Buddhism has no single Bible, but a shelf of rival Triple Baskets
Buddhist scripture is often called the Tripitaka, or Three Baskets, after the containers that once held palm-leaf manuscripts. But there was never one canon. A Tibetan historian counted eighteen early schools each with its own written collection, and today three great canons, in Pali, Chinese and Tibetan, coexist.
The classic three divisions are the Vinaya, the rules of monastic life from dress to diet; the Sutras, the Buddha's teachings in narrative or aphoristic form; and the Abhidharma, later and more systematic philosophy. The Buddha is said to have preached in Magadhi Prakrit, a language related to Pali whose exact nature is unclear, and his discourses circulated orally until being written down in the first century BCE. The Vinaya seems to have grown as commentary on the monastic code, reflecting a shift from wandering beggars to settled monasteries.
Only the Pali Canon of the Theravada tradition strictly follows the three-basket plan. Several ancient Indian schools had four, five or even seven divisions, adding collections of spells called Dharani or Mantra Pitakas, or Bodhisattva Pitakas containing texts later labelled Mahayana. An older scheme sorted teachings into twelve types, from verses and prophecies to Jataka tales of the Buddha's previous lives; Pali sources usually list nine.
Chinese pilgrims give a glimpse of the diversity. Yijing, travelling in India in the eighth century, described four principal non-Mahayana collections, three of them reckoned at 300,000 verses each; the Pali Canon descends from one, the Sthavira. Xuanzang is said to have carried the canons of seven different schools back to China. The Mahasamghika branch, born from the first great schism around the time of Ashoka, reportedly split further over whether Mahayana sutras counted as the word of the Buddha, and sources even disagree on whether it accepted any Abhidharma. Most of these early canons are lost or survive only in parts.
The main living collections are the Pali Tipitaka of Southeast Asia, the Chinese canon, known as the Great Storage of Scriptures, and the Tibetan canon in Classical Tibetan. Neither the Chinese nor the Tibetan follows the Indian three-part scheme. A Mongolian canon, largely translated from Tibetan, serves Mongolian Buddhism, and the Sanskrit manuscripts preserved in Nepal have proved invaluable to modern scholars.
Source: Buddhist canons
