that the suttas are old enough to pre-date the schisms between the sects."

p70: "The Vimānavatthu ... is probably a late addition to the canon ...

... most scholars agree that as we have it the Vimānavatthu must be one of the latest texts to be admitted to the canon. ... [p71] ... some of the stories may be older than the rest ...

There can be little doubt that in its present form the Petavatthu is a late composition."

p76: "The last two poems of [Therigatha] ... contain features which might be regarded as late, the [p77] fact that they are in [arya] metre, which went out of use quite early on in the history of Pāli literature, shows that they cannot be very late."

p85: "Although it is possible that some of the explanations given in the Niddesa go back to the time of the Buddha, and were perhaps compiled by Sāriputta, the whole work in its present form must have been produced at some later time."

p87: "Those who suggest late dates for the compilation of the Niddesa forget that the Sinhalese tradition recorded the fact ... that the Niddesa existed before the first century B.C., and had by that time been forgotten by all bhikkhus except one. From fear of its disappearing altogether the thera Mahārakkhita was persuaded to learn the Niddesa from this one bhikkhu, and others learned it from Mahārakkhita. ... It was the realisation that canonical texts could easily disappear if the oral tradition died out which precipitated the writing down of the canon ...

... [Patisambhidamagga] is later than much of the canon ... [p88] ...

... it was recognized as canonical before the composition of the Apadāna, Buddhavaṃsa, Cariyāpiṭaka and Khuddakapāṭha."

p90: "... suggests that the Apadāna is one of the latest books in the canon."

p94: "... it would seem that the Buddhavaṃsa is a relatively late addition to the canon."

p95: "... suggest that [Cariyapitaka] is a late text."

Warder 1999/2000:

p197: "The original nucleus of the Kṣudraka common to all the schools may have contained the following parts: (1) Khaḍgaviṣāṇagāthā ... (2) Munigāthā ... (3) Śailagāthā ... (4) Arthavargīyāṇi ... (5) Pārāyaṇa ... (6) Sthaviragāthā ... [p198] ... (7) Sthavirīgāthā ... (8) Ityukta ... Three other parts of the collection seem at least in origin to have been ... anthologies from the Tripiṭaka of (9) Udānas ... (10) Dharmapadas ... and (11) Jātakas ... The latest part, if it was part ..., of this nucleus would be the (12) Avadānas ..."

p285: "If they preserved a very authentic body of original Tripiṭaka the Sthaviravāda certainly made substantial additions to this: these, however, took the form of new books rather than of insertions in the old ones, with the probable exception of some of the Kṣudraka texts which in all schools seem to have grown gradually during a much longer period than the rest of the Sūtra. In fact it is likely that this 'Minor Tradition' was for along time not regarded as strictly canonical (in the sense of words of the Buddha himself), was thus a supplement to the Tripiṭaka in which interesting or useful texts which had been produced from doubtful sources, or composed by monks and nuns recently, could be handed down. Even so where we can make a comparison we find the Sthaviravāda has the shortest recension of a text, consequently ceased to make additions to it earlier than other schools ..."

p286: "... Suttanipāta ..., though having parallels in other schools for several of its constituent parts ..., is not known to have had any corresponding text as a collection, so that many of the poems in it may have been composed in the school after the schisms. [footnote: at least one part ...may have been as late as about 200 B.C.] ... the Vimānapetavatthu ... as well as the Apadāna ... Our metrical analysis dated the whole of these later than 200 B.C. The average date of their materials might be as much as a century later than this date. Slightly later still appears to be the ... Cariyāpiṭaka ... the ... Buddhavaṃsa, which is perhaps to be dated in the 2nd century B.C. ... Jātaka is substantially older on the average than the group of narrative texts we have just [p287] referred to: its average date seems to fall in the 4th century B.C., which of course does not exclude a wide range of dates on either side of this for a minority of its ... poems."

p299: "The Paṭisambhidāmagga ... may be dated from 237 to c. 100 B.C."

[edit] Abhidhamma/Abhidharma Pitakas

Cousins 1982/3:

p7: "It is of course quite possible that the proposition ... was present from an early stage. In this sense the abhidhamma approach may be older than appears."

Cousins 1984a:

p289: "each of the main recensions ... seems to have included different works ... So it is probable that the abhidhamma works are later than the four nikayas. However, it is important to distinguish the abhidhamma movement from the ... literrature. ... although ... works differ, the ... method differs much less. The movement ... which brought the abhidhamma approach into prominence probably occurred during the Mauryan period ... if not earlier. indeed the nikayas already show signs of influence from such a movement."

Gethin 1998:

p47: "In many ways the extant works of 'the basket of Abhidharma' ... can be seen as continuing the process of systematization already evident in the Nikāyas. That some form of commentary and interpretation formed part of Buddhism almost from its inception is indicated by certain of the sūtras in the Nikāyas. ... [p48] ... Something of the Abhidharma method must go back to the lifetime of the Buddha himself. Certainly much of its outlook and many of its principles must be regarded as still forming part of the common heritage of Buddhism, alonside the ... sūtra collections and the monastic rule ..." Harvey 1990:

p.83: "... the works of Abhidhamma ... In the third century BC, a few schools added these to their canons of teachings, developing them from Mātikā's ... which may have originated with the Buddha."

Gombrich 1984:

p 79: "There can be no doubt that the Pali Abhidhamma Piṭaka is apocryphal in the sense that it does not date from the First Council. Although all Buddhist schools and traditions share the Vinaya and Sūtra Piṭakas, the texts of the Theravādin Abhidhamma Piṭaka are peculiar to that school; each school of Buddhism came to possess its own texts of abhidharma."

Hinüber 1996:

p64: "The Abhidhammapiṭaka is considerably younger than both Vinaya- and Suttapiṭaka, and originated, according to Frauwallner, between 200 BC and 200 AD ..."

Hirakawa 1974:

p91: "Since the Kathāvatthu was compiled within the Theravāda order, some sort of council must have been convened. However, the council was held not during Aśoka's reign, but approximately a century after Aśoka. Since the doctrines of the various schools of Nikāya Buddhism are examined and criticized in the Kathāvatthu, this text must have been compiled after these schools arose, probably during the last half of the second century B.C.E."

p110: "The present text of the Kathāvatthu must be dated at least one hundred years after Aśoka, perhaps during the last half of the second century B.C.E."

p124: "The decision to put the canon into written form was a major step in arriving at a definite formulation of its contents."

p127: "Even before the contents of the Sūtra-piṭaka had been finalized, the Buddha's disciples were analyzing his teachings with methods similar to those employed later in abhidharma. These early analyses were often incorporated into sūtras. After the Sūtra-piṭaka had been established and its contents determined, abhidharma investigations were considered to be a separate branch of literature. Abhidharma studies were later compiled into a collection called the Abhidharma-piṭaka, which was combined with the Sūtra-piṭaka and Vinaya-piṭaka to make up the "Three Baskets" or Tripiṭaka (P. Tipiṭaka) of the early Buddhist canon. The canon was limited to these three baskets ...

The Sarvāstivādin School argued that the abhidharma was preached by the Buddha. Sarvāstivādins thus believed that the entire Tripiṭaka was, in a broad sense, the Buddha's preaching. ... However, the similarities in the texts of the Sūtra-piṭakas and Vinaya-piṭakas followed by the various schools reveal that the basic contents of these two collections were deter-[p128]mined before the divisions of Nikāya Buddhism had occurred. In contrast, the contentsof abhidharma literature varies with each of the schools, indicating that this class of literature was compiled after the basic divisions of the schools had occurred. The Abhidharma-piṭakas of most of the schools were probably compiled during a perod beginning in 250 B.C.E. (after the first major schism) and ending around the start of the common era.

With the increase in the volume of abhidharma literature, a special division of the canon, an Abhidharma-piṭaka, was established."

Nakamura 1980:

p56: "This was composed much later ..."

p114: "Some Western scholars say that [Netti] was composed around the beginning of the Christian era. ... The Peṭakopadesa ... was composed before the 3rd century A.D."

Norman 1983:

p96: "It is clear that the Abhidhamma is later than the rest of the canon. ... presumably ... it may be deduced that the Abhidhamma did not exist at that time [the 1st schism], or at least was not recognised as canonical. ... It seems likely that by the time of the third council the mātikās were already in existence, with perhaps a certain amount of elaboration ... [p97] ... In the case of the Dhammasangaṇi it can be assumed that the text was already available at greater length ... suggests that the Abhidhamma-piṭaka was in its present form by the time the Buddhavaṃsa was composed."

Warder 1982:

p xxix: "This section ... is highly tentative.

Now whereas poems and anthologies, and probably also sutta collections, grew mainly by accretion, the Abhidhamma, apart from the addition of chapters to the Vibhaṅga or of controversies to the Kathāvatthu, grew more organically. For example extra 'conditions' were added ... and extra triads and dyads ... A text would then be correspondingly elaborated internally by incorporating these new classifications, though [p xxx] maintaining the framework of its original mātikā. ...

It appears that after the First Schism ... the Theravāda School had an Abhidhamma in 4 sections ...

A collation ... indicates that even before the First Schism ... there was a set of twelve dyads and three triads ... At that time, the *Tattvasiddhi seems to confirm ..., there was a With Questions and a Without Questions Abhidhamma, probably concluding with a short section on four 'conditions.' ... But in addition to this ... there very likely were certain other texts ... [p xxxi] ... These would be an elaboration of the Saṃgīti Suttanta ... and an early version of the Peṭakopadesa ... The Paññattivāda ... had a text ... which appears tom correspond to the Peṭakopadesa and thus to confirm the antiquity of such a text ... if there was an elaboration of the Saṃgīti Suttanta ... was there not also an elaboration of ... the Dasuttara Suttanta ...?"

p xxxiii: "That leaves our hypothetical Dasuttarapariyāya ... such a text does exist> It is the first part of the Paṭisambhidāmagga ..."

Warder 1999/2000:

p8: "... the Abhidharma texts were the last to be elaborated in their present form. ... It seems very probable that in the earliest period this third section of the Tripiṭaka [sic] consisted simply of some set of Mātṛkā headings, possibly propounded by the Buddha himself ... this was ...later ... elaborated into Abhidharma ..."

p196: "Whether a Mātṛkā or Abhidharma was actually recited at the First Rehearsal or not ..."

p212: "It is doubtful ... whether any Abhidharma texts such as we find current in the schools were recited at the First Rehearsal. Perhaps nothing more than a Mātṛkā then existed ... within the first two centuries after the parinirvāṇa, and in great part before the First Schism, a substantial development had taken place. ... there are some major agreements [between schools] in the matter of the texts from which we can infer the nature of the earliest Abhidharma tradition."

p216: "... the earliest form of Abhidharma we can reconstruct, and which was probably elaborated during the first two centuries ..., consisted of the following sections: (1)Saṃgītiparyāya; (2) Apraśnaka ...; (3)Sapraśnaka ...; (4) a study of conditions, perhaps called Prasthāna ... The Peṭakopadeśa ... was probably originally part of the Kṣudraka ... [Theravada] replaced the Saṃgītiparyāya by the Dhammasaṃgaṇi ... The Apraśnaka and Sapraśnaka were combined in the Vibhanga ... but the chapter on the 'persons' ... was removed ... and kept as a separate book ..." p289: "The nucleus of ... a set of refutations ... may have originated ...after the First Schism and have had further refutations added to it as more controversies occurred. ... The additions to the Kathāvatthu undoubtedly continued long after [the Sarvastivada schism]"

[edit] Other pitakas ascribed by some sources to some schools

[edit] Mahayana

Hirakawa 1974:

p260: "Three sources appear to have made significant contributions to the rise of Mahāyāna Buddhism. ... The first ... is Nikāya ... Buddhism. ... The second ... is the biographical literature of the Buddha composed by people sometimes said to have belonged to the "vehicle that praised the Buddha" ... this literature may have had its origins in Nikāya Buddhism ... The third ... is stūpa worship.

p270: "... centers independent of monastic control must have existed, where people could practice, develop teachings emphasizing the Buddha, and pass these traditions on to younger generations. Stūpas served as such centers."

Gethin 1998:

p225: "... while earlier scholarship has tended to represent Mahāyāna as a movement inspired by popular lay religiosity and stūpa worship, more recent scholarship has suggested that wec might see the origins of the Mahāyāna in the activity of forest-dwelling ascetic monks ..."

Warder 1999/2000

page 4-5

Some of our sources maintain the authenticity of certain other texts not found in the canons of these schools (the early schools). These texts are those held genuine by the later school, not one of the eighteen, which arrogated to itself the title of Mahayana, 'Great Vehicle '. According to the Mahayana historians these texts were admittedly unknown to the early schools of Buddhists. However, they had all been promulgated by the Buddha. [The Buddha’s] followers on earth, the sravakas ('pupils'), had not been sufficiently advanced to understand them, and hence were not given them to remember, but they were taught to various supernatural beings and then preserved in such places as the Dragon World. … With the best will in the world we cannot accept this or similar accounts as historical facts. – Indian Buddhism, 3rd edition, page 4

And:

1. It is a curious aspersion on the powers of the Buddha that he failed to do what others were able to accomplish 600 years later.
2. Linguistically and stylistically the Mahayana texts belong to a later stratum of Indian literature than the Tripitaka known to the early schools.
3. Everything about early Buddhism, and even the Mahayana itself (with the exception of the Mantrayana), suggests that it was a teaching not meant to be kept secret but intended to be published to all the world, to spread enlightenment.
4. We are on safe ground only with those texts the authenticity of which is admitted by all schools of Buddhism (including the Mahayana, who admit the authenticity of the early canons as well as their own texts), not with texts accepted only by certain schools.
5. Mahayana developed gradually out of one, or a group, of the eighteen early schools, and originally it took its stand not primarily on any new texts but on its own interpretations of the universally recognised Tripitaka

Lindtner 1997:

"Perhaps Mahāyāna here and there preserves old elements more faithfully than the Theravāda and other lineages."

[edit] Commentarial traditions

Norman 1980:

p178 (156 in 1991 reprint): "We may therefore conclude that the commentarial tradition began to [p179] come into existence simultaneously, or almost so, with the original utterance. When the Buddhist sects began to separate they already had a commentarial tradition together with their canonical texts, but in the fluid state of affairs which may be preumed to have obtained prior to the actual codification of the canons of the various sects, what some regarded as canonical others left as commentarial, and vice versa."

Gethin 1992:

p14: "even when we come to the later commentarial and exegetical literature of the different schools, the position is by no means cut and dried. The Pāli tradition, for example, understands its commentaries ... as preserving a traditional exegesis ... that goes back hundreds of years and which ultimately has a north Indian provenance. there are good reasons for thinking that this tradition has some basis in fact. ... Some of the material ... may represent traditions of exegesis that are ... the common heritage of the Buddhist tradition as a whole ..."

[edit] Inscriptions

Schopen argues that these are the main early sources.

[edit] References

• Bronkhorst, Johannes
  • 1998: in Journal of the International Association of Buddhist Studies, vol 21, part 1
• Brough, John
  • 1962: Gandhari Dharmapada, Oxford University Press
• Buswell, Robert M., Jr
  • 2004: ed Macmillan Encyclopedia of Buddhism
• Cousins, L. S.
  • 1982/3: in Buddhist Studies, ed Denwood & Piatigorsky, Curzon, London & Dublin, & Barnes & Noble, Totowa, New Jersey [both dates appear on the imprints page, in different places]
  • 1984a: in Handbook of Living Religions, Penguin, 1984; revised edition 1997, reprinted 1998 as New Penguin Handbook of Living Religions; I'll check these passages there when I can
  • 1984b: in Buddhist Studies in Honour of Hammalawa Saddhatissa ed Dhammapala, Gombrich & Norman, University of Jayawardenepura, Nugegoda, Sri Lanka
• Cutler, Sally Mellick
  • 1994: in Journal of the Pali Text Society, vol XX
• Gethin, Rupert M. L.
  • 1992: Buddhist Path to Awakening, Brill, Leiden
  • 1998: Foundations of Buddhism, Oxford University Press
  • 2005: in Williams, Buddhism, Routledge; reprinted in Journal of the Pali Text Society, volume XXVIII, 2006
• Gombrich, Richard F.
  • 1984: in Bechert & Gombrich, World of Buddhism, Thames & Hudson, London
  • 1988: Theravada Buddhism, Routledge, London
  • 1990: in Skorupski, Buddhist Forum, volume 1, Heritage, Delhi/School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London
  • 2003: interview
  • 2006: 2nd ed of 1988
• Gómez, Luis O.
  • 1976: in Philosophy East and West, volume Twenty-Six
  • 1987: in Encyclopedia of Religion, Macmillan, New York
• Groner, Paul
  • 1990: translator's preface to Hirakawa 1974
• Hartmann, Jens-Uwe
  • 2004: in Buswell 2004
• Harvey, Peter
  • 1990: An Introduction to Buddhism, Cambridge University Press
• Hinüber, Oskar von
  • 1996: handbook of Pali Literature, Walter de Gruyter, Berlin
  • 2000: in Journal of the Pali Text Society, vol XXVI
• Hirakawa Akira
  • A History of Indian Buddhism, vol 1, Shunjusha, Tokyo, 1974, translated and edited by Paul Groner, University of Hawai'i Press, Honolulu, 1990, reprinted Motilal Banarsidass Publishers, Delhi, 1993
• Hüsken, Ute
  • 2000: in Journal of the Pali Text Society, volume XXVI
• De Jong, J.W.
  • 1993: The Beginnings of Buddhism, in The Eastern Buddhist, vol. 26, no. 2, p. 25
• Lang, Karen C.
  • 2007: in Routledge Encyclopedia of Buddhism
• Lindtner, Christian
  • 1997: in Buddhist Studies Review, 14.2
• Lopez, Donald S.
  • Buddhism in Practice, Princeton University Press, 1995
  • Story of Buddhism, Harper, San Francisco, 2001; Buddhism, Penguin, 2001, appears to be the same book, but with different pagination
• Manné, Joy
  • 1995: in Journal of the Pali Text Society, vol XXI
• Mus, Paul
  • 1935: Barabudur (French); English tr Macdonald, Sterling Pub, Delhi, 1998
• Nakamura Hajime
  • Indian Buddhism, Kansai University of Foreign Studies, Hirakata, Japan, 1980, reprinted Motilal Banarsidass, Delhi, 1987, 1989
• Norman, K. R.
  • 1980: in Buddhist Studies in Honour of Walpola Rahula, ed Balasooriya, pub Gordon Fraser, London; reprinted in Collected Papers, volume II, 1991, Pali Text Society
  • 1983: Pali Literature, Otto Harrassowitz, Wiesbaden
• Schmithausen, Lambert
  • 1981: in Studien zum Jainismus und Buddhismus: Gedenkschrift für Ludwig Alsdorf, Franz Steiner Verlag, Wiesbaden [although the publication as a whole is German, this article is in English]
• Schopen, Gregory
  • 1985: in Studien zur Indologie und Iranistik, vol 10, reprinted as chapter II in 1997
  • 1991: in History of Religions, vol 31, reprinted as chapter I in 1997
  • 1992: in Journal of the Pali Text Society, volume XVI; reprinted in 1997 below
  • 1997: Bones, Stones, and Buddhist Monks, University of Hawai'i Press, Honolulu
  • 2004: in Buswell 2004
• Vetter, Tilman
  • 1988: Ideas and Meditataive Practices in Early Buddhism, Brill, Leiden
• Warder, A. K.
  • 1967: Pali Metre, Pali Text Society
  • 1982: Introduction to The Path of Discrimination, Pali Text Society
  • 1999/2000: Indian Buddhism, Motilal Banarsidass,Delhi, 3rd edition [the copy I have access to gives date of publication as 2000, but Sacca says 1999]
• Wynne,Alexander:
  • How old is the Suttapitaka? St John’s College, 2003. [www.ocbs.org/research/Wynne.pdf]

[edit] Sandbox for Pali Canon#Origins

See Talk:Pali Canon#Mr Wales' remarks for rationale. Initial draft will present views of each source successively. Later we can see about integrating them.

According to the Canon itself,^[1] the Sakyan Sage, i.e. the Buddha, taught the three pitakas. Scholars have presented a variety of views. The majority of scholarship in the field of Buddhist studies is Japanese, most of it unknown to western scholars except through two major sources: the late Professor Hirakawa Akira's History of Indian Buddhism (volume 1, 1974; English translation, University of Hawai'i Press, 1990) and the late Professor Nakamura Hajime's Indian Buddhism (Kansai University of Foreign Studies, Hirakata, Japan, 1980); these take much more account of sources in Chinese and Tibetan than most English-language scholarship, which tends to be based mainly on Pali and Sanskrit sources.^[2]

Hirakawa's account of the evolution of the Canon is as follows. At the First Council shortly after the Buddha's death, some short expositions of doctrine and verses were collected together.^[3] Scholars have been unable to distinguish between the Buddha's teachings and those of his immediate disciples.^[4] Progressively over the generations, explanations and stories were added, and material connected into longer discourses.^[5] The development over the next century cannot be described in much detail,^[6] but by a century after the Buddha's death a Vinaya Pitaka and Sutra (Sutta) Pitaka existed.^[7] After this, Buddhism started to split up into schools, and each continued to add material to their versions.^[8] The similarities between the Vinaya and Sutra Pitakas of different schools indicate that their basic contents were determined before these schisms.^[9] The (first) four Agamas (nikayas) contain much more than the historical Buddha's teachings, but much of their content is closely related to those teachings, and any attempt to determine the Buddha's original teachings must be based on them.^[10] The Pratimoksha (Patimokkha) and Skandhaka (Khandhaka) were probably composed a century after the Buddha's death.^[11] The Khuddaka Nikaya represents a transitional phase, though it includes some very old texts such as the Dhammapada, Suttanipata, Theragatha and Therigatha; the Niddesa and Patisambhidamagga date from about 250 BCE.^[12] The Abhidhamma is later than these, though some examples of its methods can be found in sutras and the Niddesa and Patisambhidamagga are forerunners.^[13] The Kathavatthu probably dates from the last half of the second century BCE.^[14]

Nakamura's account is as follows. The Canon must include some sayings or phrases going back to the Buddha, but which ones they are is open to question.^[15] The oldest book of the Canon is the Suttanipata,^[16] whose earliest parts are likely to date back to the Buddha's lifetime.^[17] The Itivuttaka and Udana are early,^[18] at least in part.^[19] The (first) four nikayas are likely to have been compiled simultaneously after the reign of Asoka^[20] (he also mentions a view that the oldest teachings are found in the Digha Nikaya). These represent early Buddhist teachings, but consist of different layers.^[21] The Dhammapada is fairly old.^[22] The Mahaniddesa must not have been composed before the second century CE (though a view is mentioned dating it to about the time of Asoka), so the Pali Canon must have been composed after this.^[23] Some passages from Buddhist Sanskrit literature have been inserted into the Apadana and Netti.^[24] The Abhidhamma Pitaka is much later than the others.^[25]

K. R. Norman (Pali Literature, Otto Harrassowitz, 1983) says that the first four nikayas had begun to develop before the separation of Buddhism into schools.^[26] The Vimanavatthu,^[27] Petavatthu,^[28] Patisambhidamagga,^[29], Apadana, Buddhavamsa, Cariyapitaka, Khuddakapatha^[30] and Abhidhamma Pitaka^[31] are late.

According to Dr Peter Harvey of Sunderland University (Introduction to Buddhism, Cambridge University Press, 1990), although parts of the Canon are later than the Buddha, much must derive from his teachings.^[32] He also says the Abhidhamma was added to the Canon in the third century BCE, developed from matikas that may go back to the Buddha,^[33] and that probably little if anything was added to the Canon after it was written down.^[34]

Professor Oskar von Hinüber of the Albert Ludwigs University of Freiburg (Handbook of Pali Literature, Walter de Gruyter, 1996) says that the texts of the Canon, though the earliest Buddhist texts surviving, are much later than the Buddha, the result of a long and complicated development,^[35] which needs much more research.^[36] The Canon is anonymous literature.^[37] The Parivara is most probably 1st century CE or later.^[38] The Patisambhidamagga perhaps dates from around 200 CE.^[39] The Apadana is one of the last books to be added to the Canon.^[40]

Dr Rupert Gethin (Foundations of Buddhism, Oxford University Press, 1998) says that significant portions of the Canon must go back to the third century BCE; specifically, the Vinaya and (first) four nikayas are relatively early, being shared by different schools. He also says something of the Abhidhamma method must go back to the Buddha's lifetime,^[41] and that there was a tacit understanding from very early times that calling something the word of the Buddha was not exactly the same as saying that he actually said it; rather, what counted was whether it conformed to the structure and pattern of the teaching.^[42]

A. K. Warder (Indian Buddhism, 3rd edn, Motilal Banarsidass, 2000) says there is a central body of sutras (suttas) so similar in all known versions that they must be different recensions of the same original texts.^[43] The order of the five nikayas is their order of authenticity.^[44] The average date of the Jataka is 4th century BCE.^[45] The Vimanavatthu, Petavatthu and Apadana are later than 200 BCE, perhaps a century later, the Cariyapitaka later still, the Buddhavamsa 2nd century BCE.^[46] The Patisambhidamagga can be dated between 237 and c. 100 BCE.^[47] An Abhidhamma Pitaka probably existed within two centuries of the Buddha's death, but not consisting of the seven books we have now.^[48]

In the Macmillan Encyclopedia of Buddhism (2004), the article on Vinaya, by Dr Gregory Schopen of the University of California, Los Angeles, says the contents cannot be established before the commentary in the fifth century, and even then we have only eighteenth and nineteenth century manuscripts to go on.^[49] It also mentions two alternative theories to explain common material in different schools' versions of the Vinaya: that the common material is inherited from the period before the separation of the schools; and that it was borrowed between schools at later periods.^[50] The article on Agamas/Nikayas, by Jens-Uwe Hartmann of the University of Munich, says that, while tradition says the teachings were collected at the First Council shortly after the Buddha's death, scholars see it as expanding and changing from an unknown nucleus.^[51] The article on Abhidharma (Abhidhamma), by Collett Cox of the University of Washington, says it developed in the centuries after the Buddha's death.^[52]

Dr Richard Gombrich (Theravada Buddhism, 2nd edn, Routledge, 2006) says that the content, as opposed to the precise form, of the main body of discourses in the first four nikayas, and of the main body of monastic rules in the Vinaya, must be the work of a single genius, i.e. the Buddha himself.^[53] He also says the Canon was written down in the last century BCE, and its language slightly changed after that.

According to the article on the Pali Canon, by Karen C. Lang of the University of Virginia, in the Routledge Encyclopedia of Buddhism (2007), there is no way of knowing how closely the Canon written down in the last century BCE resmbles that of the present day.^[54]

TBC