The Foundations of Buddhism

Traditions of Buddhism

establishment of the bKa' gdams-pa school, which set the course

for the future development of Buddhist monasticism in Tibet.
Atisa also wrote for his Tibetan pupils a short but extremely
influential and much commented upon summary of Buddhist prac-
tice, the Bodhi-patha-pradfpa ('Lamp on the Path to Awakening').

The Kanjur and Tenjur

As with the Chinese translation of Buddhist texts, Indian canon-

ical collections of Buddhist texts were not translated en bloc,

rather individual texts were translated one by one over several
centuries.^26 Tibetan Buddhist tradition divides its scriptures into

two canonical collections: the Kanjur (bKa' 'gyur), or 'translated

word of the Buddha', and the Tenjur (bsTan 'gyur), or 'trans-

lated treatises'.
The Kanjur came into existence at the beginning of the four-
teenth century in response to a need to collect and arrange the
enormous numbers of these texts that had been translated into
Tibetan between the seventh and thirteenth centuries. The earli-
est woodblock printed edition was in fact produced in 1410 in
Peking and not in Tibet. Like the Chinese Tripitaka, the Kanjur
exists in several editions and recensions which diverge slightly

in their arrangement and the number of texts they include, but

it usually comprises 700-Soo texts in just over 100 volumes. One
of the most widely used and favoured editions today is a repro-
duction of the Derge (sDe dge) block-print edition of 1733.

The arrangement of the Kanjur does not follow the three-

fold division of the earlier Indian canonical collections; the fol-

lowing division into seven categories is typical: (I) Vinaya or

monastic discipline ('Dul-ba), (2) Perfection of Wisdom (Sher

ph yin), which is often further divided, (3) the Buddhavatarp.saka

(Phal-chen), (4) Ratnakuta (dKon-brtsegs) (5) Sutra (mDo), (6)
the Mahayana Maha-Parinirval)a (Myang 'das), and (7) tantra
(rGyud). The huge Sutra collection occupies a third of the Kanjur
and is almost entirely devoted to Mahayana sutras, although some
material from the earlier Nikayas/Agamas is included. Next in
size is the tantra collection which occupies about one-fifth of the

Kanjur. At one-eighth of the whole, the Vinaya comes third in size.