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The Tripitaka [Sanskrit]
[Pali: Tipitaka] is the Canon of the Buddhists, both Theravada
and Mahayana. Thus it is possible to speak of several Canons such
as the Sthaviravada, Sarvastivada and Mahayana as well as in term
of languages like Pali, Chinese and Tibetan. The word is used
basically to refer to the literature, the authorship of which
is directly or indirectly ascribed to the Buddha himself.
It is generally believed
that whatever was the teaching of the Buddha, conceived under
Dhamma and Vinaya, it was rehearsed soon after his death by a
fairly representative body of disciples. The later systematised
threefold division, into Sutta, Vinaya and Abhidhamma is
based on this collection. Sharing a common body of Dhamma and
Vinaya, the early Buddhist disciples appear to have remained united
for about a century.
The Council of Vesali
or the second Buddhist Council saw the break up of this original
body and as many as eighteen separate schools were known to exist
by about the first century B.C. It is reasonable to assume that
each of these schools would have opted to possess a Tripitaka
of their own or rather their own recension of the Tripitaka, perhaps
with a considerably large common core.
It has long been claimed
that the Buddha, as he went about teaching in the Gangetic valley
in India during the 6th and 5th centuries
B.C.E., used Magadhi or the language of Magadha as his medium
of communication. Attempts have been made to identify this Magadhan
dialect with Pali, the language in which the texts of the Sthaviravada
school are recorded. Hence we speak of a Pali Canon, i.e., the
literature of the Sthaviravadins which is believed to be the original
word of the Buddha.
At any rate, this is
the only complete recension we possess and the Pali texts seem
to preserve an older tradition much more than most of the extant
Buddhist works in other languages. Further, the Sthaviravadins
admit two other major divisions of Pali Buddhist literature which
are non-Canonical. They are:
1. Post-Canonical Pali
literature including works like Petakopadesa and Milindapanha,
the authorship of which is ascribed to one or more disciples.
2. Pali Commentarial
literature which includes:
(a) Atthakatha or Commentaries,
the original version of which is believed to have been taken over
to Sri Lanka by Thera Mahinda, the missionary sent by Asoka and
(b) the different strata
of Tika or Sub-Commentaries, contributions to which were made
by Buddhist monks of Sri Lanka, India and Burma.
Besides this Pali recension
of the Sthaviravada school there are fragmentary texts of the
Sarvastivada or of the Mulasarvastivada which are preserved in
Sanskrit. A large portion of their Vinaya texts in Sanskrit is
preserved in the Gilgit manuscripts. But a more complete collection
of the Sarvastivada recension (perhaps also of the Dharmapuptaka
and Kasyapiya), i.e., a Sanskrit Canon, must have possibly existed
as is evident from the Chinese translations preserved to us. These
include complete translations of the four agamas (the equivalent
of the Pali nikayas). Of the Ksudraka (Pali: Khuddaka), only some
texts are preserved in Chinese. In addition to these, the Chinese
translations seem to preserve, to the credit of the Sarvastivadins,
a vast Vinaya literature and an independent collection of seven
Abhidhamma treatises. Thus what could be referred to as a Sarvastivada
Canon ranges between fragments of texts preserved in Sanskrit
and the more representative collection of the Tripitaka preserved
in Chinese. It may be mentioned here that a version of the Mulasarvastivada
Vinaya consisting of seven parts, even more faithful than the
Chinese version, is preserved in Tibetan. Of the Abhidharma collection
only the Prajnaptisastra appears to have been translated into
Tibetan.
Speaking further of
the Tripitaka in terms of language we have in Chinese different
recensions of the Canon (preserved in part) belonging to different
schools. These recensions are primarily based on the Tripitaka
of Indian origin. In addition to the ancient texts which these
recensions preserve they also contain independent expositions
of the early doctrines or commentarial literature on them. The
Chinese Canon preserves the Vinaya texts of as many as seven different
schools. In place of the division into ‘canonical groups’
of Sutra, Abhidharma and Vinaya, this new arrangement seems to
reckon with a live and continuous tradition in accepting as authoritative
both the Sutra (or words of Buddha) and Sastra (or commentaries,
treatises, etc. of disciples of a later date).
It becomes clear from
the foregoing analysis that in speaking of a Buddhist Canon one
has to admit that it is both vast in extent and complex in character.
While the earlier and more orthodox schools of Buddhism reserved
the term Canonical to refer to the Body of literature, the greater
part of which could be reasonably ascribed to the Buddha himself,
other traditions which developed further away from the centre
of activity of the Buddha and at a relatively later date choose
to lay under the term Canon the entire mosaic of Buddhist literature
in their possession, which is of varied authorship and is at times
extremely heterogeneous in character.
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