The earliest Buddhist texts common to all Buddhist traditions can be traced back to the fourth or fifth century BCE. After the Buddha’s death, at the council of Rajagaha, a town in northern India, five hundred of his most accomplished monks who’d attained nibbana, gathered and shared his teachings. There, it’s said, Ananda, the Buddha’s loyal attendant, recited many of the suttas (discourses of the Buddha) for he’d spent more than twenty-five years with the Buddha and had an infallible memory.
For centuries after that, the Buddha’s teachings were only transmitted orally, from groups of monks to groups of monks. The Sri Lankan tradition claims that the canon was only written down in the first century BCE due to a fear that there weren’t enough monks at the time to ensure its survival.
The Sutta Pitaka, which is one of the three “baskets” or sections of the Pali canon, can effectively be considered the fundamental teachings of the Buddha. It’s a
