The Foundations of Buddhism

The Word of Buddha: Scriptures and Schools 41

whole does not possess a 'canon' of scriptures in the manner of

the Hebrew Bible of Judaism, the Old and New Testaments of

Christianity, or the Qu'ran of Islam. It is also apparent that the

Chinese and Tibetan canons do not represent en bloc transla-

tions of ancient Indian canonical collections of Buddhist texts,

but rather libraries of translations of individual Indian works. made

over the centuries (see Chapter ro). In the case of the Chinese

canon this process of translating Indian texts began in· the sec-

ond century cE and continued for over 8oo years; the process

of arranging and cataloguing these texts continues down to the

present century. In the case of Tibetan Kanjur and Tenjur the

translation process was carried out between the seventh and

thirteenth centuries, while the precise contents and arrangement

of these two collections has never been fixed. ·

What of the Pali canon? The use of the term 'Pali' as the name

of the language of the Theravada canon of Buddhist scriptures

derives from the expression piili-bhiisii, 'the language of the

[Buddhist] texts'. This language is an ancient Indian language

closely related to Sanskrit, the language of classical Indian cul-

ture par excellence. At the time of the Buddha, Sanskrit appears

to have been very much the language of brahmanical learning
and religious ritual. The Buddha therefore seems to have delib-
erately and consciously eschewed Sanskrit, preferring to teach

in the ordinary vernacular-the various Middle Indo-Aryan

dialects, known as Prakrit, which were spoken across the north

of India in the fifth century BCE.^10 In the first century or so after

the death of the Buddha, as Buddhism began gradually to spread

across the Indian subcontinent, different groups of monks and
the evolving schools of Buddhism appear to have preserved
their own versions of the Buddha's teaching orally in their local
dialect. However, as time passed there was a tendency for the

language of 'the scriptures' to become frozen and increasingly

removed from any actually spoken dialect. At the same time

Sanskrit was becoming less an exclusively brahmanicallanguage

and more the accepted language of Indian culture-the language

in which to communicate learning and literature right across India.
Thus Buddhist scriptures were subject to varying degrees of