THE ORIGINS OF THE BUDDHIST SCRIPTURES

When the iron bird flies, and horses run on wheels, the Tibetan people will be scattered like ants across the world, and the Dharma will come to the land of the Red Man.                     --Padmasambhava, 8th century Buddhist monk

In contrast to the scripture of most other religions, the Buddhist canon was formulated very shortly after the death of Gautama in 480 B.C.E. The Buddha's ten closest disciples convened the First Council, attended by 500 monks and held in Rajagaha, the capital of the state of Magadha.

According to tradition, the disciple Mahakashyapa was said to have inspired the need for the First Council by the following warning at the Buddha's funeral:  "Friends, we must make certain that the teachings and ordinances are put into proper form, rendering it impossible for false doctrines to flourish while true ones decline...for expounders of false teachings to grow strong while expounders of the truth grow weak...."(quoted in D. Ikeda, Buddhism:  The First Millenium [Tokyo: Kodansha International, 1977], p. 105.)

The disciple Ananda was chosen to set down the Buddha's "sayings" (Pali, sutta; Sanskrit, sutra), primarily because of his remarkable powers of memory and the fact that he had been the Buddha's personal attendant.  The disciple Upali was picked to codify the discipline (vinaya) for he was thought to be one of the best in ascetic practices.

Ananda proceeded to recite the sutras as he remembered them,  asking for corrections as they proceeded, and then the assembled monks all chanted in unison until the sutras were memorized. Most of the sutras begin with "Thus I heard," and the "I" is supposed to have been Ananda himself.  Tradition has it that Ananda recited 10,000 sutras comprising an incredible 6,000 volumes.  Thus the sacred teachings of the Buddha came into being.

The codification of this canon continued for fifty years, but because of the explicit instructions from the Buddha that his words not be written down, the canon was kept in oral form.  The basic integrity of this oral tradition has been verified by a close comparison of the final written versions of the Pali and Sanskrit canon. (E. J. Thomas, The Life of the Buddha as Legend and History [London:  Kegan Paul, 1927], p. vi.) The oral tradition was first transcribed into the Pali language in about 80 B.C.E. in Ceylon.  About a century later, the same oral tradition was transcribed into Sanskrit in Northern India, completely independent from the writings in Ceylon.

A comparison of the accounts of the same events, for examples, birth stories, teachings life and death of GautamaCshows a consistency comparable to the various Gospel accounts of Jesus' life and teachings.  The Sanskrit literature added much material, especially the sutras dealing with the Bodhisattva ideal, a major doctrine in the new Mahayana school.

Mahayana ("great vehicle") as opposed to Hinayana ("small vehicle"), or Theravada ("way of the elders"), had its origins in a group of young monks from the city of Vaishali, the home of Vimalakiriti, a famous lay believer who became an exalted Bodhisattva. These monks came forward with ten new precepts, which they wanted all Buddhists to accept.  In 370 B.C.E. a Second Council was then convened for this purpose.  Seven hundred monks gathered, and under the leadership of the "old guard," condemned the Ten Precepts as Ten Unlawful Things.

Undaunted, the young monks called together 10,000 monks, later to be known as Mahasanghika ("members of the great order"), and another council was held.  A group recitation was conducted and new material entered into the canon, for example, the Lalitavistara, a life of the Buddha filled with legends and supranatural events.  Ashvaghosha, one of the founders of the later Mahayana school, was a Mahasanghika.  Some scholars argue that some Mahayana sutras, such as the Lotus Sutra, were written down as early as 100 B.C.E., making them just as old as written documents as the Pali Scriptures.

As was indicated above, the Mahayanists added much more material to an already voluminous scripture. They claimed that these new sutras really came from the Buddha's mouth; but that he preached them only to divine beings and Bodhisattvas, lay Buddhists like Vimalakirti, who, according to the Mahayanists at least, surpassed the Theravadin monks in merit and enlightenment. The Theravadin charge, however, was most likely correct: "[The Mahasanghikas] broke up the original scriptures and made a new recension....They partly rejected the Sutta and the Vinaya so deep and made another rival Sutta and Vinaya of their own...."(excerpted in Lucien Stryk, ed., The World of the Buddha [New York:   Doubleday Anchor, 1969], p. 248.)

Starting in the fourth century CE many translations of the sutras and commentaries were made in Chinese, but by far the most complete Buddhist canon is found in Tibetan. According to tradition, the Indian monk Padmasambhava brought the first Sanskrit sutras to Tibet in the eighth century C.E.  (He is also supposed to have found new sutras after his arrival there.) Hundreds of Tibetan Buddhist monks made the dangerous trek to India to learn Sanskrit and to bring more Sanskrit texts back with them.  At that time the Tibetan language was not sophisticated enough to do justice to the subtleties of the Buddha's teachings, so a new Tibetan alphabet and grammar was meticulously created specifically for this religious purpose. Sanskrit was the model for this new language so that translation back from the Tibetan texts to the original Sanskrit is an excellent way to reconstruct Sanskrit sutras that were lost when Buddhism died out in India.

The initial translation work took about three generations, but editing and revisions, and additions continued for another six centuries.  The Kanjur (direct teachings of the Buddha) was first carved on wood blocks and printed in Peking in 1410, while the Tanjur (commentaries plus arts and sciences) was not printed until the early 17th Century.  The most recent edition of the Kanjur-Tanjur, done by Dharma Publishing of Berkeley, comprises 63,000 pages in 126 volumes.  Many of these texts still do not have any modern European translations.

The Tanjur contains intact the curriculum of Nalanda University, a Buddhist center of learning in Northeast India, of which Padmasambhava was an alumnus. It was said that Nalanda at one time enrolled 30,000 students, and if this is true, it would have made it by far the greatest university in the ancient world.