The Word of Buddha: Scriptures and Schools 49
the status of the Buddha's word, it is clear that they did not seek
to question the method and principles of Abhidharma in their
entirety; what they were concerned to question were particu-
lar interpretations and understandings current amongst, certain
exponents of Abhidharma.
To sum up, a typical ancient Indian 'canon' of Buddhist texts
consisted of 'three baskets' (tripitaka): the Sfltra Pitaka or 'bas-
ket of discourses' (comprising four main collections of the dis-
courses of the Buddha, often with a supplementary collection of
miscellaneous texts), the Vinaya Pitaka or 'basket of monastic
discipline', and the Abhidharma Pitaka or 'basket of further
Dharma'. Only one such ancient Tripitaka survives complete
in an ancient Indian language, the Pali canon of the Theravadin
tradition of Sri Lanka and South-East Asia. How many other recen-
sions of this ancient Tripi taka existed is unclear, but the contents
and arrangement of others may be partially reconstructed on
the basis of the surviving fragments in Indian languages and
Chinese and Tibetan translations; in this respect we have the fullest
knowledge of the canon of the Sarvastivadins.
The origin of the ancient Buddhist schools and their
exegetical literatures
In turning to the complex problem of the origin of the ancient
Indian Buddhist schools, we must at the outset register that we
are speaking primarily of divisions and groupings within the
community of monks and nuns or Sangha. In most cases the basis
of such divisions would have been of little or no concern to the
ordinary lay Buddhist in ancient India. In other words, we are
not dealing with great schisms of the kind associated with the
Reformation in the history of Christianity, or with one Buddhist
group accusing another of 'heresy'. In order to. understand the
processes at work here it is necessary first to consider the notion
of formal division in the Sangha (smigha-bheda) from the legal
perspective of the Buddhist monastic code encapsulated in the
Vinaya.^23
