tirety is that of the Theravadins, written in the Pali
language. It shows that some schools kept their scrip-
tures in ancient tongues, but in the extant fragments
of other schools’ canons it is apparent that a contin-
uous process of Sanskritization was under way. The
use of various Indian languages is another sign of the
absence of any central authority. In one sense all Bud-
dhist scriptures, even those in Pali, are translations; it
is not known what language(s) the Buddha himself
spoke, but he is supposed to have sanctioned his fol-
lowers’ use of their own dialects for transmitting his
teachings. The Buddhist canon is thus thoroughly
multilingual. Parts of the canons of many Indian
schools are extant in Chinese or Tibetan translation,
as well as in Sanskrit fragments displaying different
degrees of regularization from earlier Prakritic or
Middle Indic dialect forms to classical Sanskrit. Thus
the vinayas of six schools have survived, as well as
parts of the sutra-pitakasof the Sarvastivadins, the
DHARMAGUPTAKAs, and the MAHASAMGHIKAs. Abhid-
harmatexts from various schools, in particular the
Theravadins and the Sarvastivadins, also survive. But
while manuscripts continue to be found, the greater
part of the Indian Buddhist canons has no doubt van-
ished forever. Buddhist teachings, which emphasize
the inevitability of transformation and loss, have
themselves succumbed to it.
Even when it was fully extant, it is unlikely that
many Buddhists ever knew their canon in its entirety,
as a Muslim might know the Qur’an or a Christian the
Bible. The Buddhist scriptures are simply too exten-
sive, so that most members of the order would have
been familiar with and used only a small number of
them, a functional partial canon as opposed to an ideal
complete one. Scholars also believe that Buddhists
belonging to different mainstream or S ́ravakayana
schools would have accepted much of what the other
groups transmitted as canonical, agreeing on the broad
principles, and differing only on particular points of
doctrine, and, more importantly, on points of monas-
tic discipline. Some of the most heated disputes in the
history of the order were over the vinaya. With the ad-
vent of the MAHAYANA, with its prodigious outpour-
ing of new scriptures, the scope for disagreement
increased, and the bounds of the Buddhist canon be-
came less distinct. The Mahayana canon was even
more open than the mainstream one, and followers of
that path are in most cases unlikely to have known
more than a tiny fraction of the literature it generated.
The same is true of tantric Buddhism, with its many
classes of tantras, ritual and soteriological texts, which
outnumbered even the Mahayana sutras.Buddhist canons outside India
The complexity of this picture increased still further
when Buddhism spread beyond the greater Indian cul-
tural area. Although the Pali canon of the Theravadins
eventually established itself as the standard in Sri Lanka
and Southeast Asia, in Central Asia and China differ-
ent schools coexisted, and the Mahayana orientation
was dominant. The Chinese translated scriptures be-
longing to these different schools and to this new
movement with great zeal, the result being that the
Chinese Buddhist canon took on a rather different
shape. At first the work of bibliographers and cata-
loguers, later the product of imperial decree, autho-
rized and funded by the court, the Chinese Buddhist
canon (Dazangjing, literally “Great Storehouse Scrip-
ture”) was a far more comprehensive collection. ItCANONA stone tablet carved with a sacred text in Pali, one of 729, each
housed in its own miniature pagoda at a site in Mandalay, Myan-
mar (Burma). © Christine Kolisch/Corbis. Reproduced by per-
mission.