46 The Word of Buddha: Scriptures and Schools
Buddhists can therefore be seen as claiming a status on a par
with the Vedas for the utterances of the Buddha.^15
Be that as it may, a Buddhist siitra always begins with the words:'Thus have I heard. At one time the Lord was staying at .. .'^16
The later tradition understands these as the words of Ananda,
the Buddha's attendant, introducing each discourse of the Buddha
at the first communal recitation. The i!lclusion of this particular
formula at the beginning of a Buddhist text indicates that the text
claims the status of 'the word of the Buddha' (buddha-vacana).
It is clear that from a very early date there is a tacit understanding
that to claim this status for a text is not exactly to claim that it
represents only what has actually been uttered by the Buddha
in person. Even in the Nikaya/Agama collections accepted as
'the word of the Buddha' by all ancient schools, there are siitras.
presented as delivered not by the Buddha but by monks and nuns
who were his chief pupils-some of them after his death.
As indicated above, the notion of a fixed canon of Buddhist
scriptures is somewhat problematic. And we must be careful not
to impose inappropriate notions of 'canon' and authenticity-
derived, say, from Christianity-on the Buddhist tradition. Even
in the accounts of the first Buddhist council we are told of a monk
who, on hearing of the recitation of the Buddha's teaching by
the soo arhats, declared that he preferred to remember the
teaching as he himself had heard .it directly from the BuddhaP
For several centuries as Buddhism spread across the Indian
subcontinent it is clear that, while the Buddhist community
accepted and preserved a common core of textual material,
this material constituted a 'canon' in only a rather loose and
informal sense; that each and every collection of textual material
should correspond exactly was not regarded by the early com-
munity as the critical issue.
This state of affairs is reflected in the discussion of 'the four
great authorities' (mahiipadesa) to which a monk might appeal
for accepting a particular teaching as authentic Dharma: that he
has heard it from the Buddha himself, from a community of elder
monks, from a group of learned monks, or from one learned monk.
In each case the Buddha is recorded as having instructed monks