The Tipitaka

Overview

Recall questions on the three baskets and their authority, how the canon was collected and fixed, the Vinaya, Sutta and Abhidhamma Pitakas, the debate over the Abhidhamma, the canon's use and status across traditions, and Keown and Meghaprasara.

What you need to know

Answer each one before you reveal it.

Questions from this subtopic

Each one with the model answer underneath.

1. 1

   What is the Tipitaka, and why is it called that?

   Model answer

   It is the Pali canon of Theravada Buddhism, and the name means three baskets, from the three divisions into which the material is sorted. Theravada Buddhists regard it as the fullest surviving record of what the Buddha taught.

2. 2

   On what grounds do Theravada Buddhists treat the Tipitaka as authoritative?

   Model answer

   They hold that it preserves the Buddha's own teaching, recited and agreed by the community after his death and transmitted by monks who specialised in memorising particular collections. Its authority is that of an accurate record rather than of revelation, since no deity is held to have dictated it.

3. 3

   How was the canon collected and fixed?

   Model answer

   Tradition describes a council shortly after the Buddha's death at which Ananda recited the discourses and Upali the disciplinary rules, followed by further councils that reviewed and settled disputes. The material was carried orally for centuries in a formulaic, repetitive style built for memorisation, and was written down in Sri Lanka around the first century BCE.

4. 4

   What is the Vinaya Pitaka for?

   Model answer

   It contains the rules for ordained life together with the stories of the incidents that prompted each one, and the procedures for ordination, confession and settling disputes. Its purpose is to hold the monastic community together and keep it worthy of lay support, so it functions as the constitutional basis of communal life rather than as doctrine.

5. 5

   What does the Sutta Pitaka contain?

   Model answer

   The discourses: the Buddha's teaching and that of senior disciples, arranged in collections of long, middle-length, grouped and numbered discourses, plus a miscellany that includes verse works such as the Dhammapada and the poems of the elder monks and nuns. This is where a practitioner finds the teaching on the path to awakening.

6. 6

   What is the Abhidhamma Pitaka doing that the discourses are not?

   Model answer

   It reworks the teaching into a systematic analysis: lists and classifications of mental and physical events, their conditions and relations, stripped of narrative and of conventional talk about persons. It is the tradition's attempt to state the teaching with technical precision rather than in the terms of everyday conversation.

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