Writings: BuddhismThe Nepal Pali pages7 of 10

Writings: Buddhism

The Nepal Pali pages

These are four palm-leaf pages of the Cullavagga, part of the Pali monastic code, found in Nepal by Cecil Bendall in December 1898. Handwriting dates the copy to about the 9th century CE. Its 1991 editor calls it the oldest surviving Pali manuscript. The National Archives of Nepal in Kathmandu holds it.

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Three dates, kept apart

  1. The text's date: the tradition's view

    in the year of the Buddha's death, 544 BCE on the Theravada count, when the monk Upali recited the monastic code at the first council (Access to Insight)

  2. The text's date: critical scholars' view

    The sources consulted give no scholarly date for these two chapters of the Pali monastic code (Cullavagga 4 and 5) in particular. Sujato and Brahmali place the early Buddhist texts, which they say include some Vinaya material, around the 5th century BCE, without naming these chapters.

  3. This copy made

    the end of the 8th or the beginning of the 9th century CE (Cecil Bendall); the 9th century CE (Oskar von Hinuber)

  4. This copy found

    found by Cecil Bendall in December 1898 in a bundle of old leaves in Nepal; announced in October 1899

All four rows share one timeline. A row with no marker says why in words. How ancient texts are dated.

What it is

These are four palm-leaf leaves, numbered 106 to 108 and 124, from a book written in Pali, the language of the Theravada Buddhist canon.1 A leaf numbered 124 means the book had at least that many leaves, an inference drawn here from the numbering. The National Archives' index card gives their size as 48.5 by 4.5 centimeters and lists the script as Guptaksara, a Gupta script.2 Cecil Bendall described them as a fragment of the Vinaya-Pitaka, the Pali code of monastic discipline, from chapters 4 and 5 of its Cullavagga.213

How the copy was dated

The leaves are dated by paleography, the comparison of letter shapes with dated writing elsewhere. Cecil Bendall, who found them, dated them to the end of the 8th or the beginning of the 9th century CE.2 Oskar von Hinuber, who published a study of the leaves in 1991, writes of a copy made in the 9th century CE.23 In his reading, the scribe worked while one script was giving way to another, because alternative forms of some letters appear side by side.2

He also suggests that the scribe copied a manuscript fairly old in his own time and imitated one strange letter. That could point to a copy made when the original's script was no longer familiar to the copyist in every detail.2 The sources used here report no radiocarbon test and no dispute over the date. For the methods, see how ancient texts are dated.

The text: its date and authorship

The date strip marks the Vinaya, the monastic code.

The Theravada tradition's account

The Theravada tradition, as the website Access to Insight tells it, holds that in the rains retreat after the Buddha's death 500 monks led by Mahakassapa met at Rajagaha to recite his teaching. Upali's recitation of the monastic rules became the Vinaya Pitaka. The tradition places the Buddha's death, and so this first council, in 544 BCE, and the first writing down of the canon, by 500 reciters and scribes on palm leaves, at a council in Sri Lanka that its timeline dates to about 100 BCE.4 Lewis Lancaster reports the tradition's date for that council as 29 BCE, and Charles Prebish gives 25 BCE.56

The historians' view

Charles Prebish holds that virtually all scholars of Buddhism doubt that a first council on the scale the scriptures describe took place, though a small gathering of close disciples is plausible.6

Bhikkhu Sujato and Bhikkhu Brahmali, authors who argue a single thesis in a book-length work, write that most academic scholars of early Buddhism cautiously affirm that the early texts may contain some authentic sayings of the Buddha. They argue that the bulk of the sayings were very likely spoken by him. They report that Gregory Schopen, a scholar of Buddhism, argues that nothing definite is known of the canon's contents before the 5th or 6th century CE; this site did not open his writing.7

How it was found

Cecil Bendall found the leaves in December 1898 in a bundle of miscellaneous old leaves in Nepal. He announced them in October 1899 at a congress of Orientalists in Rome.2 He identified them himself, and von Hinuber writes that no other Pali manuscript from India proper has been found since.2 The sources used here do not say where in Nepal the bundle was kept.

B. V. Bapat published the text in 1952 from photographs taken in 1948. His plates were too small to read in places, so von Hinuber's edition used microfilm made by the Nepal German Manuscript Preservation Project.2 The leaves are now in the National Archives of Nepal in Kathmandu.23 This was a find among old leaves, not a dig.

What it shows, and what it does not

Von Hinuber finds the text, despite its peculiarities and variants, very close to the Theravada Vinaya of the Mahavihara tradition. He finds it tempting to ascribe the leaves to that tradition. The Mahavihara is the Great Monastery of Anuradhapura in Sri Lanka.24 He reads the script as pointing to an original written in a North Indian script, and finds no evidence that the original came directly from Sri Lanka.2 He calls the leaves the oldest surviving Pali manuscript, and Harrison and Hartmann use the same words.23

They do not show what Pali texts said before the 9th century. Von Hinuber holds that if the original was perhaps a few centuries old when copied in the 9th century, this could indicate an established though perhaps very weak Mahavihara tradition in North India, but that four leaves are far too fragmentary to go beyond speculation.2 Counting from the dates Lancaster and Prebish give for the writing down, 29 or 25 BCE, to a copy made between 775 and 900 CE gives about 800 to 930 years. From the Access to Insight timeline's about 100 BCE it would be about 875 to 1,000 years.564 These figures are computed here, and 775 CE is this site's reading of Bendall's end of the 8th century.

Sources

  1. Access to Insight. Tipitaka: The Pali Canon. Access to Insight. Accessed 2026-10-28.
  2. Oskar von Hinuber. The Oldest Pali Manuscript: Four Folios of the Vinaya-Pitaka from the National Archives, Kathmandu. Akademie der Wissenschaften und der Literatur, Mainz, and Franz Steiner Verlag, Stuttgart (Untersuchungen zur Sprachgeschichte und Handschriftenkunde des Pali II), 1991, pp. 5 to 8, 10, 11, 24 to 26, and 29 (transcribed passages only; 48 pages and 8 plates in all). Accessed 2026-11-05.
  3. Paul Harrison and Jens-Uwe Hartmann. Introduction (in From Birch Bark to Digital Data). From Birch Bark to Digital Data, Recent Advances in Buddhist Manuscript Research, ed. Harrison and Hartmann (Austrian Academy of Sciences Press, Vienna), 2014, pp. vii to xx; sections 4, 7, 8, and 9. Accessed 2026-11-05.
  4. John T. Bullitt. Theravada Buddhism: A Chronology. Access to Insight, 2005. Accessed 2026-10-28.
  5. Lewis R. Lancaster. Buddhist Books and Texts: Canon and Canonization. Encyclopedia of Religion, 2nd ed. (Macmillan Reference USA), via Encyclopedia.com, 2005. Accessed 2026-10-28.
  6. Charles S. Prebish. Councils, Buddhist. Encyclopedia of Buddhism (Macmillan Reference USA), via Encyclopedia.com, 2004. Accessed 2026-10-28.
  7. Bhikkhu Sujato and Bhikkhu Brahmali. The Authenticity of the Early Buddhist Texts. Oxford Centre for Buddhist Studies (supplement to Journal of the Oxford Centre for Buddhist Studies, vol. 5), 2014, abstract; sections 3.6 and 3.7. Accessed 2026-10-28.