Buddhist texts

• 1. Introduction

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  Buddhist texts do not live inside a single book. There is no single collection: Buddhists keep three separate canons. The Pali Canon serves the Theravada tradition. The Chinese Buddhist Canon serves East Asian Buddhism. The Tibetan Buddhist Canon serves Indo-Tibetan Buddhism. In the year 868, a single scroll rolled off a wood block press. It became the Diamond Sutra, now recognized as the oldest surviving complete printed book. A printed Buddhist charm had already appeared before it. By 947, an illustration of the bodhisattva Guanyin became the first known print colored by hand. Printing never fully replaced older habits. Long after presses existed, monks kept copying sutras out by hand, a devotional practice known as sutra copying. None of this explains why one religion split its sacred writing into three separate libraries. Nor does it explain how anyone decided which of many competing texts truly counted as the Buddha's own words.

• 2. Certifying The Buddha's Words

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  Donald Lopez has written that the criteria for buddhavacana, word of the Buddha, were fixed at an early stage of the tradition. Even in these early formulations, the Dharma was never limited to statements the historical Buddha spoke himself. Another term for this idea is the dispensation of the Buddha, or buddhanusasanam. The Mahasamghika and the Mulasarvastivada schools counted both the Buddha's own discourses and those of his disciples as buddhavacana. They held that several kinds of beings could transmit it: Buddhas, disciples of the Buddha, rsis, and devas. According to the early Mahapadesasutta, a discourse spoken by someone other than the Buddha could still be certified as true buddhavacana. Certification required one of four great references to authority. The first was the buddha himself, who often confirmed a disciple's words within the sutras. The second was a sangha of wise elders. The third was a small group of specialist monks, the dharmadharas or vinayadharas. The fourth was a single elder well versed in the Dharma. Once certified, the content was checked against the sutras, compared with the Vinaya, and weighed against the nature of the Dharma itself. This process gave Buddhist canons a certain flexibility; they were not necessarily closed after the Buddha's death.

  Traditions disagreed sharply once they had to name their standard collection. Theravada Buddhism settled on the Pali Canon, also called the Tripitaka, or three baskets, and it rejects the Mahayana sutras as buddhavacana outright. East Asian Buddhism instead collects its buddhavacana in the Chinese Buddhist Canon. Its most common edition, the Taisho Tripitaka, was itself based on the Tripitaka Koreana. Unlike the Pali Tripitaka, it includes Mahayana sutras, scholastic sastras, and Esoteric Buddhist literature. Mahayana sources took a more liberal view still. The Adhyasayasancodanasutra puts it directly: 'All which is well-spoken, Maitreya, is spoken by the Buddha.' By this standard, inspired speech counts as buddhavacana only if it meets four principles. It must be meaningful rather than meaningless. It must be principled rather than unprincipled. It must aim at extinguishing the defilements rather than increasing them. And it must focus on the qualities of nirvana rather than those of samsara. Hsuan Hua, writing from the Chinese Buddhist tradition, named five kinds of beings who may speak a sutra. They are a Buddha, a disciple of a Buddha, a deva, a rsi, or an emanation of one of these. Whatever they say still needs certification from a buddha before it counts as true Dharma. In Indo-Tibetan Buddhism, buddhavacana is gathered into the Kangyur, whose name literally means the Translation of the Word. Alongside sutras and Vinaya, that collection also holds Buddhist tantras, unlike the Chinese or Pali collections. Even with all these rules in place, some texts that one Buddhist community calls commentary, another still classifies as buddhavacana itself.

• 3. The First Written Words

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  Gandhari, Pali, and the early Magadhan language carried the earliest Buddhist teachings before anyone wrote them down. Monks preserved these Prakrit-language teachings through repetition, communal recitation, and mnemonic devices. The texts were only later compiled into canons and set down in manuscripts. The Pali Canon itself was first written down in Sri Lanka, in the first century BCE. Early Buddhist writings survive from several schools. The largest collections belong to the Theravada and the Sarvastivada. Full texts and fragments also survive from the Dharmaguptaka, the Mahasamghika, the Mahisasaka, and the Mulasarvastivada. Modern scholarship studies the first four Pali Nikayas most closely, alongside their corresponding Chinese Agamas. Scholars such as Richard Gombrich, Akira Hirakawa, Alexander Wynne, and A. K. Warder have studied this material closely. They argue some of it may trace back to the historical Buddha, or at least to the earliest years of pre-sectarian Buddhism. Mahayana Buddhism sometimes labels these older texts Hinayana or Sravakayana. Only one complete collection of an early school survives in a Middle Indo-Aryan language: the Tipitaka of the Theravada. The Chinese Agamas preserve collections from the Sarvastivada and the Dharmaguptaka instead. Their content closely matches the Pali material, differing only in detail rather than core doctrine. The Tibetan canon holds some of these early texts too, though never as complete collections.

  The oldest known Buddhist manuscripts were found in Pakistan and written in Gandhari: the Gandharan Buddhist Texts, dated from the first century BCE. They formed an important link between Indian Buddhism and the Buddhism that later took root in East Asia. Parts of what is likely the Dharmaguptaka canon turn up among these same Gandharan fragments.

  Prose suttas, disciplinary Vinaya texts, and verse forms such as gatha and udana all counted among the genres of early Buddhist literature, alongside mixed prose and verse called geya and lists, or matika, of monastic rules and doctrinal topics. The Buddha's discourses seem to have first been organized by the style in which they were delivered. Later they were gathered into collections called Nikayas, or volumes, and Agamas, or scriptures, which were folded into the Sutra Pitaka, the Basket of Discourses.

  Most surviving early sutras come from the Sthavira nikaya schools. No complete Mahasamghika collection survived, though individual texts did, such as the Salistamba Sutra, the rice stalk sutra. Scholar N. Ross Reat notes that this text agrees with the basic doctrines found across the early Sthavira sutras: dependent origination, the middle way between eternalism and annihilationism, the five aggregates, the three unwholesome roots, the Four Noble Truths, and the Noble Eightfold Path. Another Mahasamghika source is the Mahavastu, or Great Event, a collection woven into a biography of the Buddha. It preserves quotations and whole sutras, including a Mahasamghika version of the Dharmacakrapravartana.

  Monastic rules and procedures for the sangha define the Vinaya, the other major body of early Buddhist text. The pairing Dhamma-Vinaya, doctrine and discipline, reflects how central this literature was. Beyond monastic rules, Vinaya collections also hold doctrinal expositions, ritual and liturgical texts, biographical stories, and elements of the Jataka birth stories. Full Vinaya collections survive from the Theravada in Pali, the Mula-Sarvastivada in Tibetan translation, and the Mahasanghika, Sarvastivada, Mahishasika, and Dharmaguptaka in Chinese translation.

  The Theravada calls its miscellaneous collection the Khuddaka Nikaya, the Minor Collection, while the Dharmaguptaka kept a parallel called the Ksudraka Agama, fragments of which turn up in Gandhari. The Sarvastivada also kept a Ksudraka collection, though it did not call this an Agama. Named texts from these minor collections include the Dharmapadas, sayings and aphorisms best known through the Pali Dhammapada. Other versions include the Patna Dharmapada and the Gandhari Dharmapada. The Pali Udana and the Sarvastivada Udanavarga gather other inspired sayings. The Pali Itivuttaka, meaning as it was said, has a Chinese counterpart, the Itivrttaka, translated by Xuanzang. The Pali Sutta Nipata, including the Atthakavagga and the Parayanavagga, has a parallel in the Chinese Arthavargiya. The Theragatha and Therigatha collect verses tied to the Buddha's elder disciples, and a Sanskrit Sthaviragatha is known to have existed as well.

  None of these minor collections count as Abhidharma, the highly technical literature that grew up alongside them.

• 4. Systematizing The Teaching

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  Erich Frauwallner called these systems 'among the major achievements of the classical period of Indian philosophy.' Abhidharma, called Abhidhamma in Pali, offers 'an abstract and highly technical systematization' of the doctrinal material found in the sutras. It tries to describe 'ultimate reality,' or paramartha-satya, without relying on the ordinary language and stories the sutras use. Most modern scholars date the emergence of canonical Abhidharma to around the third century BCE, well after the Buddha's own lifetime. That dating is why scholars generally treat the canonical Abhidharma works as the words of later Buddhists rather than the Buddha himself.

  The Abhidhamma Pitaka and other early canonical Abhidharma works are not philosophical treatises at all. They mainly summarize and expound early doctrinal lists, called matrikas, such as the 37 factors leading to Awakening. Frauwallner argued that an 'ancient core' of pre-sectarian material survives inside the earliest Abhidharma works. He pointed to the Theravada's Vibhanga, the Sarvastivada's Dharmaskandha, and the Dharmaguptaka's Sariputrabhidharma as examples.

  Only two full canonical Abhidharma collections have survived, and each contains exactly seven texts. These are the Theravada Abhidhamma and the Sarvastivada Abhidharma, the latter preserved only in Chinese translation. Other individual works also remain, including the Dharmaguptaka's Sariputrabhidharma, the Tattvasiddhi Sastra, also called the Chengshilun, and various Abhidharma-style texts from the Pudgalavada school.

  Later post-canonical Abhidharma authors wrote in three main forms: large treatises called sastra, commentaries called atthakatha, and smaller introductory manuals. These later works are far more developed philosophically, adding innovations and doctrines absent from the canonical Abhidharma.

  None of this systematic analysis says anything about how the Buddha's own life came to be told and retold as story.

• 5. Tales And Sacred Biographies

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  The Jataka tales and the Avadanas, called Apadana in Pali, recount the previous births of Gautama Buddha in both human and animal form. These moral fables and legends differ from school to school. Each Buddhist tradition kept its own collection and often disagreed about which stories counted as canonical.

  The Lalitavistara Sutra, from the northern tradition, stands among the genre of Buddha biographies that developed within the early schools. The Theravada school preserved its own version, the Nidanakatha, while the Dharmaguptaka told the story in the Abhiniskramana Sutra.

  Asvaghosa wrote the Buddhacarita, an epic poem in Classical Sanskrit and one of the most famous Buddha biographies. He also composed other poems and Sanskrit dramas. Another Sanskrit Buddhist poet, Matrceta, wrote pious hymns in slokas and is remembered for his One Hundred and Fifty Verses. Buddhist poetry spread across Sanskrit, Tibetan, Chinese, and Japanese, and reached popular Indian languages too, including Tamil and Apabhramsa. One well known example is the Tamil epic Manimekalai, counted among the Five Great Epics of Tamil literature.

  The Buddhavamsa, the Cariyapitaka, and the Vimanavatthu, which has a Chinese parallel called the Vimanavadana, all belong to this later hagiographical genre.

  The Milinda Panha, or the Questions of Milinda, stages a dialogue between the monk Nagasena and the Indo-Greek king Menander, called Milinda in Pali. Its Chinese parallel is the Nagasena Bhiksu Sutra. Together the two texts form a compendium of doctrine that covers a wide range of subjects.

  Centuries later, a Sri Lankan monk named Buddhaghosa would build a vast commentarial tradition on top of material like this.

• 6. Theravada's Living Tradition

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  Buddhaghosa worked in Sri Lanka during the fifth century CE, alongside a scholar named Dhammapala, producing most of Theravada's vast commentarial literature. Much of this commentary remains untranslated. Sub-commentaries, called tika, comment on the commentaries themselves.

  Buddhaghosa's own Visuddhimagga, the Path of Purification, sets out doctrine and practice according to Sri Lanka's Mahavihara tradition. According to Nanamoli Bhikkhu, it stands as 'the principal non-canonical authority of the Theravada.' A shorter, similar work, the Vimuttimagga, covers similar ground. Another influential Pali text, the Abhidhammattha-sangaha, dates from the eleventh or twelfth century and offers a fifty page introductory summary still used to teach Abhidhamma.

  Buddhaghosa drew on older commentaries written in the Sinhala language of Sri Lanka, sources that no longer survive. Sri Lankan vernacular literature holds its own classical Sinhala poems, including the Muvadevavata, the story of the Bodhisattva's birth as King Mukhadeva, and the Sasadavata, his birth as a hare, both from the twelfth century. Prose works survive too, such as the Dhampiyatuva gatapadaya, a commentary on words and phrases in the Pali Dhammapada.

  Pali scholarship flourished in Burma and Thailand once the Theravada textual tradition spread there, producing works like the Saddaniti of Aggavamsa and the Jinakalamali of Ratanapañña. Composition never really stopped. In the modern era, writers such as Mahasi Sayadaw kept translating texts into Pali, especially in Burma.

  Esoteric Theravada texts, mostly from Southeast Asia, flourished in Cambodia and Thailand before the nineteenth century reformist movement of Rama IV. One of them was published in English by the Pali Text Society under the title 'Manual of a Mystic.'

  Burmese Buddhist literature developed its own poetic form, the pyui', from the 1450s onward, mostly long embellished translations of Pali jatakas. A famous example is the Kui khan pyui', the pyui' in nine sections, from 1523. A related genre, the nissaya, was a commentary used to teach Pali. The nineteenth century brought a wider flowering of Burmese Buddhist writing, spanning religious biography, Abhidharma, legal literature, and meditation literature.

  Phya Lithai wrote the 'Three Worlds According to King Ruang' in 1345, an extensive cosmological and visionary survey of the Thai Buddhist universe.

  None of these Southeast Asian traditions ever accepted the swelling body of Mahayana sutras that had already begun circulating in India by the start of the common era.

• 7. The Mahayana Turn

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  David Drewes describes the rise of Mahayana as 'primarily a textual movement, focused on the revelation, preaching, and dissemination of Mahayana sutras.' He argues it developed within traditional Buddhist social and institutional structures and never really left them. Early dharmabhanakas, the preachers and reciters of these new sutras, proved influential in spreading them through Buddhist communities. The earliest of these texts did not call themselves Mahayana at all. They used the terms Vaipulya, meaning extensive, or Gambhira, meaning profound.

  Sanskrit, in both hybrid and classical forms, carried most Mahayana sutras before they were translated into the Tibetan Kangyur and the Chinese Taisho Tripitaka. Buddhists in north India had adopted Sanskrit during the Kushan era, and it became the dominant language of Buddhist literature in India until Buddhism declined there.

  Mahayana Buddhists traditionally regard their sutras as the Buddha's own word, generating more spiritual merit than the sravaka texts. They explained the sutras' late appearance in one of two ways. Either the texts had been transmitted in secret, through lineages of beings such as the nagas, until listeners were ready, or they had been revealed directly through visions and meditative experience.

  David McMahan has argued that the literary style of the Mahayana sutras shows they were composed mainly as written works, ones that needed to justify themselves to other Buddhists. The Gandavyuha, for instance, criticizes early figures such as Sariputra for lacking knowledge and goodness. It casts these elders as unfit to receive the higher teaching reserved for bodhisattvas.

  Debate over the Mahayana sutras' authenticity ran through the whole Buddhist world, splitting the Mahasamghika school into sub-schools that accepted or rejected them. Sri Lanka's Theravada school split the same way during the medieval period. The Mahavihara sect rejected the texts, while the now extinct Abhayagiri sect accepted them. Theravada commentaries call these texts Vedalla or Vetulla, and dismiss them as counterfeit scriptures.

  The Mahayana movement stayed small until the fifth century, with very few manuscripts surviving from before then outside Bamiyan. According to Walser, production increased sharply across the fifth and sixth centuries. Chinese pilgrims such as Faxian, Yijing, and Xuanzang were traveling to India by then, and their writings describe monasteries they labeled Mahayana, some housing Mahayana and non-Mahayana monks side by side.

  New Mahayana sutras promised an easier path to Buddhahood. One sutra put it as 'hearing the names of certain Buddhas or bodhisattvas, maintaining Buddhist precepts, and listening to, memorizing, and copying sutras.' Some sutras claim these practices lead to rebirth in Pure Lands such as Abhirati and Sukhavati, where becoming a Buddha comes far more easily. The sutras also introduced Buddhas and bodhisattvas absent from earlier texts, among them the Buddhas Amitabha, Akshobhya, and Vairocana, and the bodhisattvas Maitreya, Manjusri, Ksitigarbha, and Avalokiteshvara.

  Paul Williams describes the Mahayana view of a Buddha as 'a spiritual king, relating to and caring for the world,' rather than a teacher who has simply 'gone beyond' it. The Lotus Sutra has the Buddha call himself 'the father of the world' and 'the self existent...protector of all creatures,' saying he has 'never ceased to exist' and merely 'pretends to have passed away.'

  Hundreds of Mahayana sutras survive today in Sanskrit, Chinese, and Tibetan translation, spanning genres such as the Prajnaparamita, Tathagatagarbha, and Pure Land sutras. Among the best known are the Diamond Sutra and the Heart Sutra from the Prajnaparamita group, the Lotus Sutra, called one of the most influential texts in East Asian Buddhism, the Vimalakirti Sutra, which stages a layman's teaching on non-dualism, and the Karandavyuhasutra, which introduces the Om Mani Padme Hum mantra. Some sutras carry a distinctly tantric character too, among them the shorter Perfection of Wisdom texts and the Mahavairocana Sutra. Certain editions of the Kangyur even place the Heart Sutra within the tantra division alongside nine Sravakayana texts, including the Atanatiya Sutra, which also appears in the Mikkyo division of the standard Sino-Japanese Buddhist collection.

  Nagarjuna's Mulamadhyamika-karika, the Root Verses on the Middle Way, became the seminal text of Madhyamaka philosophy and drew commentaries from generations of later authors. East Asian tradition also credits Nagarjuna with the Da zhidu lun, a massive treatise on the Prajnaparamita sutra in Twenty-five Thousand Lines that shaped major Chinese Buddhist schools. Modern scholars question whether he actually wrote it. It survives only in the Chinese translation by Kumarajiva (344-413 CE).

  The Yogacarabhumi-Sastra, a fourth century CE treatise on yogic practice and Yogacara doctrine, was studied in both the East Asian and the Tibetan traditions. Asanga wrote the Mahayana-samgraha and the Abhidharma-samuccaya, the standard Abhidharma compendium for many Mahayana schools, especially in Tibet. He is said to have received further texts from the Bodhisattva Maitreya in the Tushita realm. These included the Madhyantavibhaga, the Mahayana-sutralamkara, and the Abhisamayalamkara, though modern scholars dispute this authorship. Asanga's brother Vasubandhu wrote the Trisvabhava-nirdesa, the Vimsatika, the Trimsika, and the Abhidharmakosa-bhasya.

  Shantideva, a ninth century Indian Buddhist, wrote the Bodhicaryavatara, which became a strong influence across many Mahayana schools and a favorite text of the 14th Dalai Lama. Dignaga founded a school of Buddhist logic and produced the Pramana-samuccaya. Dharmakirti later wrote the Pramana-varttika as a commentary reworking Dignaga's text.

  The Awakening of Faith in the Mahayana, or Dasheng Qixin Lun, is traditionally attributed to Ashvaghosha, though most scholars now consider it a Chinese composition. It became especially influential in China's Hua-yen school and its Japanese equivalent, Kegon.

  The Dhyana sutras, or Chan-jing, blend meditation teachings from the Sarvastivada school with early proto-Mahayana practice, mostly the work of Yoga teachers from Kashmir. They were translated into Chinese early on. The monk Xuanzang (c. 602-664) traveled overland to India and recorded the journey in the Great Tang Records on the Western Regions. He also wrote an influential commentary on Yogacara, the Discourse on the Perfection of Consciousness-only.

  Zhiyi (538-597 CE) led the rise of the Tiantai school. He wrote commentaries on the Lotus Sutra and composed the Mohe Zhiguan, the first major comprehensive Chinese work on meditation. The Huayan school built its philosophy from the Avatamsaka, shaped in large part by the patriarch Fazang's commentaries and treatises.

  Fire destroyed an earlier version of the Tripitaka Koreana during the Mongol invasions of Korea. Its replacement was then carved onto 81,258 wooden printing blocks during the thirteenth century. It has stayed intact for roughly 750 years, and UNESCO has called it 'one of the most important and most complete corpus of Buddhist doctrinal texts in the world.'

  The Platform Sutra, attributed to the Zen patriarch Huineng, gives an autobiographical account of his succession as Ch'an Patriarch alongside teachings on Ch'an theory and practice. Koan collections such as the Blue Cliff Record and The Gateless Gate, and biographical compilations such as the Transmission of the Lamp, filled out the wider genre of Zen literature.

  None of these East Asian schools produced the tantric manuals that would soon anchor Buddhism's rise across Tibet, Bhutan, and Mongolia.

• 8. Tantra And Hidden Treasures

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  Mantras, dharanis, mandalas, mudras, and fire offerings anchor the ritual core of the Tantras, a class of Buddhist text that rose in the late seventh century. Early Tantric texts, later termed action tantras or kriya tantra, mostly gathered magical mantras and phrases for worldly aims, called mantrakalpas, and did not call themselves Tantras at all.

  From the eighth century onward, later Tantric texts, grouped as Yogatantra, Mahayoga, and Yogini Tantras, advocated union with a deity, called deity yoga, alongside sacred mantras and techniques for working the subtle body. Some of these texts include antinomian and transgressive practices, such as ingesting alcohol and other forbidden substances, along with sexual rituals. Scholar Alexis Sanderson has argued that the later Yogini tantras especially were shaped by non-Buddhist Tantric Saivism and the Saiva tantras.

  The Mahavairocana Tantra and the Vajrasekhara Sutra, both centered on Vairocana Buddha, remain the most influential tantras within East Asian Esoteric Buddhism and its Japanese offshoot, Shingon.

  The Tibetan Kangyur alone holds translations of almost 500 tantras, texts central to Vajrayana Buddhism, the dominant form of Buddhism across Tibet, Bhutan, and Mongolia. Tibet's Sarma, or New Translation, schools sort these tantras into four categories: Kriyayogatantra, Charyayogatantra, Yogatantra, and Anuttarayogatantra. The Nyingma school calls this last category Mahayoga. Among Indo-Tibetan Buddhism's most influential Higher Tantras are the Guhyasamaja Tantra, the Hevajra Tantra, the Cakrasamvara Tantra, and the Kalacakra Tantra. The Nyingma school also holds its own Dzogchen tantras, texts absent from the other Tibetan schools.

  Tertons, specialists in revealing hidden scripture, retrieve Tibet's terma texts, works either composed or hidden by earlier tantric masters. Some terma turn up in caves. A few, called mind termas, are said to be discovered inside a terton's own mind rather than any physical place. The Nyingma school and the Bon tradition hold a large terma literature, much of it credited to the master Padmasambhava. Its best known example is the Tibetan Book of the Dead, known as the Bardo Thodol.

  A sadhana is a tantric practice text used to work with a mandala or a yidam, a meditation deity, and the Sadhanamala gathers many such texts together.

  Mahasiddhas, Vajrayana's adept practitioners, often set their teachings as songs of realization, collected in works such as the Caryagiti and the Charyapada. The Dohakosha gathers doha songs by the ninth century yogi Saraha. The Hundred Thousand Songs of Milarepa, composed by the Tibetan yogi Milarepa, remains especially popular among the Kagyu school.

  Gölo Zhönnupel (1392-1481) completed the Blue Annals in 1476, a historical survey of Tibetan Buddhism written with a notably ecumenical view of its many sectarian lineages. Namtar, or spiritual biographies, trace a practitioner's teaching and spiritual path through the story of their life.

  Kukai's own treatises on Vajrayana Buddhism, written more than a thousand years ago, still guide how Japan's Shingon school teaches its tantras today.