Fleshing out further the Sangha story, how the Canons came about and what they are

The first council of the sangha arranged for the remembrance of the vinaya and the suttas virtually immediately upon Siddhartha’s death. The disciple Ananda was noted as being the best at remembering what was required to be remembered. A second council occurred exactly 100 years later.

The vinaya and suttas were first written down in Pali in Sri Lanka in the first Century BCE as the first two pitaka (baskets) of the Pali Canon (also the only complete surviving canon written in an Indic language). The third basket was the abhidhamma Pitaka. Altogether they are the three baskets -the Tripitaka.

The vinaya consists essentially of stories of how Siddhartha developed the rules for his religious 'orders' in the context of his many years of organising them and some of the actual rules. They are together seen as providing a form of precedent in legal terms for the future development of rules for religious orders.

The oral recitation for so many centuries, though, of the vinaya and vows (together the pratimoksa – way to (towards) liberation) especially appears to be the reason for the development of the different solidified traditions of the different orders. The religious had to be able to recite their orders' particular pratimoksas. I mentioned this division in an earlier post as it posed problems for some women seeking to be nuns of certain orders, today. The orders do not consider the other orders heretical, however. This was also why at least the early Mahayana monks were not excluded from their communities as long as they could recite and aim to live by their correct pratimoksa (independent thought wasn’t a problem as long as the rules of the order were still known, adhered to as much as possible and chanted as required).

The suttas are also called the Nikayas (Nikaya being Pali for group (as the suttas were grouped) – the corresponding Sanskrit word used for the sutras of its canon is “agama”). They are of course the discourses of Siddhartha concerning matters other than the organisation and commitments of the religious orders and often begin with the introduction “thus I have heard”.

The abhidhamma is the work of early scholars at systematising the teachings of Siddhartha. In the canons, it’s not much more than groupings of lists (matrkas) that Siddhartha made with some brief exposition. Theravadans claim their abhidhamma pitaka was all recited at the first council virtually as is and hence may be regarded as the word of Siddhartha Gautama along with the vinaya and suttas, as he had only very recently passed on.

Incidentally, they also claim that a form of Pali was Siddhartha's spoken language. Scholars consider this claim to be unlikely to be meritorious. Philologists believe (based on the two earliest Canons) that he would have spoken a North Indian language now largely lost to us called Magadhi. He did require that his ideas be translated into local languages and this canon is also the first written example of this. There was certainly no powerful Buddhist belief that the truth could only be fully revealed in one language such as Arabic (or Greek or Latin), for example.

The second oldest canon which unfortunately doesn’t survive in its entirety is believed to have been first written in Sanskrit (the most important language of learning in India at the time) in the first century CE. It survives in a sense in its Tibetan and Chinese forms today as the Tibetan and Chinese Canons (also often called Tripitaka as their source had the same basic organisation into three ‘baskets’: vinaya, sutras and abhidharma) but also in fragments in Sanskrit. The school of Buddhist thinkers that were responsible for having it written in Sanskrit were called the Sarvastivada and it was apparently written in the Kashmir region of what is now modern Pakistan.

The later canons were organised somewhat differently and were based on translated collections essentially from the Sanskrit and with commentaries.

We have one Canon written on woodblock in China in 868 CE. Korea and Japan have extant editions dating from around the 14^th Century. The Chinese Canon appears to have had Korean and Japanese input and additional material.

The Tibetan Canon came in at least two waves due to oppression of Buddhists in India. A Classical Tibetan written language was created especially from the Tibetan vernacular for the purpose of creating the Canon finalised in the 14^th Century after the conclusion of the second wave. It first began to be compiled in some form in the first wave of the 8^th Century. Some of its source material may have been originally written in Chinese and some in Sanskrit. Versions of the finalised Canon were also produced on woodblock in the 15^th Century.

Sometimes the whole of Buddhist teaching of a particular view is also called its Tripitaka and Tripitaka is also a title of honour for a learned Buddhist (remember Monkey). The Tripitaka is all also regarded as the word of the historical Buddha although, with regard to the third pitaka, at least, this is still in dispute among both Buddhists and experts. Followers of the two earliest canons would regard the abhidharma part of their canon as words of Siddhartha.