Tuesday, March 28, 2017

The Canon


The Buddha's teachings were memorized and passed down orally for four centuries before they were first written down on talipot palm leaves (ola leaves) in Sri Lanka around 80 BCE.


There tends to be a bias in the modern world towards oral traditions. Yet, two groups of monks from the Ganges Valley memorized the Teachings. One group migrated south to Sri Lanka and the other to the northern areas of India. Today, we find an extraordinary degree of agreement between these two, now written, collections. They obviously came from the same original material. 




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