Questioning the Buddha: A Selection of Twenty-Five Sutras

By Dzongsar Jamyang Khyentse and Peter Skilling

An important new book unlocking the words of the Buddha contained in the vast Tibetan canon, one of the main scriptural resources of Buddhism.

In the forty-five years the Buddha spent traversing northern India, he shared his wisdom with everyone from beggar women to kings. Hundreds of his discourses, or sutras, were preserved by his followers, first orally and later in written form. Around thirteen hundred years after the Buddha’s enlightenment, the sutras were translated into the Tibetan language, where they have been preserved ever since. To date, only a fraction of these have been made available in English. Questioning the Buddha brings the reader directly into the literary treasure of the Tibetan canon with thoroughly annotated translations of twenty-five different sutras. Often these texts, many translated here in full for the first time, begin with an encounter in which someone poses a question to the Buddha.

Peter Skilling, an authority on early Buddhist epigraphy, archaeology, and textual traditions, has been immersed in the Buddhist scriptures of diverse traditions for nearly half a century. In this volume, he draws on his deep and extensive research to render these ancient teachings in a fresh and precise language. His introduction is a fascinating history of the Buddhist sutras, including the transition from oral to written form, the rise of Mahayana literature, the transmission to Tibet, the development of canons, and a look at some of the pioneers of sutra study in the West.

Sutras included in this volume are: Four Dharmas Not to Be Taken for Granted; The Benefits of Giving; The Exposition of Four Dharmas; The Merit of the Three Refuges; Four Dharmas Never to Be Abandoned; Advice for Bodhisatva Dharmaketu; Advice for Bodhisatva Jayamati; Sutra Comparing Bodhicitta to Gold; Bodhisatva Maitreya’s Question about the Gift of the Dharma; Four Summaries of the Dharma Spoken to the Naga King Sagara; The Stanza of Dependent Arising; The Heart Formula of Dependent Arising; Prediction of the Boy Brahmasri’s Future Buddhahood; Ksemavati’s Prediction to Future Buddhahood; The City Beggar Woman; An Old Woman’s Questions about Birth and Death; The Questions of Srimati the Brahman Woman; The Questions of the Laywoman Gangottara; Brahma Sahampati’s Question; Advice to King Prasenajit; Passage to the Next Life; Instructions for King Bimbisara; Instructions for King Udayana; Buddhas as Rare as a Grain of Golden Sand; and Predictions on the Eve of the Great Final Nirvana.
 

• Language: English
• Publisher: Wisdom Publications
• Release date: Aug 17, 2021
• ISBN: 9781614294085

Book preview

CLASSICS OF INDIAN BUDDHISM

The flourishing of Buddhism in South Asia during the first millennium of the Common Era produced many texts that deserve a place among the classics of world literature. Exploring the full extent of the human condition and the limits of language and reason, these texts have the power to edify and entertain a wide variety of readers. The Classics of Indian Buddhism series aims to publish widely accessible translations of important texts from the Buddhist traditions of South Asia, with special consideration given to works foundational for the Mahāyāna.

Editorial Board

Andy Rotman (chair), Smith College

Paul Harrison, Stanford University

Jens-Uwe Hartmann, University of Munich

Sara McClintock, Emory University

Parimal Patil, Harvard University

Akira Saitō, University of Tokyo

IN THE FORTY-FIVE YEARS the Buddha spent traversing northern India, he shared his wisdom with everyone from beggar women to kings. Hundreds of his discourses, or sutras, were preserved by his followers, first orally and later in written form; many survive today only in the Tibetan canon. Often these texts begin with an encounter in which someone poses a question to the Buddha. Questioning the Buddha brings the reader directly into this literary treasure.

In this volume, prose and verse join beautifully to celebrate the Dharma. The selections show how rich, how diverse, and how wonderful the Kangyur is—and how little we know about it.

—from the foreword by Dzongsar Jamyang Khyentse

A stimulating and delightfully readable book . . . Peter Skilling is probably the most versatile scholar of Buddhology today, equally conversant with philosophy, history, ritual, doctrine, art, and iconography. He has selected from the Tibetan twenty-five sutras that were lost in India long ago, which he has translated into elegant English. His introduction and first two appendixes together form a most lucid and up-to-date discussion of Buddhist thought that should be compulsory reading in any field of Buddhology.

—Pratapaditya Pal, author of Quest for Coomaraswamy: A Life in the Arts

Peter Skilling’s selection of Buddhist sutras comes with an informative introduction, a meticulous exploration of sources, and an attractive and reliable rendering in English. Textual discoveries and expositions of this quality are a substantial contribution to Buddhist studies.

—Romila Thapar, professor emerita of history, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi

A magnificent scholar and a magnificent human being, Peter Skilling has always been an example for us all, for his unbounded erudition combined with an unflinching modesty. This precious volume will serve as a reference and an inspiration to present and future generations.

—Matthieu Ricard, Shechen Monastery, Nepal

Dedicated to the dedicated:

to the philologists, lexicographers, and translators

whose conscientious work

has made my own work possible.

And dedicated to

Phornphat Homchat,

born in Bangkok, 2551 BE (2008 CE).

namo buddhāya gurave

namo dharmāya tāyine

namo saṃghāya mahate

tribhyo’pi satataṃ namaḥ.

sangs rgyas gtso la phyag ’tshal lo ||

skyob pa’i chos la phyag ’tshal lo ||

dge ’dun che la phyag ’tshal lo ||

gsum la rtag tu phyag ’tshal lo ||

Homage to the Buddha, foremost teacher.

Homage to the Dharma, protector.

Homage to the Saṅgha, the grand.

Perpetually—homage to these three!

Contents

Foreword by Dzongsar Jamyang Khyentse

Preface

Introduction

1. Prologue

2. Canon Formation

3. Vaitulya/Mahāyāna Dharmaparyāyas

4. In Praise of the Buddha

5. The Structure of This Book

6. Style and Content: The Tribulations of Translation

7. Reading the Dharmaparyāyas

The Translations

I. DOGMA, DHARMA, AND RITUAL

1. Four Dharmas Not to Be Taken for Granted

2. The Benefits of Giving

3. The Exposition of Four Dharmas

4. The Merit of the Three Refuges

5. Four Dharmas Never to Be Abandoned

6. Advice for Bodhisatva Dharmaketu

7. Advice for Bodhisatva Jayamati

8. Sūtra Comparing Bodhicitta to Gold

9. Bodhisatva Maitreya’s Question about the Gift of Dharma

10. Four Summaries of the Dharma Spoken to the Nāga King Sāgara

11. The Stanza of Dependent Arising

12. The Heart Formula of Dependent Arising

II. MARVELOUS CHILDREN, WOMEN, AND GODS

13. Prediction of the Boy Brahmaśrī’s Future Buddhahood

14. Kṣemavatī’s Prediction to Future Buddhahood

15. The City Beggar Woman

16. An Old Woman’s Questions about Birth and Death

17. The Questions of Śrīmatī the Brahman Woman

18. The Questions of the Laywoman Gaṅgottarā

19. Brahmā Sahāṃpati’s Question

III. CONVERSATIONS WITH KINGS

20. Advice to King Prasenajit

21. Passage to the Next Life

22. Instructions for King Bimbisāra

23. Instructions for King Udayana

IV. THE RANGE OF THE BUDDHAS

24. Buddhas as Rare as a Grain of Golden Sand

25. Predictions on the Eve of the Great Final Nirvāṇa

Appendixes

1. Vacillations of Dating

2. Conventions

3. Tibetan Titles

4. Tibetan Concordances

5. Chinese Parallels

Abbreviations

Notes

Bibliography

Index

About the Author

Seated sandstone Buddha carved at Mathura about six or seven centuries after the Buddha (first–second centuries CE). Discovered at the ancient urban site of Ahicchatra, Uttar Pradesh, at present it is on display at the Indian Museum, Kolkata. We are deeply grateful to the original sponsors and craftsmen who joined together to produce this marvelous image nearly two thousand years ago. May their merits flourish for the benefit of all sentient beings. Śubham astu.

Dimensions 69 × 42 × 14 cm. Photo by Phongsathorn Buakhampan, courtesy of Fragile Palm Leaves Foundation.

Foreword

BY DZONGSAR JAMYANG KHYENTSE

ABOUT TWENTY YEARS AGO, my friend Albert told me about a Western scholar living in Thailand who was collecting Pali Buddhist texts. With my usual skepticism of Western academics, I thought this would be one of the many who shrug off the spiritual and traditional dimensions of Buddhism in the interests of intellect and science. But I had nothing to do that day, so I gave in to Albert’s plea to visit this man.

As soon as I met him, I was utterly humbled, moved, and inspired by Peter Skilling’s palpable love and dedication to saving precious Pali texts that might otherwise be lost forever. Here was a Westerner with no prior connection or cultural affinity with Buddhism, at least in this lifetime, who was doing far more to protect the Dharma than us lamas sitting on thrones and surrounded by our entourages.

From that time on, I have watched Peter Skilling’s work closely and, with the utmost admiration, have been delighted to converse with him about his extraordinary work, and I have benefited greatly from his sage advice over more than a decade. In 2012, Peter was appointed a Khyentse Foundation fellow in recognition of his outstanding contributions to Buddhist scholarship. It is rare individuals like the late Gene Smith and Peter Skilling who give me hope for the survival of the genuine Buddhadharma.

And so, I am deeply honored to contribute a short foreword to this splendid collection of twenty-five translations of complete sūtra texts from the Kangyur. Without the Kangyur—the actual words of the Buddha—there is no foundation to the Buddhadharma, and without translation into modern languages, this remarkable treasury of spiritual literature and guidance will be lost. The sūtras started out in Prakrit and then Sanskrit in ancient India; traveled to Tibet, where they were translated into Tibetan under the sponsorship of great Dharma kings; and now at last are being translated into English in order to preserve the Buddha’s teaching and make the Dharma widely available.

The texts translated in this volume belong to different genres, different formats, and different styles. Some are questions, some are expositions, and some are sūtras. The questioners include women and men, kings and monks, gods and bodhisattvas. They encounter the Buddha in all his confidence, radiance, and glory, which naturally leads to conversations and questions. This gives the contents of this book a wonderfully human context. We can imagine the laywoman Gangottara (translation 18) going home and telling her family, I went to see the Buddha today, and we talked about emptiness and whatnot. I didn’t quite agree with everything he said, but what a great talk we had!

In this volume, prose and verse join beautifully to celebrate the Dharma. The selections show how rich, how diverse, and how wonderful the Kangyur is—and how little we know about it. How can we pretend to know the scriptures and to know our Buddhist heritage when so little has been translated into modern languages?

And so, I am really pleased to welcome these translations by Peter Skilling. In this age of globalization, I’d like to think that one of the greatest benefits of the growing connectedness of life around the world is translation of ancient texts into modern languages. Only in this way can the living Dharma be translated into the daily lives of people around the world. Only thus can they learn to live and breathe the Dharma.

The Buddha advised us to transmit the Dharma in our own languages, and to tell the truth like it is without attachment to particular forms. To me, living in this day and age, that means we should make these priceless treasures of Buddhist thought accessible today in reliable English versions. Whether we like it or not, English is now the primary vehicle of thought and ideas around the world. For better or for worse, we Buddhists need to accept this reality and use this language to benefit humanity and all living beings. It’s not that English versions are any better than those in Thai, French, Russian, Japanese, or Esperanto, but they will initially preserve and spread the Dharma more widely that way. As a second step, of course, the translations should also be made available in other languages. Whatever the language, of course, the real thing is the gem, not the particular case or package that holds it.

These days we prattle a lot about pride in cultural heritage, but a lot of that is pious nonsense to justify our habitual patterns and attachment to our particular comfort zones. That can lead and has led to serious misconceptions, misinterpretations, and misunderstandings that distort and contort the genuine Buddhist teachings. As the Buddha tells a mighty Brahmā god in Brahmā Sahāṃpati’s Question (translation 19), the true Buddhadharma is the direct path that leads us straight to pristine awareness of our bodies, speech, thoughts, and mind. Anything that lacks this immaculate wisdom and compassion is a counterfeit Dharma.

Here are twenty-five texts, many of them never previously translated. But that doesn’t mean twenty-five different flavors, because each text is itself packed with many flavors and a wealth of powerful ideas and guidance. But no matter how many flavors, moods, styles, and contexts we might savor in each of these texts, they are also all pervaded by one single flavor that delivers the taste of complete freedom and liberation.

There’s another key message in these texts—that what you get out of anything depends on what you put into it—like the dear lady who used up all her meager resources on just a thimbleful of oil to light a lamp to celebrate the Buddha (translation 15). It didn’t matter how much money she had—whatever we can afford is enough—she will become a buddha. And there are other powerful messages throughout this volume.

The Dharma used to be written down on palm leaves and measured in bundles. That’s why Peter Skilling founded the Fragile Palm Leaves Foundation, a wonderful nonsectarian organization that preserves a large collection of palm-leaf manuscripts in Pali and supports the study of the Buddhist literature of Southeast Asia. Since Khyentse Foundation’s establishment nearly eighteen years ago, we have been proud to lend some modest support to this invaluable work.

In this volume we have just twenty-five precious bundles out of the 84,000 bundles of the Buddhadharma. I hope each one of these will be appreciated, savored, and enjoyed by readers around the world. May these pearls of wisdom lead readers to complete liberation.

Dzongsar Jamyang Khyentse

29 November 2018

Preface

IBEGAN TO STUDY Kanjur texts in the early 1970s, when I was ordained as a Theravāda monk at Wat Benjamabopit, Bangkok. The resident Tibetan monks, especially Thubten Kalsang (Washo Rinpoche), Geshé Losang Tengyé, Zasep Tulku, and Tenzin Drakpa, were always ready to teach me Tibetan and, as I went along, to answer my questions—as well as to prepare giant thermos flasks of Tibetan tea, assuredly a curious import to the sultry Thai environment. I had the luxury of being able to borrow volumes of the Otani reprint of the Peking Tripiṭaka from the temple library, and I had the leisure to browse through the Sūtra sections. My attention was caught by some of the shorter sūtras, and I began to translate them, writing them down in well-made notebooks from Japan, some with plaid covers or names like Mr. Richard.

Throughout this period, I was guided by a number of kalyāṇamitras, above all, by Bhikkhu Pāsādika, who, I am pleased to say, continues to offer guidance to this day, forty years on. It was Bhikkhu Pāsādika who introduced me to some of the key tools for the study of Indian texts in Tibetan translation, such as Sarat Chandra Das’s Tibetan-English Dictionary, Jäschke’s Tibetan-English Dictionary, the Sakaki edition of the Mahāvyutpatti, and Nagao’s Madhyāntavibhāga. I still remember how they lined the bhikkhu’s tidy desk in his simple kuṭi at Wat Cholaprathan, Nonthaburi, and how I opened them with awe. Later, in southern Thailand, in Nakhon Si Thammarat and in Phang-nga, Venerables Mahā Ghosānanda of Cambodia, Bhikkhu Nāgasena of India, and Bhikkhu Vimalo of Germany guided me in the study of Pali.

Years passed, and the first to read and comment on my notebooks was John Blofeld (1913–87), a pioneering author of books on Buddhism who in his later years taught at Chulalongkorn University and lived in the eastern suburbs of Bangkok. An Australian friend, the late Peter Swan of the Asian Institute of Technology, read through and made comments and suggestions, and at some stage his wife, Marasri Swan, typed the translations on the computer and presented me with huge floppy disks. Since then the files have been periodically updated, migrating from Macintosh to Macintosh and font to font, until the age of Unicode made life at least marginally easier. But for the most part the notebooks lay fallow year after year, and the computer files slept peacefully, untended. From time to time I added notes, but generally all was quiet. Some files succumbed to obsolescence and had to be retyped. Here Jak Cholvijarn stepped in to help.

The source texts, the dharmaparyāyas themselves, did not stand still. New editions of the Kanjur became available, and more remarkably, Sanskrit versions of some of the texts resurfaced. The most dramatic moment was when the Sanskrit text of the Questions of Śrīmatī the Brahman Woman (translation 17) was discovered in partial citation on a copperplate inscription in the Schøyen Collection, and a group of us in Oslo followed as it was deciphered by Gudrun Melzer. The Stanza of Dependent Arising (translation 11) is always in my mind when I study the small clay caityas that have been recovered in the tens of thousands from Buddhist sites across Asia. Here was a text that had a real ritual impact. Even more recently, Sanskrit versions of four or five of the sūtras were identified in a unique Indian manuscript from the Potala (translations 3, 7, 9, 16, 21) and were promptly published by Bhikṣuṇī Vinītā in an exemplary edition. The Sanskrit of the short Sāgaranāgarāja-paripṛcchā (translation 10) was published in Lhasa, and an important fragment of the Dānānuśaṃsa (translation 2) was identified in the Schøyen Collection. At the eleventh hour, when I visited Munich on the way back to Bangkok, tertön Jens-Uwe Hartmann directed me to Sanskrit fragments of the Predictions on the Eve of the Great Final Nirvāṇa (translation 25), and Hiromi Habata informed me of the existence of a Tocharian parallel.

Perhaps if I wait longer, Sanskrit versions of the rest of the sūtras will be recovered. But as years passed, I felt it was time to act. The first step was to go through the aging translations, to revise them, and to try to standardize the terminology from sūtra to sūtra. I was first helped with this by David Welsh, then at Oslo University. Later I had the pleasure and benefit of going through many of the translations word by word with John Canti in the Dordogne in France and at Lumbini in Nepal in 2013, and again in the Dordogne in 2014 and 2016. John’s long experience as a translator with the illustrious Padmakara team and later on as editor of the 84000 project, combined with his good-humored and refined sense of the English language, helped make the translations more presentable. In all of this I have received the generous support of the Khyentse Foundation, and it remains to offer my heartfelt thanks Dzongsar Khyentse Rinpoche, whose vision, outlook, and outreach are a continuous inspiration.

In April and May of 2014, I undertook a translation retreat at Sea to Sky Retreat Centre, near Whistler, British Columbia. I benefited from the warm and unstinting help of Michiko, Ron, and all the others there, and from the inspiration of the sky, the lake, the spirits, and the forests. During the retreat, progress was magical.

In Thailand, I enjoyed for forty years the inspiration and patronage of His Holiness the Supreme Patriarch Somdet Ñāṇasaṃvara, who passed away in 2013 at the age of one hundred. I am privileged to have the constant interest and support of Her Royal Highness Maha Chakri Sirindhorn. Otherwise, so many people have been resources and have offered help over the years that it is impossible to thank all of them individually. The final product, as if anything can be final, has been steered by the invisible forces of dependent origination in which every thought and action hinges on everything else.

Throughout my endeavors Saerji (Peking University) has been a constant and patient collaborator. For this I thank him profoundly. The scholars in the great maṇḍala of letters who have shared their knowledge and good humor over the years are too many to mention. From my prehistoric grade nine school days, I thank Jessica Porter (Ritter) for being my first inspiring English teacher. Special thanks are owed to Venerable Pāsādika, Cristina Scherrer-Schaub, Paul Harrison, Jens-Uwe Hartmann, Gao Ming Dao, Jens Braarvig, Kazunobu Matsuda, Klaus Wille, Helmut Eimer, John Canti, Leonard van der Kuijp, Prapod Assavavirulhakarn, Claudio Cicuzza, Christoph Cüppers, Lance Cousins, Richard Gombrich, Mark Allon, Richard Salomon, Mattia Salvini, Donald Lopez, Max Deeg, Nalini Balbir, Kuo Liying, Hwang Soonil, Olivier de Bernon, Bhikkhunī Dhammadinnā, Huang Jingrui and Uṣṇīṣā, Lilian Handlin, Mark Blum, Trent Walker, Henry Albery, and Christian Lammerts. My gratitude to Cangioli Che, Florence Koh, Christine Ng, and many others at the Khyentse Foundation is immense. I remember with thanks the unstinting generosity of Gene Smith and Hubert Durt. I could go on with this litany of names, carrying the thanks around the world on my long anabasis from Hanover, New Hampshire, to Toronto to New York to Vienna, where at age ten I first read about Buddhism in a textbook on world religions in the International School library. Since then I have benefited from good-spirited scholars and institutions in Paris, the Dordogne, Prague, Munich, Hamburg, Freiburg, Lausanne, Oslo, Oxford, Bristol, the two Cambridges, Berkeley, Stanford, Seattle, Vancouver, Toronto, Chicago, Rangoon and Yangon, Mandalay, Kathmandu, Lumbini, Poona and Pune, Bombay and Mumbai, Delhi, Sarnath, Calcutta and Kolkata, Singapore, Sydney, Colombo, Hong Kong, Beijing, Shanghai, Taipei, Seoul, Kyoto, Hachioji, and Tokyo—all the wonderful places where communities of scholars nurture knowledge and freely share it with others.

My gratitude goes to Pratapaditya Pal and Michael Willis, and to Phairot Singbun and Bunchar Phongphit of the Buddhadāsa Indapañño Archives, Bangkok, for stimulating conversations over the years. I thank the Numata Foundation and the Henry Ginsburg Fund and all the institutions and individuals who have offered their time and assistance.

For their constant support I thank Dave and Jane Skilling, Arun Karnbun, Suriya Homchat, Siriwan Karnbun, Somneuk Hongprayoon, and all the others at Fragile Palm Leaves; Chanwit, Arthid, Natchapol, and all those at Chulalongkorn University. Last but by no means least, I offer profound thanks to my parents, Gordon and Sally Skilling, who gave me their unstinting support and love throughout my long and unpredictable pilgrimage. And I thank my editor, David Kittelstrom, for the patience and insight that have made this a better book.

The cultural translation of a Buddhist literary, monastic, and ritual culture from India to Tibet was an extraordinary human endeavor, an early forerunner of the cultural projects of UNESCO. The Tibetan Dharma kings invited top-notch Buddhist scholars from India to Tibet, and in collaboration with generations of bright and dedicated Tibetan scholars, they laid the groundwork of lexical and grammatical styles and set to work straightaway. They did not take the system they had devised as set in stone but rather revised and improved it as they went along.

I am grateful to the Dharma kings and the project they initiated.

I am grateful to the Indian masters, the upādhyāyas who traveled across the snowy mountains from India to Tibet.

I am grateful to generations of Tibetan scholars and intellectuals who worked together with Indian masters to produce the unique body of translations that make up the Kanjurs and Tanjurs.

I am grateful to those who collected, edited, and copied the translated texts to make the great Tibetan collections.

I dedicate the merit from this work to my preceptors and teachers, to my father and mother, to my relations, and to all sentient beings. May they achieve their goals, and may they quickly reach unsurpassed insight.

Two thousand years after they were compiled, give or take a century, and over one thousand years since they were translated into the Tibetan language, I have retranslated these sūtras. I, an ignorant person, have attempted to render them into the English language, which for better or for worse has become the premier medium of communication around the world. I have tried to understand their linguistic and historical contexts. I thank all those who over the years have unstintingly given help and advice. The mistakes are all mine, and mistakes there must be. I apologize for them, and I hope that these translations will inspire future generations and that the lineage of the three precious jewels will flourish.

Śubham astu.

Nandapurī, 16 January 2564/2021

Introduction

1. Prologue

THIS BOOK is a collection, an anthology, of twenty-five sūtras translated from the Tibetan Kanjur. The Kanjur is one of the world’s three great collections of Buddhist scripture: the Tibetan, the Chinese, and the Pali canons. The collected teachings of the Buddha translated into Tibetan, the Kanjur is made up of Indian texts translated by teams of learned Indian and Tibetan scholars over a period from about twelve to nineteen centuries after the Buddha’s nirvāṇa (between the eighth and about the fourteenth centuries CE). Many of these texts are lost in the original Indic languages and were not translated into Chinese or any other language. That is, they are preserved only in Tibetan. Even when a particular text does exist in Sanskrit or in Chinese translation, the Tibetan translation represents a particular moment in the life of the text. Even when the Tibetan, Sanskrit, and Chinese are close, they are not, and cannot be, identical. They are different recensions, different iterations, of what is ideally the same text.

Let us reflect on this: The Tibetan Kanjur preserves accurate translations of approximately 270 Buddhist sūtra texts, some of them extremely long, the collaborative work of Indian and Tibetan scholars. This major and important collection of Indian texts has been preserved in Tibetan but has scarcely been translated into English or other modern languages. This lack of translation leaves a large lacuna in the materials available for the global study of Buddhist history, literature, philology, and philosophy. This raises the question: Can we appreciate or evaluate Indian Buddhist literature without taking account of the Tibetan corpus? Can we write satisfactory histories of Indian Buddhist literature without knowing more about the Tibetan collections?

We human beings are fond of certainties and conclusions. Nearly all the details of the history of Buddhist literature are, however, uncertain—date, authorship, provenance, production, circulation, reception—all of them. From the beginning, shortly after the Master’s great decease, his followers redacted his teachings orally and organized them orally, through memorization and recitation. The oral canon developed for three or four hundred years before it began to be written down. I suspect that the process of writing started out with individual texts or groups of texts, rather than with single projects to transfer a complete Tripiṭaka from oral to written medium in a single go, despite the fact that some of the chronicles and their modern interpreters might suggest so.

Buddhist history begins with narratives of orality, and these narratives challenge, or even render invalid, the received notions of prehistory and history. Prehistory is defined as the period before the development of writing systems and written records. This definition is inadequate insofar as it assumes that the only reliable history is written history, and it ignores or devalues other technologies of history, such as oral records or the study of the material record. Many societies have rich oral histories, and well into the twentieth century, indigenous communities from Borneo to Baffin Island preserved oral records that not only related a community’s longue durée but also mapped their territories or known worlds in oral geographies of bodies of water, plains, mountains, and sacred sites—myths, stories, and songs that celebrate the features and life of the land. Today we look at these vanishing or vanished oralities as great and nearly impossible feats of memory, but is this not because our own memories, our own mental capacities and abilities, have changed? They have shrunk, they have withered, and we begin, or are already well on the way to, complacently outsourcing the work of memory to commercial conglomerates. These oralities were a vital part of the identity and the soul of the people. It may seem ironic, but it is good fortune that these records from the dawn of humankind’s literary accomplishments were eventually recorded in writing, before the practices of orality died out or were altered by the encounter with modernity. The stories were not simply written down: they were crafted and refashioned into the written media of sagas and epics. Writing inevitably transforms.

Early Buddhist texts share in the poetry of prehistory. The Italian word for history is storia, and the French and English words for history also mean story: when all is said, history is but a story, a tale told by the ignorant, full of sound and fury, signifying less than we fondly imagine. This story starts from an unknowable beginning (in Sanskrit, anavarāgra), and its pre- or proto-phases are scarcely retrievable. No specimens of everyday writing—notes, drafts, letters, diaries—survive from the earliest periods of written culture in South Asia, but as decades and centuries passed, burgeoning corpora of inscriptions, poems, dramas, and religious texts were produced. No early Indian books survive in India itself; it is an anomaly that the earliest Indian manuscripts come from outside of India proper, from Gandhāra, Afghanistan, and Central Asia. This is not a result of social convulsions—although these have certainly taken their toll—but of the relentless erosion of time. Whenever dynastic or economic centers declined, relocated, or disappeared, so also cities, markets, trade routes, and religious centers declined, relocated, or disappeared, and this happened not just once or twice but periodically and repeatedly. Libraries and library cultures need steady support systems; they need long-term patronage and constant maintenance. What happened to the books and manuscripts when monasteries or cultural centers were abandoned? We do not know.

This story has been told before, and many times. In the discussion of Buddhist history that follows, I prefer to let the old warhorses rest in their stables and avoid the familiar dichotomies of Hīnayāna/Śrāvakayāna/early Buddhism versus later Buddhism/Mahāyāna, not to speak of the threefold division of Śrāvakayāna/Mahāyāna/Vajrayāna. I do not see much point in repeating the familiar narratives, the well-worn plots and set-piece battles of the orthodox accounts.¹ Buddhism wears robes of many colors, and it loses a lot when painted in dull monochromes or when forced into stark dualities or tripartite periodizations. I may use an unfamiliar terminology, coupling, for example, Vaitulya with Mahāyāna, or describing texts as dharmaparyāya rather than sūtra.² There are reasons for these choices, which I mention further on. Generally speaking, I hope to open new ways of investigating early Buddhist history by bringing attention to ancient but lesser-used categories than those that have been adopted in modern Buddhist studies. I aim for a holistic account that focuses on the shared core rather than easy segmentations into discrete sects or broad periodizations into Hīnayāna, Mahāyāna, and Vajrayāna. Buddhist schools of thought developed not in isolation but in conversation and competition.

Later in this introduction, I consider how Buddhist texts were transmitted, how they progressed from the spoken to the written word, from Indian language originals to Tibetan translations, how a body of Buddhist texts migrated across the Himalayas and settled down in a very different language family.³ This is an enormously complicated story. Originating in deep orality, it is a tale without a text, a historical drama without a script, and this is not the place to tell the long and fascinating storia, even if I knew how. I hope to provide an up-to-date background for readers, and to this end I try to give a no-frills account taking into consideration the recent manuscript discoveries that have made a big change in how we look at Buddhist history.

A study like this ought to pay homage to the trope of incomplete knowledge and point out that the field and the interpretations of the field are in a state of perpetual flux, and as a result, our knowledge is incomplete. This trope is accurate enough, because knowledge can never be complete. Knowledge always strives for perfection. Here I am writing about the Kanjur, about the translation of twenty-five out of a total of about 270 sūtras, a handful of leaves in the great and ancient forest of the Buddha’s teachings. My knowledge, my perspective, cannot be complete, and I am not inclined to pretend to an omniscient command of the field. The ancients expressed the fullness, the gestalt of the teachings of the Buddha, as 84,000 units of teaching. But, as the Fortunate One points out to Sāgara, the lord of the nāgas, in translation 10, four summaries of the Dharma encompass all of the 84,000 units of teaching:

All compounded dharmas are impermanent.

All impure dharmas bring suffering.

All dharmas are without self.

Nirvāṇa is peaceful.

With these four summaries there arises insight into the inexhaustible teachings of the bodhisatvas, great beings.

This is more manageable. The teachings of the Buddhas are vast and incommensurable, and the scope of the buddhas is beyond our scope. We need to focus on core teachings, summaries, and outlines to bring our ideas and practice into focus.

This book belongs to a series called Classics of Indian Buddhism. How is it possible to call these Tibetan texts Indian classics? Certain Mahāyāna sūtras are undisputed classics of Indian Buddhist literature and indeed of world literature. Idealistic epiphanies presented through innovative metaphysical dialogues and narratives, they are imperishable classics of the human spirit.⁴ There are no universal criteria for defining classic or for settling a list of classics. Like canon, classic is a subjective category, context bound, autonomous, and indeterminate. Classics are texts (or artifacts or practices) that individuals or communities privilege according their own criteria (taste, proclivities, needs).

The reader will soon see that I read the Tibetan texts as classical texts of Indian Buddhism, as Indian compositions, and I believe that the Tibetan scholars looked at them in a similar way. In the Kanjur (as well as the Tanjur), each translation is introduced, set apart, by the opening phrase, in the language of India, which is followed by the Indian (usually Sanskrit) title written in Tibetan letters. The translation work was an intellectual collaboration between accomplished masters from India and learned Tibetans. At the same time, in terms of resources, patronage, and production, the Kanjur was a Tibetan effort. The Dharma kings, the nobles, and the Tibetan intelligentsia invited Śākyamuni Buddha to cross the mighty mountains and settle down in the Land of Snows in the shape of his Dharma body—of his bka’, his authoritative words. They then proceeded to conscientiously and methodically translate these words into the language of Tibet so that the sage of the Śākyas could settle down and feel at home. The opening formula in the language of India with its Sanskrit title is followed by in the language of Bod (Tibet) and the translated Tibetan title. In this way, the Kanjur has a double identity. We may call it Indo-Tibetan and celebrate its hybridity.

Translation must have begun in India during the Buddha’s lifetime: the earliest translations would have been oral renderings within the Middle Indic family, from Prakrit to Prakrit.⁵ In a Vinaya passage about which much has been written, two brahmans ask the Fortunate One whether they may render the Dharma into Vedic chandas; the Buddha turns down the proposal and authorizes his followers to transmit his teachings in their own dialects.⁶ Texts started out in unprocessed, living Prakrits; as they circulated they underwent progressive processing—conversion and translation—into other Prakrits, including Pali and the canonical language of the Sāṃmitīya school. Some of them were eventually recast in hybrid or in standard Sanskrit. It is the nature of things (dharmatā) that texts did not and do not stand still; they need to be regularly updated. This fulfills both the religious urge to participate in the creation of a perfect text and the social urge to edit or revise texts to ensure that they are comprehensible. The translation of Indian Buddhist texts was a grand and polyglot enterprise, and over the centuries a single text may well have progressed through several dialects or languages. The power of the Buddha’s teachings and the fame of his words (kalyāṇo kittisaddo) were remarkable, and they drew wider and wider circles of attention. Texts traveled across borders, and by the second century CE at the latest they began to be translated into Chinese, with the result that the earliest extant transcultural translations are those preserved in Chinese. Chinese Buddhists developed a culture of compiling catalogues of translations that give an idea of what was translated, when, where, and by whom. In Central Asia, the Dharma was translated into languages like Khotanese, Uighur, Tocharian, Tangut, and a range of others including Mongolian. Central Asian Buddhism was a multifaceted and dynamic force for over a millennium.

The Kanjur may be a cultural fusion, composite and heterogeneous, but honoring these texts as Indian classics does not in any way diminish the Kanjur’s status as a treasure of Tibetan culture. It goes without saying that all cultures are composite and heterogeneous. The Kanjur stands in its own right as an extraordinary accomplishment of Tibetan Buddhists created over several hundreds of years and written, carved, wrapped, stored, and revered with care through the centuries till today. A vast body of knowledge was transferred from India to the Land of Snows. The process began by the seventh century CE, if not earlier, and continued, with periods of disruption, up to the thirteenth century and beyond. The result was the two collections called the Kanjur and Tanjur, the collected translations of the Buddha’s words and the collected of commentaries and treatises by later scholars. The Kanjur alone takes up over a hundred traditional volumes (pothi), amounting to an estimated 70,000 pages. The Tanjur takes up 224 volumes. In short, the production of the Kanjur and Tanjur was a stupendous human accomplishment. The translation project sponsored by the Dharma kings was certainly one of the greatest planned and sustained cultural exchanges in early world history.

This exchange, this transfer and transmission, was both cultural and spiritual. The Buddhist texts were carried to Tibet not only in letter but also in spirit, to constitute an enduring monument of culture in all its meanings. Buddhist thought, Buddhist philosophy, and Buddhist ethical and meditation practices were all part of the package. Renowned Indian masters like Śāntarakṣita and his pupil Kamalaśīla crossed the Himalayas to help establish Buddhism in Tibet, to be followed by a regular stream of scholars in the centuries to follow. Tibetans in quest of manuscripts and teachings crisscrossed the ranges from Kashmir to Bengal, and Indians traveled to the high Tibetan plateau. The formidable snow mountains both separated and joined the two regions.

The Kanjur and Tanjur are not just collections of texts. They are important records of human and cultural history—a shared heritage of India, the Himalayan regions (including the Kathmandu Valley), and the Tibetan plateau. The prestige of the Kanjur and Tanjur was such that they were translated into Mongolian, and such that in China opulent imperial editions were produced in Beijing by visionary rulers like the Yunglo, Wanli, Kanzi, and Qianlong emperors. By the nineteenth century after the Buddha (the fourteenth century CE), if not earlier, the Kanjur and Tanjur were recognized across Central and East Asia as primary resources for the study of the Buddhadharma.

By the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries CE, at the western end of the Eurasian continent, the frontiers of knowledge were expanding to inspire new intellectual concerns and interests, and the encounter with the cultures and religions in the east was very much part of this. One of the new fields of interest was the scriptures and literature of non-European religions, including those of India and Tibet. The grand pioneers of European Kanjur-Tanjur studies were the Hungarian scholar Alexander Csoma de Kőrös and the Frenchman Léon Feer—those were the days when giants strode the Earth. Feer wrote of the former that by making known the vast sacred literature of Tibet, Csoma cast light on a part of the history of the human spirit that up to then was unknown.⁷ In the modern period, in the twentieth century, the Kanjur and the Tanjur crossed the great oceans to spread around the world, and the Tibetan scriptures are now a world resource.

2. Canon Formation

Intangible and Unquantifiable Records

THIS IS a collection of sūtras attributed to the Buddha, but the Buddha did not write down a single word. He did not leave behind any written records, either inscribed by himself or recorded by his direct disciples. Gautama the Buddha did not produce the scriptures that we know today, but he inspired them. Gautama the Buddha did not leave any tangible traces behind, to the extent that, from the outset of modern Europe’s encounter with Buddhism, scholars have periodically questioned whether or not the Buddha even existed. The quest for the material traces of philosophers, poets, or religious figures strikes me, however, as rather futile. What evidence is there for the existence of Socrates, Plato, or Pyrrho? Of Homer or of Ovid? They have biographies, but they are later; there are busts and portraits of them, but they are much later. Are the canonical greats of antiquity mere figureheads? Are they naught but fictions and phantoms? What, then, are we to make of the ancient philosophers of India and China? Does the near total absence of empirical evidence for any of them mean that none of them ever existed? What, after all, are the limits of empiricism?

This line of thought ignores the evidence that really counts—the intangible evidence of their ideas. Great thinkers leave behind coherent philosophies, bodies of ideas, poetic works with their own distinctive traits. These corpora may have been produced or melded together by sympathetic followers, but these corpora are what we have—the legacies of great thoughts and great and unmistakable ideas.

The relation between the physical person and the thinking person is intangible and not an easy one to determine. The question recalls a celebrated stanza of the Diamond Sūtra, where the Buddha says:

Whoever saw me through my physical form,

whoever followed me through the sound of my voice,

engages in the wrong endeavors,

Those people will not see me.

A Buddha is visible through the Dharma,

a Realized One has the Dharma for a body,

but the nature of Dharma being unknowable by sensory consciousness,

it cannot be known by sensory consciousness.⁸

In the same Perfection of Wisdom That Rends Like a Thunderbolt, the Fortunate One speaks to Venerable Subhūti:

However, Subhūti, if someone were to say that the Realized One goes or comes or stands or sits or lies down, he does not understand the meaning of what I have preached. Why is that? He who is called the Realized One (tathāgata), Subhūti, has not come (āgata) from anywhere, nor has he gone (gata) anywhere. That is why he is called the Realized, Worthy, and Perfectly Awakened One.

Sūtras were not composed with historicist agendas. To seek intellectual figures through material evidence, to expect them to leave behind material traces, is ill considered. It is like trying to trace the passage of a fish through the water or the trail of a bird in the sky.

One whose defilements are exhausted,

Who is unattached to food,⁹

Whose range is liberation,

Empty and signless—

His track is as hard to follow

As that of birds in the sky.¹⁰

Or,

Defilements exhausted,

not the least attached to food,

liberation is his range,

empty and signless—

hard to follow is his track,

like that of birds in the sky.¹¹

Allow me to leap from ancient India to ancient China for a moment. Laozi’s famous treatise on the way, the Daode jing, opens with:

As for the Way, the Way that can be spoken of is not the constant Way;

As for names, the name that can be named is not the constant name.

The nameless is the beginning of the ten thousand things;

The named is the mother of the ten thousand things.

Therefore, those constantly without desires, by this means will perceive its subtlety.

Those constantly with desires, by this means will see only that which they yearn for and seek.

These two together emerge;

They have different names yet they’re called the same;

That which is even more profound than the profound—

The gateway of all subtleties.¹²

This translation of Laozi is from the Mawangdui texts that were discovered in Changsha, Hunan province, in 1973. Written in ink on silk, they were excavated in the tomb of a nobleman who was buried in 375 BE (168 BCE). Included among the texts found in the grave were two copies of the Daode jing,¹³ which would have been copied before 168 BCE. Hence they were recognized as the oldest versions of the classic, older by centuries than any other manuscripts then available. The Mawangdui Laozi manuscripts are more securely dated than any Buddhist text; even the Gandhari manuscripts can only be dated approximately through paleography or through radiocarbon or thermoluminescence. But the story does not end here. In 1993, at Guodian, Hubei province, archaeologists excavated bamboo slips inscribed with what is at present estimated to be an even older recension of the Daode jing. None of the grave goods bear any dates, but the bamboo-slip manuscript is estimated to date to about 250 years after the Buddha’s nirvāṇa (300 BCE).¹⁴

Scholars do not agree on how the Daode jing was composed or whether it had a single or multiple authors;¹⁵ the name Laozi means simply old sage, and one school of thought holds that the old sage never existed.¹⁶ As noted above, Gautama Buddha and others have shared similar fates. But are the cases of the Sage of the Śākyas and the Sage of the Dao the same? It strikes me that they are not. In the case of the Buddha, autobiographical and biographical passages are embedded in the earliest documents, the Vinayas and Āgamas, many of them presented as direct speech, in the first person. The Buddha engages in debates, sometimes quite long, about ethics and philosophy. And his distinctive personality shines through throughout. His uniqueness is announced in the statement:

Bhikkhus, there is one person who arises in the world for the welfare of many people, for the happiness of many people, out of compassion for the world, for the good, welfare, and happiness of devas and human beings. Who is that one person? The Tathāgata, the Arahant, the Perfectly Enlightened One. This is that one person who arises in the world . . . for the good, welfare, and happiness of devas and human beings.¹⁷

With the passage of time, the Buddha’s biography was elaborated with legends that illustrate his awesome talents and amazing skills. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, archaeologists identified the towns, cities, and countries and the rivers and mountains mentioned in the Buddhist texts, and some of the monasteries or sites were identified in ancient inscriptions. All of this fortified and gave a strong sense of presence to Gautama’s life story.

Today we know the Buddha and his teaching not through the founder’s pensées or écrits but through his speech as written down long after his passing. Nonetheless, the Buddha’s speech, the Buddhavacana, is invested with extraordinary qualities and is a locus of immense power and authority:

Words may decay,

And suns and moons may fall;

Heaven and earth may be filled,

Leaving no space to move;

Fire may change into water,

And water into fire;

And the great ocean may dry up—

But the Tathāgata’s words

Will remain forever true.¹⁸

The transmission of the Buddha’s teaching, of the Dharma, began during his lifetime with his first sermon, Turning the Wheel of the Dharma (dharmacakrapravartana). The wheel is a central metaphor for the dynamic activity of a buddha’s teaching. Śākyamuni’s Dharma wheel began to turn in the Deer Park near Vārāṇasī. This does not refer to a physical wheel or to an abstracted, symbolic wheel. It refers to a process of transmission that began when insight arose in the mind of Kauṇḍinya, one of the five monks who earlier on had accompanied Śākyamuni during his grueling ascetic practices. That is, the Dharma of teaching was substantiated into the Dharma of insight in Kauṇḍinya’s own stream of consciousness. In this way, the wheel is more than a metaphor for the teaching: it is also a metaphor for the first moments of realization or, in scholastic terms, the first moment of the transformative path known as the path of vision (darśanamārga). In this vision, an individual sees the truth, the four truths, and becomes an ārya, a noble one.¹⁹ The wheel is a passage from the unawakened to the awakened state.

The wheel soon became a visual symbol of the Buddha’s first sermon and an enduring feature of Buddhist iconography. Wheels were erected on high pillars, and many elaborate stone wheels were carved in ancient Siam, in the land of Dvāravatī. The Prakrit pillar inscription from Phanigiri, Telangana, records the setting up of a dharmacakra by the royal physician.²⁰ There is a long eulogy of the wheel of the Dharma in the Lalitavistara.²¹ In the Questions of Śrīmatī the Brahman Woman (translation 17), Śrīmatī praises the Fortunate One for turning the wheel of emptiness, the wheel of release, the wheel of certitude, the inconceivable wheel, the unturning wheel, the peerless wheel, the wheel of things as they are, the wheel of the unborn, the wheel of the nonsubstantial, the wheel of no characteristics, the wheel of space.²² She then fills her hands with sandalwood powder, sprinkles it over the Fortunate One’s feet, and declares, Through this root of virtue, may I in the future turn a wheel of Dharma just like this. Her deed shows us how past acts of merit and devotion and future supreme cognition of full awakening are linked. Śrīmatī is inspired to become a buddha herself, and over the longue durée she will preserve and perpetuate the lineage of the buddhas. The Fortunate Eon Sūtra (Bhadrakalpika-sūtra) records how each of one thousand bodhisatvas served one or another of the thousand past buddhas and made the aspiration to awakening.²³ Simple acts of devotion are important steps on the path to buddhahood.

The transmission continued throughout Śākyamuni’s teaching career, during which the practice of commentary began. During the forty-five years of the Buddha’s career, the nuns and monks—and also laywomen and laymen—joined in to teach the Dharma, sometimes in the Buddha’s presence, sometimes in the city where he was staying, and sometimes in distant towns or cities. Even during the lifetime of the Master, his disciples spread over a large area, and administratively independent centers were established. In this way, from the time of the Buddha himself, the Dharma was transmitted not only by the Buddha but also autonomously among others, from disciple to disciple. Monks and nuns explained and amplified the statements of the Master and initiated new aspirants into the order.

A classic example of the train of transmission is that from the Buddha to Aśvajit to Śāriputra to Maudgalyāyana (see box). Initially, Śāriputra does not meet the Buddha himself; the Master’s teaching is transmitted though the direct impression of seeing Aśvajit—the impression of presence—and then through their meeting, at which Śāriputra hears the ye dharmā stanza.

After his awakening, the Buddha went to the Deer Park near Vārāṇasī to share his newfound insight with the five former ascetics who had followed him in his practice of austerities. Then he went back to Uruvilvā, where he had practiced along the banks of the Nerañjarā River, and converted the three Kāśyapa brothers and their followers. Next he went to stay in the outskirts of Rājagṛha, capital of Magadha, where King Bimbisāra visited him and realized stream entry, the first stage of the path to holiness. At that time, two young brahmans who had set out in quest of the truth had settled along with 250 other seekers near the city to practice under a master named Sañjaya. One was named Upatiṣya, the other Kolita, but soon enough they would be renowned as Śāriputra and Maudgalyāyana, two of Śākyamuni Buddha’s foremost disciples. The two brahmans made a pact with each other: Whichever of us attains the way first will return and tell the other.

One day, Upatiṣya observed a mendicant monk as he approached on his almsround. He was mindful and self-composed, and his noble bearing attracted the young brahman, who thought, Surely this monk is a worthy arhant! Upatiṣya followed the monk and waited for an appropriate moment after he had finished collecting alms. Then he approached him and asked: Who, O monk, is your teacher? And what does he teach? The monk answered with a four-line verse:

ye dharmā hetuprabhavā, hetūn teṣān tathāgato hy avadat,

teṣāñ ca yo nirodha, evaṃ vādī mahāśramaṇaḥ.

The dharmas that have arisen from a cause,

their causes the Tathāgata proclaims

as well as their cessation.

Such is the teaching of the Great Ascetic.†

The instant he heard this stanza, Upatiṣya realized the way: he became a streamwinner. He uttered the following verse:

This is the truth: even if that were all,

you have attained the state where is no sorrow

that we for many times ten thousand ages

have let pass by unseen.

Upatiṣya returned to the ashram. He had been transformed, and when Kolita saw him, he asked, O Upatiṣya—your face is radiant and calm. Have you found the way? Upatiṣya’s reply was to repeat the same verse:

The dharmas that have arisen from a cause,

their causes the Tathāgata proclaims

as well as their cessation.

Such is the teaching of the Great Ascetic.

And on the spot Kolita became a streamwinner as well. The two brahmans, followed by the rest of the 250 seekers, set out to see the Buddha, who was staying in the Bamboo Grove. The Fortunate One saw them coming from afar and announced, Look, O monks! These two will become my foremost disciples.

And so it was. Upatiṣya became Śāriputra, the disciple foremost in wisdom, and Kolita became Maudgalyāyana, the disciple foremost in supernormal powers.

† Tathāgata and Great Ascetic are both epithets of the Buddha.

The monk who taught the stanza to Śāriputra, Aśvajit, was one of the five former ascetics who became the Buddha’s first five disciples. Aśvajit imparted to Śāriputra a summary of the Great Śramaṇa’s teaching, the ye dharmā hetuprabhavā stanza, which is featured below in translations 11 and 12. This stanza is the epitome of the teaching, the heart of dependent arising and of the four truths of the noble ones.

The Verses of the Senior Nuns (Therīgāthā) includes instructive examples of nuns transmitting the Dharma to other nuns. Paṭācārā describes her experience of awakening in five verses. These link immediately to five verses describing how Paṭācārā’s teaching inspires thirty bhikkhunīs to attain freedom from the taints.²⁴ The Buddha declares Paṭācārā to be foremost among the nuns who were expert in the Vinaya. As Norman and Masset note, the impact of Paṭācārā’s teaching is mentioned by several other therīs.²⁵ Paṭācārā exemplifies the influence of realized bhikkhunīs and how they transmitted the Dharma to other women.

Paṭācārā

Ploughing the field with ploughs, sowing seeds in the ground, nourishing wives and children, young men find wealth.

Why do I, possessed of virtuous conduct, complying with the teaching of the teacher, not obtain quenching? I am not slack, nor puffed-up.

I washed my feet and paid attention to the waters: and seeing the foot-water come flowing downhill from the high land to the low land, then I collected my mind, as [one collects] a noble thoroughbred horse.

Then I took a lamp, and I entered my cell. I inspected the bed and sat on the couch.

Then I took a needle and drew out the wick. The complete release of my mind was like the quenching of the lamp.

Thirty bhikkhunīs

"Having taken pestles, young men grind corn; nourishing wives and children, young men find wealth.

Do the Buddha’s teaching; having done it one does not repent. Wash your feet quickly and sit down on one side. Intent on peace of mind, do the Buddha’s teaching.

They heard her utterance, Paṭācārā’s teaching; they washed their feet and sat down on one side. Intent on peace of mind, they did the Buddha’s teaching.

In the first watch of the night they recollected that they had been born before; in the middle watch of the night they purified the divine eye; in the last watch of the night they tore asunder the mass of darkness [of ignorance].

Standing up they paid homage to her feet. "We have taken your advice; we shall dwell honouring you like the thirty deities honoring Indra, who is unconquered in battle. We have the triple knowledge; we are without āsavas.

The Buddha’s words were memorized, standardized, edited, and transmitted by trained specialists, and eventually they were written down, at the latest five centuries after the Buddha’s demise (first century BCE). This is the date for the writing down of the scriptures suggested by the Sri Lankan chronicles and also the date of the oldest of the recently discovered manuscripts from Gandhāra; that is, there is a convergence of the Lankan legend with the Gandhāran manuscript evidence. Tāranātha puts the event later, in the time of Kaniṣka, but he is referring to the writing down of a complete Tripiṭaka. He also says that some scriptures had already been written down by that time.²⁶ By this time there were multiple and distinct lines of transmission, and what developed into Buddhist canons were diverse collections in diverse dialects of Middle Indic.

From the time of King Aśoka, the stream of Buddhist practice and thought flowed across India and beyond and branched into different channels. Through natural circumstances—the forces of change (anityatābala) and the diversity of human character (nānādhātutā)—different monastic orders or schools (nikāya) developed, eighteen according to a traditional count (Pali aṭṭhārasanikāya). New ideas, practices, and schools are natural turns in the social history of religious bodies.

The nikāyas were not sects, as Heinz Bechert and others have pointed out:²⁷ The translation ‘sect’ is hardly adequate. . . . I would rather prefer to use the term ‘denomination.’ Modern writers seem to use the word unconsciously or unproblematically, as an inevitable feature of the terminological fittings of religious studies (which occupies rather badly appointed rooms crammed with heavy Victorian cabinets alongside uncomfortable modern furnishings). Bechert also points out that the number eighteen is a conventional number that probably never represented the actual number.²⁸ Assuredly, the eighteen schools never existed at the same time or in the same place, and every school did not have the same weight in the history of Buddhism. It is possible that some vihāras had collections of texts and documentation for most of the schools, but we do not know whether this was really the case. When Vasubandhu, Candrakīrti, or Bhāviveka report on the scriptures of all schools or on eighteen schools, did they have access to such documents?

If nikāya must be translated, and I am not certain it is not best treated as an untranslatable, I prefer the renderings order or school. Order makes the monastic nature of the nikāyas clear, while school brings out their role as lineages of training and of philosophical thought (their Abhidharmas). Did the monastic orders try to mobilize the laity ideologically, or did they do this only materially, by channeling donations? Did they actively propagate sectarian religion? Questions like these seem impossible to answer from the available sources, although there does not seem to be any evidence for it.²⁹ The word sect may, however, be appropriate for the modern period, at least within the Theriyas within which several sects formed in the twentieth century, and in Siam. Cousins describes three trends that he characterizes as reformism, ultimatism, and modernism.³⁰ Beginning in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries CE, saṅgha reforms led to a "growth of reformist fraternities (nikāya)" in Sri Lanka, Burma, Thailand, and Cambodia. These modern developments have expanded the referential scope of the word nikāya beyond the historical eighteen nikāyas to include local or regional fraternities of the Theravaṃsa like the Shwegyin nikāya in Burma, the Thammayut nikāya in Siam and elsewhere in Southeast Asia, the Amarapura nikāya in Ceylon, and so on. In the lived religion of these societies, nikāya most frequently refers to the more recent and active fraternities.³¹ In Thai nikāya may also refer to the sects of other religions.³²

Each school would have recited and cherished its own recension of the Buddhavacana. Does this mean there were piṭakas in eighteen languages? Possibly: Yijing’s (義凈, 635–713) foreword to his Record of the Inner Law Sent Home from the South Seas (T. 2125),³³ Bhāviveka’s Tarkajvālā,³⁴ and other documents suggest that this was the case. We do not know. We have samples of the scriptures of four, the four main schools of northeastern India, plus at least one more, the Gandhari Prakrit of the northwest. Given the local and temporal specificity of the schools, I suspect there were more rather than fewer languages.

There are texts that suggest reasons for the use of different languages. A narrative related in several texts, including the Chapter on Medicine (Bhaiṣajyavastu) of the Mūlasarvāstivādin Vinaya,³⁵ relates how Śākyamuni taught the four truths of the noble ones to the Four Great Kings, each in his own language: two of them in the Ārya language, that is to say, Sanskrit, one in Piśācī, a Prakrit, and one in the Dravidian or Tamil language.³⁶ A remarkable feature is that the story