Tripitaka

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The Tripitaka — Pali Tipiṭaka, “three baskets” — is the name for the collected scriptures of early Buddhism, divided into three parts. The oldest and most complete version to survive in full is the Pali Canon of the Theravada school, the body of texts the southern Buddhist world has carried as the word of the Buddha.

The three baskets are not three subjects so much as three kinds of writing. The Vinaya Piṭaka sets out the rules of the monastic order — the conduct binding monks and nuns, each rule framed by the story of the occasion that prompted it. The Sutta Piṭaka gathers the discourses: sermons, dialogues, and verse attributed to the Buddha and his close disciples, and it is here that the best-known short texts, the Dhammapada among them, are found. The Abhidhamma Piṭaka is the latest and most technical layer — an analytic restatement of the teaching, which breaks experience down into its constituent factors and arranges them into a systematic psychology. The word piṭaka, “basket,” is usually read as referring to the way manuscripts or palm-leaf bundles were stored and passed along.

Tradition holds that the canon was first recited and agreed upon at a council held shortly after the Buddha’s death, and fixed by communal recitation at later councils. For several centuries it was transmitted orally, by monks trained to memorise whole sections; it was written down in Sri Lanka around the first century BCE. Scholarship treats this account with care. The texts plainly contain material of very different ages, the Abhidhamma is widely regarded as a later development, and the precise wording cannot be traced to the Buddha himself — but the core discourses are old, and the oral methods that preserved them were remarkably stable.

The Pali Tipitaka is one canon among several. Other early schools kept their own recensions in other languages, surviving now mostly in Chinese and Tibetan translation, where the corresponding collections are larger and arranged differently; the Mahayana traditions added a wide further literature of their own. “Tripitaka” in East Asia therefore names something broader than the Pali books alone. For the Theravada, the three baskets remain the measure of orthodoxy: what is canonical is what they contain, and the long work of commentary has been, in good part, the work of explaining them.

→ In the library: Rhys Davids — Buddhist Suttas (SBE XI, 1881) · Müller — The Dhammapada (SBE X, 1881)

→ Related: Mahabodhi Temple · Burmese Vipassana Revival