Buddhism and Sri Lanka
The Birthplace of Buddhism
Obviously, India is the birthplace of Buddhism. Siddhartha Gautama (the Buddha or ‘the awakened one’) is thought to have been born in Lumbini, into the Shakya clan, a minor republic among other republics that covered the Ganges plain that now incorporates the Nepal/India border. His dates are uncertain but recent archaeological dating of his ‘birth shrine’ by a team from Durham University suggests that he was active in the sixth century BCE.
Traditionally he is held to have been a mendicant, ascetic meditator who attained enlightenment under a bodhi tree at Bodh Gaya in his thirty-fifth year. He travelled by foot teaching his ‘dharma’ for forty-five years until his death and parinirvana at Kushinagar in modern-day Uttar Pradesh, India.
Places where the Buddha spent his early teaching career (Adapted from “The Realised One’s early career” by Anandajoti Bhikkhu, 2012
Some of the modern place names, where they differ, are given here: Uruvelā = Bodhgaya; Bārāṇasī = Varanasi; Isipatana = Sarnath; Rājagaha = Rajgir; Vesālī = Vaishali; Kapilavatthu = Kapilavastu.
The key to the numbers on the map is (1) Uruvelā > Isipatana; (2) Isipatana > Gayā; (3) Gayā > Rājagaha; (4) Rājagaha > Kapilavatthu; (5) Kapilavatthu > Rājagaha; (6) Rājagaha > Sāvatthī.
Oral Tradition and the Problem of a Single Teaching
There is no definitive end to the oral tradition that preserved versions of what the Buddha taught in the sixth or fifth century BCE. The Chinese pilgrim Xuanzang saw oral transmission continuing at Nālandā in the seventh century CE. The account of Purāṇa in the Vinaya tradition shows that various versions of the Buddha’s teachings already existed at the time of the First Council.
New scholastic and philosophical works continued to be composed well into the Common Era. Some doctrinal developments were incorporated into the Abhidharma collections of particular schools and canonised, whilst other influential works remained extra-canonical. This means that specific schools decided—by unknown criteria—what they took Buddhism to be.
Texts recently found at Gandhāra date to the second and first centuries BCE and mirror Chinese Āgamas translated in the fourth century CE. They align with some Pāli Suttas but also contain Perfection of Wisdom texts and material that has altogether disappeared from surviving records. This implies that oral tradition continued along multiple independent paths.
A Dispersed Sangha from the Very Beginning
The Nikāyas record less than ten per cent of the Buddha’s forty-five-year teaching life. They also reveal that Saṅgha communities were already dispersed during the Buddha’s own lifetime. In DN16, the Buddha and Ānanda are recorded as walking to several such communities before the Parinibbāna, yet the sutta records no members of those communities returning with them or attending his final hours.
Their absence is telling. These Saṅgha communities appear to have been functionally independent—not branches of a centralised organisation but separate communities with their own autonomy, their own oral traditions, and their own judgements about what to preserve and emphasise. There was no expectation of attendance or reporting to a central authority, and no standardisation process appears to have existed. The Buddha taught different things to different audiences, and independent communities would have developed distinct transmission streams from the very beginning.
This explains the textual diversity found in the Gandhāran period: early Āgama materials, Perfection of Wisdom texts, and lost texts existing side by side, because there was never centralised control. The Buddha didn’t forget to establish a doctrine. The notion of a single, original, authoritative teaching does not hold up. Multiple independent streams existed from the start, and the Nikāyas themselves support this conclusion.
The Chronicles and Their Limitations
The Chronicles are the only source of ancient Buddhist history in Sri Lanka. Taken from earlier texts now lost to us, they began to be written after the fourth century CE and describe events many centuries before their composition. It is plain that they carry legendary status and a pronounced bias in favour of the Mahāvihāra monastery from which their scribes operated.
The Arrival of Buddhism in Sri Lanka
Archaeological evidence demonstrates that Buddhism in Sri Lanka predates the traditional accounts of its formal introduction through Asoka’s mission in the third century BCE. Whilst the Pāli chronicles attribute the establishment of Buddhism to the arrival of Mahinda, son of Emperor Asoka, around 250 BCE, over a thousand Buddhist cave-dwellings with dedicatory inscriptions reveal a considerably more complex picture.
These epigraphic records indicate that Buddhism attracted substantial patronage from Sri Lankan élites prior to and concurrent with the purported royal mission. Of the 1,234 cave donations recorded, 6.4 per cent were made by royal patrons or members of the royal family, whilst 30.2 per cent came from individuals bearing the title parumaka (chief) and their families, representing the island’s aristocratic class. A further 1.7 per cent of donations were made by brahmans, members of high-caste Hindu priestly families.
This epigraphic evidence suggests that Buddhism had already gained significant traction amongst Sri Lanka’s ruling and aristocratic classes, indicating that the religion’s establishment was not solely dependent upon Asokan missionary activity but rather emerged through multiple channels of élite patronage and political competition (Coningham 1995: 222–232).
It’s not hard to image that over 2 or 300 years, monks crossed the narrow strait looking for somewhere to meditate. The fact that they enjoyed support from the privileged classes indicates they were established and probably known to the king before Asoka’s mission arrived and that would have given confidence to his conversion.
The First Two Centuries of Regal Buddhism
From the traditional introduction of Buddhism around 250 BCE until the restoration of Sinhala control by Vaṭṭagāmaṇi Abhaya in 89 BCE is a period of 161 years. Across that time, Anurādhapura was under Tamil rule for eighty years—nearly fifty per cent of the period, across three separate intervals of twenty-two, forty-four, and fourteen years.
Buddhism did not enjoy a straightforward beginning. On his return to power from hiding at Dambulla, King Abhaya built an entirely new monastery—Abhayagiri—rather than restoring what had existed before. During his rule he is also credited with the writing down of the Pāli Canon at a separate monastery, Āloka Vihāra. Crucially, however, the third basket of the Tipiṭaka did not yet exist at that time.
What ‘Writing Down’ Actually Means
‘Writing down’ does not mean ‘completion’. What was recorded represented a snapshot of a dynamic oral tradition at a particular moment in time—nothing more. The Pāli Canon was not finished when oral transmission ended in Sri Lanka. The chronicles claim it was written down in 29 BCE, but this is widely misunderstood: the texts kept growing long after that date, with new material being added for centuries. The idea that we possess a perfect, unchanging canon from that time simply does not hold up when examined against the facts.
Defenders of the canon’s authenticity point to oral tradition as proof that what was written in 29 BCE was accurate. But oral tradition continued well beyond that date—not just in Sri Lanka but in India. Xuanzang’s Great Tang Records on the Western Regions records oral transmission still active in India in the seventh century CE, and along with Yijing, writing later in the same century, describes monks still reciting texts, often with regional variations. Only some oral tradition could therefore support what was written in 29 BCE. Texts composed after that date cannot be authenticated by a tradition that supposedly underwrote the earlier transcription.
The Missing Manuscripts
There is an even more fundamental problem. The texts supposedly written on palm leaves in 29 BCE have not survived. In fact, no version of the Pāli Canon has survived from before the fifteenth century CE. Consider what that means: there is a gap of nearly 1,500 years between the claimed date of writing and our earliest physical evidence. We simply do not know how the texts changed across that immense period. Oral recitation continued alongside written texts in both Sri Lanka and India, and variations existed between communities. The act of writing something down did not freeze it in time.
The common claim that ‘the Tipiṭaka was written down in Sri Lanka in 29 BCE’ confuses two entirely different things: physically writing something down, and the composition of its content. Writing down existing texts tells us nothing about when individual texts were created or when they entered the collection. The canon was not sealed in 29 BCE; it continued to grow.
The Abhidhamma: A Later Addition the Buddha Never Mentioned
Consider the Abhidhamma Piṭaka, the so-called ‘higher teachings’. No text in any Buddhist canon—not the Pāli Canon, nor any other—claims that the Abhidhamma was taught by the Buddha himself. In the Pāli Canon, the Buddha refers only to Dhamma and Vinaya, and gives no indication whatsoever that his teachings require augmentation or systematic elaboration. Yet the Abhidhamma is presented as a third basket of scriptural authority and equal to his.
Buddhaghosa (5th century CE) in his Visuddhimagga explicitly frames the Abhidhamma as Buddha’s teaching. Before that, there is no surviving textual or historical evidence that anyone explicitly claimed the Abhidhamma Pitaka itself was directly taught by the Buddha. But earlier sources—including the Dipavaṃsa and Mahāvaṃsa—don’t explicitly make this claim.
Scholars widely agree it was composed after the core suttas and Vinaya—sometimes significantly later—representing systematic philosophy developed by later anonymous monks rather than original discourse of the Buddha.
Even within the Sutta Piṭaka itself, texts such as the Buddhavaṃsa are recognised as late additions from the first or second century BCE or beyond. The Kathāvatthu contains doctrinal debates that clearly reflect later developments rather than early teachings. The authentication argument, when examined honestly, collapses under its own logic: oral tradition cannot guarantee texts that did not yet exist.
Only some scholastic essays were elevated into “Abhidhamma Piṭaka”, their authors are unknown, different schools made different choices, and we lack any selection criteria explaining why a given anonymous treatise in one tradition became scriptural while a similar one in another tradition did not. We have no sign that it was ever closed. This undercuts any claim that the Abhidhamma’s authority rests on a transparent, traceable link back to the Buddha himself; instead, its authority is a product of later communal canon-formation and the historical fortunes of particular monastic networks.
The Gandharan manuscripts sharpen the point considerably
The British Library fragments and the related Senior collection, dating to roughly the 1st century BCE to 3rd century CE — making them the oldest surviving Buddhist manuscripts by a considerable margin — are written in Gandhari Prakrit in Kharosthi script and represent a tradition associated with the Dharmaguptaka nikaya, though their precise affiliation is disputed and they may preserve material that predates clean nikaya boundaries. Richard Salomon’s work on them has been careful not to overassign them.
What they contain is overwhelmingly sutta-type material — avadanas, dhamma verses, narrative material, some Vinaya-adjacent content. There is no Abhidharma. Not fragments of Abhidharma, not references to Abhidharma as a category, not even the term used in the technical sense. For a collection that appears to represent actual working monastic library material — texts being copied and used — rather than a later curated canon, this absence is the kind of evidence that is hard to dismiss. These aren’t texts selected by a later tradition to represent its orthodoxy. They’re what monks apparently actually had and used.
Wonderment is entirely appropriate historically. What it suggests is that the three-pitaka structure as a framing of Buddhist teaching was not yet established or possibly not yet conceived when these manuscripts were being produced and circulated. The teaching was dhamma and vinaya, as the oldest formula diectly attributed to the Buddha says. The third basket’s elevation to co-equal status with the Buddha’s own words — words that the Sutta pitaka presents as directly heard and transmitted — required centuries of institutional work, commentary, and the kind of legendary apparatus like the Tavatimsa heaven story that exists precisely to answer the objection being raised.
It also raises an interesting question about what the Asokan moment actually looked like. Asoka’s edicts recommend specific texts for monks and laity to study and the identification of those texts is contested, but none of the candidates are Abhidharma texts. If Abhidharma had achieved anything like canonical parity by the 3rd century BCE you’d expect some trace of it in that context.
Abhidhamma is the work of brilliant monastic scholars systematising and extending the Buddha’s teaching — rather than being the Buddha’s own word in the same sense as the Pali Nikayas present themselves. The insistence on the stronger claim is what requires the increasingly elaborate apologetic, and the Gandharan material just makes that apologetic look even more like a later construction.
Sri Lanka and Abhidhamma Scholarship
Abhidhamma scholarship in ancient Sri Lanka remained an active and recognised tradition well into the early medieval period, as evidenced by references from prominent Indian Buddhist scholars Vasubandhu (ca. fourth century CE) and Bhaviveka (ca. 500–570 CE). According to Cheng’s analysis of Chinese Buddhist sources, both scholars acknowledged the Sri Lankan Buddhist tradition—which they referred to as Tāmraparṇīya, the ‘copper-leaf’ or ‘red copper plate’ school—particularly noting its doctrine of bhavaṅgaviññāṇa (consciousness of existence).
Through careful examination of Chinese translations, Cheng demonstrates that these Indian masters were aware of and engaged with the doctrinal positions of the Sri Lankan Saṅgha, indicating that Abhidhamma discourse extended well beyond the Indian subcontinent and that Sri Lankan Buddhist scholarship maintained sufficient intellectual prominence to warrant attention in major Indian Buddhist philosophical works during this period (Cheng 2012: 104–123).
On this reading, we can see that, even unofficially, Sri Lankan sangha were still devising Abhidhamma texts centuries after the Canon had been formalised.
An Honest Assessment
What we call the Pāli Canon today is a collection assembled over many centuries—a historical compilation shaped by time, politics, and human hands, not a fixed record of the Buddha’s words delivered whole from antiquity. The first two centuries of regal Buddhism in Sri Lanka forged the institutional and textual foundations of Theravāda, but those foundations were dynamic, plural, and deeply political. The date 29 BCE marks a milestone in the formalisation of the Sri Lankan tradition, not its completion.
This is not about rejecting scholarship. It is about applying basic logic to extraordinary claims. If texts were added after 29 BCE, if oral tradition continued for centuries in both India and Sri Lanka, if the Buddha himself never mentioned an Abhidhamma, and if no manuscripts survive from before the fifteenth century, then claims of an unbroken and authentic canon simply do not match the evidence. We should examine these claims intelligently, not accept them on faith.
The Buddha’s Call to Come and See
Ehipassiko—“come and see”—is a hallmark of the Dhamma. It invites direct verification rather than blind belief.
Key points:
– Not blind faith: The Dhamma is to be tested in your own experience (AN3.65, often paraphrased as “Come and see; don’t go by hearsay”).
– Open to all: The Buddha described the Dhamma as “sandiṭṭhiko, akāliko, ehipassiko, opanayiko, paccattaṁ veditabbo viññūhi”—visible here-and-now, timeless, inviting inspection, leading inward, to be known individually by the wise (AN6.10).
– Practical application: Start with ethical clarity (sīla), cultivate collectedness (samādhi), and develop insight (paññā). Observe how greed, hatred, and delusion lessen through practice (SN45.8).
Simple way to “come and see” today:
– Keep one precept deliberately for 24 hours and notice the mind’s ease (Dhp 183).
– Sit quietly for 10 minutes, attend to the breath at the nostrils, soften clinging when thought streams arise, return kindly (MN118).
– In a difficult moment, pause and radiate metta: “May I/they be safe and at ease.” Observe cause and effect on the heart (AN4.125).
This captures the pragmatic, “open-source” spirit of the early Dhamma. The concept of Ehipassiko is what separates the Buddha’s teaching from many contemporary Iron Age philosophies; it shifted the focus from metaphysical speculation to empirical psychological observation.
A few specific verse numbers in the Suttas can vary slightly depending on the translation/edition (like the Pali Text Society vs. Bhikkhu Bodhi).
AN 3.65 (The Kesaputtiya/Kalama Sutta): This is the famous “charter of free inquiry.” The Buddha tells the Kalamas not to go by oral tradition, lineage, or even the authority of a teacher, but to know for themselves when qualities are skilful or unskilful.
AN 6.10 (Mahānāma Sutta): This sutta lists the six qualities of the Dhamma (sandiṭṭhiko, akāliko…). It’s also frequently found in the Dhammānussati (recollection of the Dhamma) across various parts of the Canon.
SN 45.8 (Vibhaṅga Sutta): This provides the formal definition of the Noble Eightfold Path, categorising the practice into the “Three Trainings” of Sīla, Samādhi, and Paññā.
Dhp 183 (Dhammapada): “To avoid all evil, to cultivate good, and to cleanse one’s mind—this is the teaching of the Buddhas.”
MN 118 (Anapanasati Sutta): This is the definitive manual on Mindfulness of Breathing, detailing the 16 steps of the practice.
AN 4.125 (Metta Sutta): This describes the cultivation of the four Brahmaviharas (Loving-kindness, Compassion, Appreciative Joy, and Equanimity) and their karmic results.
The “Come and See” Framework
The beauty of Ehipassiko is that it treats the mind like a laboratory. If you apply a specific “input” (like a precept or a breath meditation), you should be able to observe a repeatable “output” (ease of mind or clarity).
A Technical Note on the Gāndhārī Diversity
Bringing this back to the Gāndhārī period: the reason we see such diversity in those early scrolls is precisely because of this “test it for yourself” attitude. Without a central “Pope” or “Inquisition,” different communities (the Dharmaguptakas, Sarvastivadins, etc) concentrated on different aspects of the “laboratory results” they found most effective. They weren’t “heretics”; they were researchers using slightly different methodologies to reach the same goal of ending dukkha.
Practical Challenge
Keeping one precept for 24 hours is the ultimate “low-barrier” entry to Ehipassiko. It moves Buddhism from a historical subject to a living experiment.