Buddhist Scriptures

Buddhist scriptures are a vast and wide terrain. If you wished to read them all in the original language they were written in you would need to be a prodigious linguist. You would need to know Pali, Sanskrit, Chinese and Japanese just to start with. Fortunately, the Buddha's teachings have all been translated into modern languages and are therefore accessible to us all. The starting point, however, for any initial foray into this wealth of Buddhist scripture is the Pali Canon, the first scriptures to be committed to writing after the Buddha's death and final entry into Nirvana.

The Pali Canon

The Pali Canon consists of three divisions, the Tipitaka (or Tripitaka in Sanskrit) which literally means the 'three baskets'. Each of these baskets has different concerns.

First, there is the Vinaya Pitaka, the Book of Discipline, which includes the rules of monastic discipline given by the Buddha during his lifetime. The second division is the Sutra Pitaka, a collection of the Buddha's discourses. This has particular significance as it contains the essential teachings of the Buddha, accounts of his own enlightenment experience, and instructions on morality and meditation. The third division is the Abhidhamma Pitaka or Higher Teachings which offers an intricate analysis of the nature of mental and physical existence.

The fact that the Pali Canon every came to exist in such a highly developed form is something of a miracle. After the Buddha's parinirvana - his death and final entry into Nirvana - the Buddha's followers met at what was called the First Council, and a consensus was formed on what the Buddha's teachings actually were. There were then committed to memory and passed down orally from generation to generation. An amazing feat! It was not until the first century BCE that the Buddha's teachings were finally written down. The language used was Pali, the liturgical language of Theravada Buddhism. The scriptures were written on palm leaves and stored in three baskets, hence the name Tipitaka.

The Lotus Sutra

The Saddharma-pundarika, or Lotus of the True Dharma is written in Sanskrit and has become one of the most influential of Mahayana scriptures. Analysis suggests that it was written between 100BCE and 200C. In the Lotus Sutra, the Buddha in the form of Sakyamuni speaks to a vast audience of assembled saints, monks, nuns and bodhisattvas. One of the key Mahayana concepts to be found in the Lotus Sutra is that of 'skill-in-means'. This is the idea that the Buddha has adapted his teachings to suit the level of his audience.

The Heart Sutra

The Heart Sutra is believed to have been written about the first century BCE. Although this is a very short text - about a page in length - it has been enormously influential. Essentially it expounds the concept of 'emptiness' (sunyata), a key term in Mahayana philosophy. In short, sunyata refers to the absence of self or essence in all conditioned phenomena: 'form is emptiness and emptiness is form'. The world is seen as a complex of ever-changing, fluctuating elements (dharmas): 'Here, O Sariputra, all dharmas are marked with emptiness'. The texts culminates with the mantra: 'Gone, gone, gone beyond, gone altogether beyond, O what an awakening, all-hail!'.

The Diamond Sutra

The Diamond Sutra takes the from of a dialogue between Sakyamuni Buddha and the disciple Subhuti. In it the Buddha expounds the notion that that the self and the world around us are ultimately illusory: 'The appearance of self is actually no appearance. The appearance of others, the appearance of living beings and the appearance of a life are actually not appearances'. The world that we think is real is no more than 'a dream, an illusion, a bubble or a shadow.'

Subhuti asked, "So what should be on one’s mind as one begins the Bodhisattva journey?"

"Like a falling star, like a bubble in a stream,

Like a flame in the wind, like frost in the sun,

Like a flash of lightning or a passing dream --

So should you understand the world of the ego.”