as it is a collection of texts dealing with the monastic
discipline of monks and nuns. It contains texts that
discuss the life of the Buddha and the history of the
order, texts that list monastic vows, narrative accounts
of how the various vows were set forth by the Buddha,
ritual formulas (for example, for ORDINATION), and so
forth. The abhidharmabasket, by contrast, is more
philosophical, often elaborating lists of technical terms
(for example, the psychophysical constituents of the
self and the world), their definitions and their group-
ing. Since it is a more derivative, manipulated, one
might almost say artificial genre, there arose the ques-
tion even in ancient times of whether or not abhi-
dharmatexts should be considered the actual word of
the Buddha, with different schools taking different po-
sitions on the issue.
Although there were questions even from very early
times about which texts should and should not be con-
sidered the buddha’s word (and hence scripture), the
issue truly came to the fore with the rise of the MA-
HAYANA, or Great Vehicle. The Mahayana emerged (or,
according to the tradition, reemerged) in the first cen-
turies of the common era in India. It maintained that
the Buddha had actually taught a much wider set of
doctrines and practices than those preserved in the ear-
lier scriptures, but that these texts had been hidden un-
til the world was ripe for their revelation. Mahayanists
thus made a case for an expanded scriptural corpus
that included a wider range of texts. Although it is not
clear whether this new corpus of texts ever achieved a
canonical completeness or finality as a separate and
distinct collection that had the same level of authority
as the earlier canon, there is evidence that some Ma-
hayanists did have a notion of the so-called Vaipulya
(Extensive Works) as a kind of Mahayana canon, pos-
sibly subsumed within the sutra basket.
Following this same pattern, several centuries later
the TANTRA(also known as the Mantrayana or Vaj-
rayana) emerged as a movement within Indian Bud-
dhism (more specifically, as a submovement within the
Mahayana), claiming scriptural status for its own set
of texts, this time called not sutras but tantras. Like the
former, the tantras were considered to be the word of
the historical Buddha, or else the word of one or an-
other of a variety of deities that, like the buddha, were
fully enlightened beings. And here too one sometimes
finds use of the “hidden text” trope to explain why
these scriptures had not existed in the world hereto-
fore. But tantrics also at times resorted to other strate-
gies to explain why their scriptural texts had never
existed in this world, strategies that were not unknown
to the earlier Mahayana. For example, in some in-
stances, rather than having been hidden, the texts were
claimed to have been revealed anew to accomplished
yogis or siddhas in visions or in otherworldly journeys
to heavenly realms. In this way one finds in some
tantras a theme that is common to other religious tra-
ditions, namely, the notion of a heavenly library, ac-
cess to which is granted only to spiritually advanced
individuals.
As mentioned above, the corpus of texts that came
to have the status of “scripture” varied from one Bud-
dhist tradition to another. Hence, the Pali, the Tibetan,
and the Chinese canons, to take three examples, are
quite different, even if there is some overlap between
the three. For example, the Chinese canon has a sec-
tion called agama,which contains many of the sutras
also found in the Pali canon (even if the Chinese texts
are translations of different—Sanskrit, and not Pali—
versions of these texts). Likewise, the Tibetan canon
contains a great deal of vinaya material that is the-
matically similar to material found in the vinaya sec-
tions of both the Chinese and the Pali canons, even if
the texts are not exactly the same. But of course both
the Chinese and the Tibetan canons include Mahayana
sutras that are absent from the Pali canon, and the Ti-
betan canon, in addition, includes many tantras that
are not found in any other collection of Buddhist scrip-
tural material. Theravada Buddhists, who follow the
Pali canon, consider much of what is found in the Chi-
nese and Tibetan scriptural collections to be apoc-
ryphal, that is, inauthentic because it is not the
Buddha’s word. And likewise, Chinese Mahayana
Buddhists will consider much of the scriptural mater-
ial found in the tantric portions of the Tibetan Bud-
dhist canon to be apocryphal. And even among
Tibetans there were controversies over whether certain
texts were authentic, such as certain tantras of the RNY-
ING MA(NYINGMA) school, and the so-called treasure
texts (gter ma) that were said to have been hidden and
later found in a variety of sites in Tibet. This is im-
portant to point out, lest it be thought that there is
consensus among different Buddhists concerning what
constitutes scripture. Despite the fact that there are
some contemporary collections of translated texts that
bear this name, there is in reality no such thing as a
single “Buddhist Bible.”The uses of scripture
That being said, there is a great deal of similarity in the
ways that different Buddhist traditions use scripture.SCRIPTURE