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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