![]() ![]() CE, when the Indian monk Buddhaghosa began the laborious task of collating the ancient Sinhala commentaries and translating them into Pali, that these books first became accessible to non-Sinhala speakers around the Buddhist world. Most of these texts were written in Sinhala, the language of Sri Lanka, but because Pali - not Sinhala - was the lingua franca of Theravada, few Buddhist scholars outside Sri Lanka could study them. Shortly thereafter Buddhist scholar-monks in Sri Lanka and southern India began to amass a body of secondary literature: commentaries on the Tipitaka itself, historical chronicles, textbooks, Pali grammars, articles by learned scholars of the past, and so on. The Tipitaka (Pali canon) assumed its final form at the Third Buddhist Council (ca. 250 BCE) and was first committed to writing sometime in the 1 st c. Introduction The origins of the post-canonical texts The Field Guide is essentially an annotated table of contents, in which I borrow heavily from a variety of sources to describe each text. The Introduction provides historical background to the texts and offers some thoughts on why these texts are so valuable to the Theravada tradition. But what are these ancient books, and what relevance do they have to the western student of Buddhism in the 21 st century? Although complete answers to these questions lie well beyond the range of my abilities, I hope that this short document will provide enough of a road map to help orient the interested student as he or she sets out to explore this vast corpus of important Buddhist literature. In fact, in some countries they are as deeply treasured as the suttas themselves. Although many western students of Buddhism may be unacquainted with these works (indeed, most have never been translated into English), these books have for centuries played a crucial role in the development of Buddhist thought and practice across Asia and, ultimately, the West. Intermingled with the familiar Nikayas, Vinaya texts, and Abhidhamma are scores of titles with long, scarcely-pronounceable Pali names. A quick glance through the pages of the Pali Text Society's publications catalog should be enough to convince anyone that there is much more to classical Pali literature than the Tipitaka alone. ![]()
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