The Pali Canon

Background: How the Teachings were Delivered

Let’s begin by looking back to the Buddha’s lifetime, and considering how he taught, to whom he taught, and how the sangha spread this teachings through his own culture, during his own lifetime. We’ll jump into the story in the middle of the Buddha’s teaching career, when the sangha of bhikkhus and bhikkhunis had grown to a substantial size. There’s no way, of course, to accurately determine just how large the sangha was, but from various evidential bits teased from the texts, I come to a total of between 2500 and 10,000 bhikkhus throughout Northern India, and perhaps one-third that many bhikkhunis.

For most of the year, most of those bhikkhus and bhikkhunis travelled, alone and on foot, from village to village, living on alms and eating one meal a day; sitting in solitary meditation through the middle part of each day, and perhaps through the evening as well; and giving dharma talks wherever the opportunity presented itself, speaking to village leaders, merchants, schoolteachers, children and parents. Sometimes, it is assumed, those wandering bhikkhus and bhikkhunis engaged in public debate with members of the dominant priestly class, the Brahmins, or with wanderers and ascetics of other sects, followers of teachers whose names we know and whose doctrines we know know slightly, as those were summarized by biased sources, i.e. the Buddha’s own followers.

During the rainy season, from July through October, the sangha came together, usually in park-like retreat centers donated to the Buddha and his sangha by wealthy followers; most of those were are the edges of fairly large towns where the bhikkhus and bhikkhunis went each morning on their alms rounds, which was typically followed by each member of the sangha finding his or her own isolated location for a period of solid meditation. When the sangha gathered in the afternoons and early evenings, the time was, for the most part, occupied by dharma discussions, or by dharma talks given by the senior members of the sangha to visitors from the town or to their fellow ascetics. I would imagine that many of those consisted, wholly or in large part, of recitations of talks that the bhikkhu had heard from the Buddha himself, and had memorized, as the Buddha encouraged his followers to do.

There were a number of retreat centers scattered around Northern India, and they must have been busy, bustling places during the rains retreats. No doubt the busiest and most bustling was the center at which the Buddha himself had chosen to spend the retreat. During the first part of his teaching career, he spent the rains retreats at a number of different centers. During the last 25 years of his life, he spent each retreat at Savatthi, the capital city of the kingdom of Kosala, home of King Pasenadi. Let’s assume that the typical population of the retreat at Anattapindika’s park in Savatthi during the 3-month rainy season was upwards of 500 bhikkhus and bhikkhunis, and that the discourses delivered by the Buddha were typically attended by a large number of lay followers from the city itself. That’s a large audience to address in the open air, without amplification, and a good part of the audience would not have been able to hear the Buddha’s words clearly if at all.

The discourses were typically short, especially those addressed to lay audiences. And the Buddha usually retired to his dwelling immediately after delivering the discourse. I would imagine, and here this gets extremely speculative, that the senior monks who were at the Buddha’s side during the discourse would repeat what he had said to that part of the audience who had not had the chance to hear him clearly, or who wanted to hear it again. And the fact that there were several of them, all repeating what they had just heard, made it possible for them to correct one another and to get their story straight. The monks trained deliberately to be expert at this kind of memorization (and this part is not speculative; we have it in various ways from a number of the suttas), and, by the end of a rains retreat, the number of monks who were prepared to carry the latest discourses of the Buddha, pretty much verbatim, in their wanderings over the next 9 months, would have been fairly large.

Shortly before the Buddha died, at age 80, Ananda asked him tearfully what the sangha was to do without him. His answer was that they had the Dharma, and anyone who knew the Dharma knew the Buddha; he refused to appoint a successor to lead the sangha, telling Ananda that each member of the sangha must be an island unto himself.

The Buddha did not die suddenly. He got sicker and sicker over a three-month period, possibly from intestinal cancer. As news of his condition spread, monks began travelling to where he was staying, in a sparsely inhabited jungle region west of the city Rajagaha, where King Ajatthasattu had his capital and where there was a major retreat center. By the time the Buddha died, there were probably hundreds of sangha members in the vicinity, and they continued to stream in through the weeks following his death.

The Buddhist Councils

About three months after the Buddha’s parinibbana, the elder monk Mahakassapa convened an assembly of 500 monks, all of whom had achieved enlightenment under the Buddha. The avowed purpose of the council, which was held in Rajagaha, under the sponsorship of King Ajatthasattu, was to preserve the Dharma. To that end, the monks spent a number of weeks listening to all of the dicourses that the Buddha had delivered during his lifetime. Tradition tells us that the recitation was in two parts. The discourses dealing with the history and governance of the Sangha were delivered by the bhikkhu Upadi, while Ananda himself, who was renowned throughout the sangha for his prodigious memory, delivered the suttas, the discourses that the Buddha had delivered to the sangha or to lay followers regarding the Dharma and the proper way to live in accord with the Dharma. Together, the topics of the two recitations comprise the Dhamma-Vinaya, “the doctrine and the discipline”, a term the Buddha frequently used to refer to his teachings.

The bhikkhus in attendance at that First Council were divided into groups, and each group was given a particular collection of teachings to remember; they agreed to meet regularly, and, at each meeting, to repeat to one another the teachings for which they’d taken responsibility, making certain that those were remembered completely and accurately.

We have no record of how frequently those smaller groups met, but we do know that there were two more general Buddhist conferences over the next couple of centuries, at each of which the entire body of teachings was repeated to the assembled bhikkhus.

During those same two centuries, Buddhism spread well beyond the parts of Northern India where the Buddha taught. Much of the credit for the expansion of Buddhism goes to the Emperor Ashoka, the first person to unify all of the Indian sub-continent under a single rule; Ashoka himself was a convert to Buddhism, and the sponsor of the Third Buddhist Council in about 250BCE. Most importantly, however, Ashoka, at the urging of the bhikkhu Mogaliputta Tissa, organized missions to many of the major countries outside of India to carry the Dhamma-Vinaya to those countries. Although the missions to the West (traditionally including one to Greece) did not have a lasting effect, Buddhism did take root in Nepal and Tibet to the north, in Thailand and Burma to the southeast, and in the island kingdom of Sri Lanka in the south; Ashoka’s son Mahinda was the leader of that last mission.

The Composition of the Canon

Sri Lanka adopted the Buddha’s Dharma eagerly, and it was in that island kingdom, under the sponsorship of King Vattagamani, that the Fourth Buddhist Council was held, in about 200BCE, with the express purpose of committing the teachings to writing. Once again, the council heard the recitation of the entire body of teachings; by this time, with various accretions, the whole thing took over six months to recite, and it had become virtually impossible for a single bhikkhu to memorize in its entirety. So, in order that the teachings would not be lost, the bhikkhus of the Fourth Council undertook to write the whole thing down.

The composition was in a language called Pali, which is closely related to Sanskrit, the “official” language of the Brahmin caste in India and the language in which all of the great classics of Hindu literature have been composed. And the texts were written on palm leaves, which were sewn together in volumes and kept in baskets. There are three basic parts of the Pali Canon, which are known as pitakas—pitaka is the Pali word meaning “basket”.

• The Abhidhamma Pitaka contains some difficult and (from my very limited examination) exceedingly abstruse commentary on details of Buddhist philosophy and psychology – detailed enumeration of the 50 or so dhammas, elaborate dissection of the precise mechanism of conditional causality, etc. All scholars agree that the Abhidhamma Pitaka is the latest section of the Canon, and was probably not composed until several hundred years after the Buddha’s death.
• The Vinaya Pitaka concerns the origins of the Buddhist sangha and its development through the Buddha’s lifetime; it presents historical contexts for the very complex body of rules that direct the governance of the sangha and the training and practices of its members.
• The Sutta Pitaka contains a record of the Buddha’s teachings (and the teachings of some senior bhikkhus and bhikkunis ). The term sutta comes from a Sanskrit word meaning “thread”; each of the texts in the Sutta Pitaka is known as a sutta, and most of them record a teaching delivered by the Buddha or one of the senior bhikkhus or bhikkhunis. In very many cases, we are told where the teaching was delivered, the audience to which it was delivered, and something of the circumstances that surrounded the occasion.

Many, if not most, Buddhist traditions accept the Vinaya Pitaka and the Sutta Pitaka as a record of the Buddha’s own words or the words of one of his followers. Modern scholars, as we would expect, are a bit more skeptical. There are basically three positions: one is that the entire Pali Canon was composed over a long period following the Buddha’s death, and that nothing in it preserves an accurate record of his teaching; at the opposite extreme, there are scholars (including many of the first rank, such as Richard Gombrich and Rupert Gethin) who feel that very much of the Canon, including most of the Vinaya Pitaka and much of the Sutta Pitaka, is, in fact, an accurate record of the teachings delivered during the Buddha’s lifetime; finally, there are many who take the position that the Canon as we have it, while much of it was composed after the Buddha’s death, does, in fact, present an accurate summary of his teaching and an accurate record of the formula phrases that the Buddha and his followers relied upon to preserve the consistency of the teaching.

The Pali Canon is not the only canon of the Buddha’s teachings. The Tibetan Kangyur Canon and the Chinese Mahayana Canon contain much of the same material that is in the Vinaya Pitaka and the first four Collections of Suttas in the Sutta Pitaka, although each contains much additional material that is not in the Pali Canon. The material in the Tibetan and Chinese canons is not exactly the same as the material in the Pali Canon, and it’s clear that the Northern canons are not translations from the Pali, but they almost certainly derive from the same oral tradition, and their closeness to the texts of the Pali Canon is one reason to believe that that Canon does, in fact, provide an accurate record of an oral tradition that pre-dates the written versions by several centuries.

The climate of Sri Lanka is not conducive to the preservation of palm leaf manuscripts, and we do not have any remnant of the original version of the Pali Canon. But the texts were copied and recopied faithfully over the years and centuries following their composition, and copies were taken to all parts of the Buddhist world and recopied there. The earliest physical remnants that we have date from the 8th or 9th century; the earliest complete manuscripts are from the 15th century, and we don’t have any copy of the complete canon dating from before the 18th century. But the copies that we do have, although coming from different parts of the world, are strikingly similar to one another, and most scholars are convinced that little or nothing has been added to the canon or removed from it since its first composition.

The Significance of the Canon

That’s enough of history. Why is the Pali Canon important? What makes it different from any other body of scripture?

I would give a four-fold answer to that question:

• First, there is the sheer size of the canon; the Sutta Pitaka itself is considerably larger than the Old Testament, the New Testament, and the Koran combined. Considered simply as a treasure trove, full of wonderful stories and thought-provoking lessons, the Pali Canon contains a lot of treasure.
• Second, there is the remarkable consistency and internal coherence of the teachings contained in the Canon, which, to my mind, speaks to its authenticity. Although I have not read the whole thing, and almost certainly will not reach that goal in this life, I have yet to find anything in the teachings that contradicts anything else in any significant way at all; indeed, each new sutta that I read casts some light on all the others, so that each one enriches and helps to complete everything that went before. Again, that consistence and integrity of meaning is different, from what I’ve experienced in any other scriptural tradition.
• Third, the message of the teachings is one that I find totally convincing, mostly rational and compatible with the understanding of the world that I’ve taken from my reading of modern science and philosophy, and immensely helpful as a guide to practice (by practice I mean both meditative practice and practicing the of kind day-by-day behavior that conduces to calm, sanity, and the maintenance of a benevolent presence in the world). The Buddhadhamma, as I gradually deepen my understanding of it through study of the teachings and meditation on their meaning and import, seems to me to be both complete and adequate; nothing could be subtracted from it without diminishing its significance, and nothing added to it would increase its power as a method of knowing and practice.
• Fourth, and finally, the Pali Canon is the record of what I consider the most original mind in human history. What the Buddha understood, when he had achieved his enlightenment, about how things unfold in this world comprises a doctrine that has, to my knowledge, no precedent; he did, indeed, discover that understanding through his own profound effort. His decision to teach others the way to that understanding, the way to enlightenment, was an act of unexcelled generosity. And the skill with which he conducted that teaching, so that those who were ready to follow him all the way could, in fact, repeat his experience and gain enlightenment, while the rest of us could still benefit through following a path of practice that can ameliorate the inevitable pain in our lives and help us to become better people—that skill is awe-inspiring.

Resources for Study

No one knows what language the Buddha actually used to deliver his teachings; it was probably a dialect of Maghadan, the language that was spoken in region of Northern India where he was born and where his major teachings were delivered. Although Maghadan was probably similar to Pali, in the same way that Pali is similar to Sanskrit, we have no record of it today, and it’s almost certain that the discourses recorded in the Pali Canon are not verbatim transcripts of the Buddha’s words.

The Buddha advised his followers, as they carried his Dhamma into the world, to teach that Dhamma in the language of the people that they spoke to. And the Pali Canon, or large portions of it, have been translated into many other languages. As far as I know, the complete canon has never been translated, and I can’t speak to the quality of the translations that exist in any other language than English. But I can tell you that those of us who speak English, and who live today, in the age of the Internet, are incredibly fortunate in the translations that are available to us, the accessibility of those translations, and the availability of tools to help us evaluate those and make sense of them.

A generation of English-speaking Westerners has emerged who share a fortunate combination of qualities:

• They have all been educated at fine Western universities, so that they are familiar with Western intellectual traditions, including philosophy, literature, and science.
• They have all ordained as monks in the Theravada tradition, the Buddhist tradition that observes the teachings in the Pali Canon as its entire scripture and has acted most conscientiously to preserve the canonical texts and make them widely available. Each has made a deliberate and informed effort to become familiar with Buddhist traditions outside of Theravada.
• They are all active Buddhist practitioners and teachers.
• They are all, by and large, careful and graceful writers, conscientious in their footnoting of difficult points and creative in how they deal with the inevitable difficulties of translating an oral tradition for a literate audience—particularly the high degree of repetition in the texts and what to most literate audiences appears to be an over-reliance on formula phrases.

These translators, particularly Thanissaro Bhikkhu, Piyadassa Thera, Nanamoli Bhikkhu, Peter Harvey, and the indefatigable Bhikkhu Bodhi, have produced a body of work that is a pleasure to read and is, to the best of my understanding, faithful to the meaning of the original texts. Many of those translations are online at the excellent Access to Insight website, maintained as an act of dana by John Bullitt.

The pleasurability of a translation is in the reader’s mind; to evaluate the faithfulness of the translation, the diligent student of the Dharma has, easily accessible, a body of tools that only a few scholars at a few uncommonly well-endowed universities would have had just five or ten years ago. The entire Pali Canon is available on the web or on a CD-ROM in either Pali script, for those willing to learn how to read it, or in Romanized transliteration, so that it’s possible to read the original text alongside any translation. Tools for learning Pali abound on the web and in the library, and for those who are only interested in examining the detailed meaning of an occasional difficult technical term, the Oxford Pali-English dictionary is online with a pretty good interface for searching it. All of the online resources are free.

In addition to the online texts, Wisdom Publications is in the process of publishing the entire Sutta Pitaka in book form. Volumes available so far include the complete Digha Nikaya (the collection of long discourses), the Majjima Nikaya (the middle-length discourses, which include most of the teachings concerned with matters of applying the Dhamma to one’s daily life), and the Samyutta Nikaya (a collection of discourses arranged by their subject matter or by the audiences they are addressed to). An excellent short anthology has been published of suttas from the Anguttara Nikaya (a collection of discourses arranged by the number of topics the Buddha is covering in each), and a full translation of the Anguttara Nikaya is in the works. And a wonderful anthology of suttas and sections of suttas, arranged by subject and organized to be read as a complete introduction to the Buddhadhamma, with excellent introductory essays and informative footnotes, has been written by Bhikkhu Bodhi; it’s called “In the Buddha’s Words”, and it, too, is published by Wisdom. The quality of the Wisdom volumes is high, and their cost is relatively low.

Conclusion: the Opportune Moment

In the Sutta Nipata, a small volume of short discourses that’s found in the Khandaka Nikaya of the Sutta Pitaka—a collection of miscellaneous texts that includes such classics as the Dhammapada, a number of Jataka Tales, Discourses of the Elder Bhikkhunis and so forth—in the Uṭṭhāna Sutta, the Discourse on Arousing, we are urged to keep our energy level high:

The concept of an opportune moment that’s referred to in that sutta is explained in another sutta, the Sangiti Sutta of the Digha Nikaya. The opportune moment is the moment that’s given to those who are born as humans, and not as long-lived gods, or as animals, or in one of the unfortunate realms, who are born into a family that nurtures them and provides for their education, who are born with a good mind and a lively curiosity, who remain open-minded, not tied to a rigid and incorrect point of view, and who are born in a time of the world and at a place in the world in which the teachings of a Buddha are accessible.

We have all been born in an opportune moment; of all the people who have ever lived, we are among the infinitesimally few who can hear the Buddha’s teachings in the radically disintermediated way that the current flock of good modern translations of the Pali Canon makes possible and who can use the radically new tools available to us through the Internet to scrutinize those teachings deeply, as the buddha advised us to do.

If you seize the moment and make the study of the Pali Canon a part of your lives and of your Buddhist practice, I am convinced that your study will be entirely enjoyable, and that the fruits you will gather from it will make your lives richer and your practice more complete.

sangha“, <<sangha means “assembly”. As we’re using it here, it refers to the community of renunciants who followed the Buddha and who observed the meticulously detailed rules of training and behavior that he’d set down for them.

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bhikkhus and bhikkhunis“, <<Bhikkhuis a Pali word that means “one who lives on alms food”;
it is probably cognate with our word “beggar”. Bhikkhuni is
the feminine form of the word.

Bhikkhu and bhikkhuni are usually translated as “monk” and “nun”, but I
think that is a bit misleading, calling up a whole raft of associations
that do not apply (as well, of course, as many other associations that do apply).

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