Buddhist Scriptures

What are the Buddhist sacred texts?

The Buddhist sacred texts fill three large canons, and no single list binds all Buddhists. The scholar Paul Harrison writes that there is no such thing as the Buddhist canon, because Buddhism spread widely and never had a central authority.¹ The scholar Lewis Lancaster notes that few texts appear in all three.²

Canon	Language	Where it is used	How it is arranged
Pali canon, or Tipitaka	Pali	Theravada Buddhists in Sri Lanka and Southeast Asia1	Three "baskets": monastic discipline (Vinaya), discourses (Sutta), and systematic teaching (Abhidhamma)3
Chinese canon	Classical Chinese4	China, and as the standard in Korea and Japan1	Too large for the three baskets: texts from several Indian schools, Mahayana scriptures, commentaries, and works written in China1
Tibetan canon	Tibetan	Tibet, and the basis of the Mongolian canon1	The Kangyur, the translated word of the Buddha, and the Tengyur, translated commentaries and treatises1

The Pali canon is the scripture of Theravada Buddhism. Its discourses, or suttas, are grouped into five collections, among them the long, the middle-length, and the grouped discourses, and a miscellany that includes the Dhammapada, a book of verses.³⁵ The Chinese and Tibetan canons add many more scriptures: the sutras of Mahayana Buddhism, and tantras, texts of ritual and practice.¹

How were the texts composed and handed down?

The tradition holds that the Buddha's disciples recited his teaching together soon after his death and then preserved it by memory, while historians accept that the texts began as oral tradition but differ on how much reaches back to the Buddha himself.⁵¹⁶

Lancaster adds that the final list of the Theravada canon was not agreed until the fifth century CE.² Among the oldest surviving Buddhist manuscripts are birch-bark scrolls from the region of modern Afghanistan and Pakistan, written in the Gandhari language and dated to the first century CE.⁶⁹ The Writings section describes these manuscripts, and How ancient texts are dated explains the methods.

When were the Mahayana sutras composed?

Mahayana tradition holds that the Buddha taught its sutras himself, while historians date their first appearance to around the start of the common era.⁹¹

How did the texts gain authority?

No council or ruler ever closed one canon for all Buddhists, so each tradition shaped its own collection over many centuries.¹² In the Pali account of the Buddha's last days, he tells Ananda that his followers will not be left without a teacher: The teaching and training that I have taught and pointed out for you shall be your Teacher after my passing. (DN 16)¹² The same discourse sets a test for any later report of his words. It must fit the discourses and agree with the monastic training, whoever reports it.¹²

Harrison argues that these guidelines, together with others that put meaning ahead of wording, left the canon open. Buddhists judged a text by whether its content led toward liberation, so in time the principle ran the other way: whatever is well said is the word of the Buddha. In his account, that is how some Buddhists came to accept the Mahayana sutras, and later the tantras.¹

Mahayana tradition holds instead that the Buddha himself taught these sutras, and the Dalai Lama, a teacher of the Gelug school, adds that he taught them to hearers able to receive them.⁹¹⁰¹¹ Other Buddhists did not accept them, and in Sri Lanka and Southeast Asia the Pali canon of Theravada became the standard.¹

In Theravada, Prebish writes, putting the texts in writing in Sri Lanka "closed" the three baskets. Later councils checked the text: one in Burma in 1871 carved it on 729 stone slabs, and another in Rangoon from 1954 recited it with about 2,500 monks.⁸

In China, the canon took shape from the catalogs of monastery libraries, with lists in place by the fourth century CE, and the whole collection was first printed from wooden blocks carved from 972 to 983.² Texts written in China but presented as translations from India were sometimes accepted into the canon and sometimes rejected by catalogers as not genuine translations.² Korea's Tripitaka Koreana, carved on 81,258 wooden blocks in the thirteenth century, is still kept at Haeinsa Monastery.⁴

Tibetan tradition holds that translation began in the eighth century with Indian teachers such as Shantarakshita and Padmasambhava. Lancaster writes that the translations were gathered into a canon only in the thirteenth century, at Narthang monastery, while Harrison places that first edition in the fourteenth.²¹

How do the branches interpret the texts?

Each branch works from part of the scriptures and reads them by its own principles.¹ In Theravada, the monk Buddhaghosa wrote commentaries on the four main discourse collections in the fifth century CE. His Path of Purification (Visuddhimagga) is still a handbook of Theravada teaching.⁵

Some Buddhist schools, though not all, follow principles that tell readers to prefer sutras of definitive meaning over those whose meaning needs interpretation.¹ A Mahayana scheme of three turnings of the wheel sorts the sutras by when in his life the Buddha is held to have taught them, and Tibetan catalogs file the Perfection of Wisdom sutras under the second.⁹

Tibetan Buddhism also follows Vajrayana, the vehicle of the thunderbolt, whose scriptures are the tantras.¹³¹ Ronald Davidson and Charles Orzech, scholars of tantra, write that tantra is usually understood to include mantras that a preceptor authorizes for a disciple in an initiation rite.¹⁴ The Tengyur's Indian commentaries also guide reading. For the Perfection of Wisdom sutras, 84000 notes, the commentarial tradition inherited from India grew in Tibet into a vast literature of its own.¹⁹

Chan, called Zen in Japan, traces its teachers in an unbroken line to the awakened mind of the Buddha, passing through the Indian monk Bodhidharma. John Jorgensen, a scholar of Chan, writes that Chan monks were still well read in scripture and favored a meditative reading over a literal one.¹⁵

Other East Asian schools center on one scripture or a few. Pure Land Buddhism looks to the sutras about Amitabha Buddha and his Land of Bliss, and Nichiren Buddhism to the Lotus Sutra, whose title its followers chant.¹⁶¹⁷

How have the texts been translated?

Buddhist texts have been translated since they first left India, because no rule tied them to one language.² Harrison notes that the Buddha is said to have let his followers teach in their own dialects.¹ Chinese translators worked for more than a thousand years, some from as early as the second century CE. Their versions keep many texts lost elsewhere, and Lancaster suggests some may be closer to early forms than the surviving Sanskrit copies.²

Theravada Buddhists kept the Pali language itself, written in local scripts such as Burmese and Thai, though Cambodia's royal edition, finished in 1969, added a Khmer translation.²

In English, T. W. Rhys Davids founded the Pali Text Society in 1881. It has since published editions and translations of nearly all the Pali canonical texts.¹⁸ Bhikkhu Sujato's translations of the Pali discourses, which this site quotes, are free to use and published online by SuttaCentral.¹² The book Christianity vs Buddhism sets these scriptures beside the Bible.