Buddhist texts
Buddhist texts are religious texts that belong to, or are associated with, Buddhism and its traditions. There is no single textual collection for all of Buddhism. Instead, there are three main Buddhist Canons: the Pāli Canon of the Theravāda tradition, the Chinese Buddhist Canon used in East Asian Buddhist tradition, and the Tibetan Buddhist Canon used in Indo-Tibetan Buddhism.
The earliest Buddhist texts were not committed to writing until some centuries after the death of Gautama Buddha. The oldest surviving Buddhist manuscripts are the Gandhāran Buddhist texts, found in Pakistan and written in Gāndhārī, they date from the first century BCE to the third century CE. The first Buddhist texts were initially passed on orally by Buddhist monastics, but were later written down and composed as manuscripts in various Indo-Aryan languages. These texts were collected into various collections and translated into other languages such as Buddhist Chinese and Classical Tibetan as Buddhism spread outside of India.
Buddhist texts can be categorized in a number of ways. The Western terms "scripture" and "canonical" are applied to Buddhism in inconsistent ways by Western scholars: for example, one authority refers to "scriptures and other canonical texts", while another says that scriptures can be categorized into canonical, commentarial, and pseudo-canonical. Buddhist traditions have generally divided these texts with their own categories and divisions, such as that between buddhavacana "word of the Buddha," many of which are known as "sutras", and other texts, such as "shastras" or "Abhidharma".
These religious texts were written in different languages, methods and writing systems. Memorizing, reciting and copying the texts was seen as spiritually valuable. Even after the development and adoption of printing by Buddhist institutions, Buddhists continued to copy them by hand as a spiritual exercise, a practice known as sutra copying.
In an effort to preserve these scriptures, Asian Buddhist institutions were at the forefront of the adoption of Chinese technologies related to bookmaking, including paper, and block printing which were often deployed on a large scale. Because of this, the first surviving example of a printed text is a Buddhist charm, the first full printed book is the Buddhist Diamond Sutra and the first hand colored print is an illustration of Guanyin dated to 947.
Buddhavacana
The concept of buddhavacana is important in understanding how Buddhists classify and see their texts. Buddhavacana texts have special status as sacred scripture and are generally seen as in accord with the teachings of the historical Buddha, which is termed "the Dharma". According to Donald Lopez, the criteria for determining what should be considered buddhavacana were developed at an early stage, and that the early formulations do not suggest that Dharma is limited to what was spoken by the historical Buddha. Another term for "buddha word" is the “dispensation of the Buddha”.The Mahāsāṃghika and the Mūlasarvāstivāda considered both the Buddha's discourses and those of his disciples to be buddhavacana. A number of different beings such as Buddhas, disciples of the Buddha, ṛṣis, and devas were considered capable of transmitting buddhavacana. According to early Buddhist sources like the Mahāpadesasutta, a text said by someone other than the Buddha may be certified as true buddhavacana by four "great references to authority" : the buddha himself, a sangha of wise elders, a small group of specialist monks, or one elder knowledgeable in the Dharma. The content of such a discourse was then to be collated with the sūtras, compared with the Vinaya, and evaluated against the nature of the Dharma. This allowed a certain flexibility in the compilation of the Buddhist canons, which were not necessarily closed after the Buddha's death.
In Theravāda Buddhism, the standard collection of buddhavacana is the Pāli Canon, also known as the Tripiṭaka. Generally speaking, the Theravāda school rejects the Mahāyāna sūtras as buddhavacana, and do not study or see these texts as reliable sources. In East Asian Buddhism, what is considered buddhavacana is collected in the Chinese Buddhist canon; the most common edition of this is the Taishō Tripiṭaka, itself based on the Tripiṭaka Koreana. This collection, unlike the Pāli Tripiṭaka, contains Mahāyāna sūtras, Śāstras, and Esoteric Buddhist literature.
Mahāyāna Buddhist sources generally tended to be more liberal in their interpretation of buddhavacana, allowing for more texts to be included. As such, Mahayana sources often see buddhavacana as referring to statements which are well spoken and thus reflect the truth of the Dharma. For example, the Adhyāśayasañcodanasūtra states: “All which is well-spoken, Maitreya, is spoken by the Buddha.” According to the sūtra, “well spoken” means that inspired speech should be seen as buddhavacana if it is in accord with four principles:
- being meaningful and not meaningless,
- being principled and not unprincipled,
- bringing about the extinction of the defilements and not their increase,
- it explains the qualities and benefits of nirvana, not the qualities and benefits of samsara.
In Indo-Tibetan Buddhism, what is considered buddhavacana is collected in the Kangyur. The East Asian and Tibetan Buddhist Canons always combined buddhavacana with other literature in their standard collected editions. However, the general view of what is and is not buddhavacana is broadly similar between East Asian Buddhism and Tibetan Buddhism. The Tibetan Kangyur, which belongs to the various schools of Tibetan Vajrayāna Buddhism, in addition to containing sutras and Vinaya, also contains Buddhist tantras and other related Tantric literature.
The texts of the early Buddhist schools
Early Buddhist texts
The earliest Buddhist texts were passed down orally in Middle Indo-Aryan languages called Prakrits, including Gāndhārī language, the early Magadhan language and Pāli through the use of repetition, communal recitation and mnemonic devices. These texts were later compiled into canons and written down in manuscripts. For example, the Pāli Canon was preserved in Sri Lanka where it was first written down in the first century BCE.There are early texts from various Buddhist schools, the largest collections are from the Theravāda and Sarvāstivāda schools, but there are also full texts and fragments from the Dharmaguptaka, Mahāsāṅghika, Mahīśāsaka, Mūlasarvāstivāda, and others. The most widely studied early Buddhist material are the first four Pāli Nikayas, as well as the corresponding Chinese Āgamas. The modern study of early pre-sectarian Buddhism often relies on comparative scholarship using these various early Buddhist sources.
Various scholars of Buddhist studies such as Richard Gombrich, Akira Hirakawa, Alexander Wynne, and A. K. Warder hold that early Buddhist texts contain material that could possibly be traced to the historical Buddha himself or at least to the early years of pre-sectarian Buddhism. In Mahāyāna Buddhism, these texts are sometimes referred to as "Hinayana" or "Śrāvakayāna".
Although many versions of the texts of the early Buddhist schools exist, the only complete collection of texts to survive in a Middle Indo-Aryan language is the Tipiṭaka of the Theravāda school. The other extant versions of the Tripitakas of early schools include the Chinese Āgamas, which includes collections by the Sarvāstivāda and the Dharmaguptaka. The Chinese Buddhist canon contains a complete collection of early sutras in Chinese translation, their content is very similar to the Pali, differing in detail but not in the core doctrinal content. The Tibetan canon contains some of these early texts as well, but not as complete collections. The earliest known Buddhist manuscripts containing early Buddhist texts are the Gandharan Buddhist Texts, dated to the 1st century BCE and constitute the Buddhist textual tradition of Gandharan Buddhism which was an important link between Indian and East Asian Buddhism. Parts of what is likely to be the canon of the Dharmaguptaka can be found among these Gandharan Buddhist Texts.
There are different genres of early Buddhist texts, including prose "suttas", disciplinary works, various forms of verse compositions, mixed prose and verse works, and also lists of monastic rules or doctrinal topics. A large portion of Early Buddhist literature is part of the "sutta" or "sutra" genre. The Sūtras are mostly discourses attributed to the Buddha or one of his close disciples. They are considered to be buddhavacana by all schools. The Buddha's discourses were perhaps originally organised according to the style in which they were delivered. They were later organized into collections called Nikāyas or Āgamas, which were further collected into the Sūtra Piṭaka of the canons of the early Buddhist schools.
Most of the early sutras that have survived are from Sthavira nikaya schools, no complete collection has survived from the other early branch of Buddhism, the Mahāsāṃghika. However, some individual texts have survived, such as the Śālistamba Sūtra. This sūtra contains many parallel passages to the Pali suttas. As noted by N. Ross Reat, this text is in general agreement with the basic doctrines of the early sutras of the Sthavira schools such as 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 important source for Mahāsāṃghika sutras is the Mahāvastu, which is a collection of various texts compiled into a biography of the Buddha. Within it can be found quotations and whole sutras, such as the Mahāsāṃghika version of the Dharmacakrapravartana.
The other major type of text aside from the sutras are the Vinayas. Vinaya literature is primarily concerned with aspects of the monastic discipline and the rules and procedures that govern the Buddhist monastic community. However, Vinaya as a term is also contrasted with Dharma, where the pair mean something like 'doctrine and discipline'. The Vinaya literature in fact contains a considerable range of texts. There are, of course, those that discuss the monastic rules, how they came about, how they developed, and how they were applied. But the vinaya also contains some doctrinal expositions, ritual and liturgical texts, biographical stories, and some elements of the "Jatakas", or birth stories. Various Vinaya collections survive in full, including those of the following schools: Theravāda, Mula-Sarvāstivāda and the Mahāsānghika, Sarvāstivāda, Mahīshāsika, and Dharmaguptaka. In addition, portions survive of a number of Vinayas in various languages.
Aside from the Sutras and the Vinayas, some schools also had collections of "minor" or miscellaneous texts. The Theravāda Khuddaka Nikāya is one example of such a collection, while there is evidence that the Dharmaguptaka school had a similar collection, known as the Kṣudraka Āgama. Fragments of the Dharmaguptaka minor collection have been found in Gandhari. The Sarvāstivāda school also seems to have had a Kṣudraka collection of texts, but they did not see it as an "Āgama". These "minor" collections seem to have been a category for miscellaneous texts, and was perhaps never definitively established among many early Buddhist schools.
Early Buddhist texts which appear in such "minor" collections include:
- The Dharmapadas. These texts are collections of sayings and aphorisms, the most well known of which is the Pali Dhammapada, but there are various versions in different languages, such as the Patna Dharmapada and the Gāndhārī Dharmapada.
- The Pali Udana and the Sarvāstivāda Udānavarga. These are other collections of "inspired sayings".
- The Pali Itivuttaka and the Chinese translation of the Itivṛttaka by Xuanzang.
- The Pali Sutta Nipata, including texts such as the Aṭṭhakavagga and Pārāyanavagga. There is also a parallel in the Chinese translation of the Arthavargīya.
- Theragāthā and Therīgāthā two collections of verses related to the elder disciples of the Buddha. A Sanskrit Sthaviragāthā is also known to have existed.