IB World Religions 2.3.1. the Pali Canon: the Tipitaka and the Dhammapada Notes

2.3.1. The Pali Canon: The Tipitaka and the Dhammapada

Siddhartha Gotama and Sakyamuni

1. The Pali Canon presents itself as the record of one teacher's words. Theravada Buddhists hold that it preserves the teaching of Siddhartha Gotama, the man they identify as the Buddha of this era.
2. He is also called Sakyamuni, the sage of the Sakyas, after the clan he was born into in the foothills of what is now Nepal. Buddhists use the epithet to distinguish him from the other Buddhas the tradition names.
3. Buddha is a title rather than a name. It means the awakened one, and Buddhists apply it to anyone who has reached that understanding without being taught it.
4. The Canon has him refer to himself differently again. The word he most often uses in the texts is Tathagata, usually rendered as the one thus gone or thus come.
5. Traditional Theravada dating places his life in the sixth and fifth centuries before the common era, while much recent scholarship moves it later, towards 480 to 400. Buddhists do not treat the precise dates as doctrinally significant.
6. What matters for the texts is the claim of authorship. The Canon does not present its contents as revealed by a god but as remembered speech, delivered by a human teacher to identifiable audiences in named places.

The three baskets

1. The Canon is called the Tipitaka (Sanskrit Tripitaka), meaning the three baskets. The name comes from the palm leaf manuscripts it was written on, which were stored in baskets by category.
2. The three divisions are the Vinaya Pitaka, the basket of discipline, the Sutta Pitaka, the basket of discourses, and the Abhidhamma Pitaka, the basket of higher teaching.
3. The order of the three is not accidental. Discipline comes first because the Canon was compiled for a monastic community that needed a rule before it needed a philosophy.
4. The scale is easy to underestimate. The Pali Text Society edition runs to more than forty printed volumes, which makes the Canon a library rather than a book.
5. Theravada Buddhists treat the whole of it as buddhavacana, the word of the Buddha, though they read different parts for different purposes and few people read all of it.

The Vinaya Pitaka

1. The Vinaya Pitaka contains the rule the monastic community lives under. It governs ordination, property, food, clothing, disputes and the procedures for handling all of them.
2. At its centre is the Patimokkha, the list of training rules recited by the assembled monks every fortnight. The Theravada recension has 227 rules for bhikkhus and 311 for bhikkhunis.
3. The rules are graded by seriousness. Four parajika offences bring permanent expulsion, those being sexual intercourse, theft, killing a human being and falsely claiming a spiritual attainment.
4. The basket has three parts. The Suttavibhanga analyses the Patimokkha rules one by one, the Khandhaka groups procedures by subject in its Mahavagga and Cullavagga sections, and the Parivara is a summary added later.
5. The Khandhaka carries much of the narrative material. It contains the account of the Buddha's enlightenment and first teaching, and the record of how the order of bhikkhunis was founded.
6. Its authority is practical and current. Ordination, the rains retreat and the uposatha recitation are all conducted today according to procedures set out in this basket.

The Sutta Pitaka

1. The Sutta Pitaka holds the discourses, and it is the part of the Canon lay Buddhists are most likely to meet. It is divided into five collections called nikayas.
2. The first four are organised by shape rather than subject. The Digha Nikaya collects thirty four long discourses, the Majjhima Nikaya one hundred and fifty two of middle length, the Samyutta Nikaya groups short texts by topic, and the Anguttara Nikaya arranges them by number.
3. Several of the tradition's foundational texts sit here. The Dhammacakkappavattana Sutta with the Four Noble Truths is in the Samyutta collection, and the Mahaparinibbana Sutta describing the Buddha's death is in the Digha.
4. The fifth collection is the untidy one. The Khuddaka Nikaya, the minor collection, gathers what the other four did not take, and it is where the Canon's poetry mostly ended up.
5. Its contents are varied and much loved. The Khuddaka Nikaya holds the Jataka stories of the Buddha's previous lives, the Therigatha and Theragatha verses of the elder nuns and monks, and the Dhammapada.
6. Lay teaching draws on this basket heavily. The Sigalovada Sutta, which sets out the duties owed between parents and children, employers and workers, teachers and pupils, is preached as the householder's guide.

The Abhidhamma Pitaka

1. The Abhidhamma Pitaka takes the teaching of the discourses and rebuilds it as technical analysis. The narrative frame disappears, the named audiences disappear, and what remains is classification.
2. Its unit of analysis is the dhamma, in the sense of an irreducible element of experience. Persons and objects are analysed into these elements, so a chariot or a self is treated as a convenient label rather than a thing.
3. The basket contains seven books. The Dhammasangani enumerates the elements, the Patthana works out the twenty four ways they condition one another, and the Kathavatthu records points disputed between early schools.
4. It supplies the ground for the doctrine of momentariness. By analysing a continuous stretch of experience into rapid separate events, the Abhidhamma turns anicca into a claim about every moment rather than about long spans of time.
5. Its status was disputed from early on. Theravada tradition holds that the Buddha taught it and counts it as his word, while some other early schools kept a different Abhidhamma and the Sautrantikas denied that any of it was canonical.
6. In practice it belongs to specialists. Abhidhamma study is a recognised monastic discipline in Myanmar in particular, where it carries a prestige it does not have in every Theravada country.

The Dhammapada

1. The Dhammapada is the Canon's best known text by a wide margin. Its 423 verses are arranged in 26 chapters by theme, covering the mind, heedfulness, anger, flowers, fools, the wise and old age.
2. It opens with the claim the rest of the collection develops. Mind precedes all things, the first verse says, and what a person becomes follows from what that person has thought.
3. Its most quoted lines are ethical rather than metaphysical. Hatred is never appeased by hatred, one verse runs, and only by the absence of hatred is it appeased, which the text calls an ancient law.
4. Another verse is treated as a summary of the whole teaching. Not to do evil, to cultivate what is good and to purify one's own mind, it says, is the teaching of the Buddhas.
5. A commentary supplies the setting each verse lacks. The Dhammapada-atthakatha attaches a story to every verse, explaining the incident that supposedly prompted it, and Buddhist preachers use those stories more than the verses alone.
6. Verse collections of this kind were not unique to Pali. Related compilations survive in Gandhari and in Sanskrit as the Udanavarga, which tells Buddhists that the material circulated widely before it settled into the form they read.