Dhammapada

SR No.: 007674
Original Sutra Author: N/A
Author: Max Muller
Publisher: Oxford
Publication Year: 1881
Total Pages: 2540
Language: English
Classification: Book_English
File Size: 45 MB

Page 35

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DHAMMAPADA.
We must be satisfied therefore, so far as I can see at present, with fixing the date, and the latest date, of a Buddhist canon at the time of the Second Council, 377 B.C. That some works were added later, we know; that many of the treatises included in the canon existed before that Council, can hardly be doubted. The second chapter of the Dhammapada, for instance, is called the Appamâda-vagga, and if the Mahavamsa (p. 25) tells us that at the time when Asoka was converted by Nigrodha, that Buddhist priest explained to him the Appamâdavagga, we can hardly doubt that there existed then a collection (vagga) of verses on Appamada, such as we now possess in the Dhammapada and in the Samyutta- · nikâya 1.
With regard to the Vinaya, I should even feel inclined to admit, with Dr. Oldenberg, that it must have existed in a more or less settled form before that time. What I doubt is whether such terms as Pitaka, basket, or Tipitaka, the three baskets, i.e. the canon, existed at that early time. They have not been met with, as yet, in any of the canonical books; and if the Dîpavamsa (IV, 32) uses the word
Tipitaka,' when describing the First Council, this is due to its transferring new terms to older times. If Dr. Oldenberg speaks of a Dvi-pitaka ? as the name of the canon before the third basket, that of the Abhidhamma, was admitted, this seems to me an impossible name, because at the time when the Abhidhamma was not yet recognised as a third part of the canon, the word pitaka had probably no existence as a technical terms.
We must always, I think, distinguish between the three. portions of the canon, called the basket of the Suttas, the
Feer, Revue Critique, 1870, No. 24, p. 377. Introduction, pp. x, xii. 3 Dr. Oldenberg informs me that piraka occurs in the Kankisuttanta in the Magghima Nikâya (Turnour's MS., fol. the), but applied to the Veda. He also refers to the tipitakâkâryas mentioned in the Western Cave inscriptions as compared with the Pankanekâyâka in the square Asoka character inscriptions (Cunningham, Bharhut, pl. Ivi, No. 52). In the Sû trakrid-anga of the Gainas, too, the term pidagam occurs (MS. Berol. fol. 77 a). He admits, however, that pitaka or tipitaka, as the technical name of the Buddhist canon, has not yet been met with in that canon itself, and defends Dvipiraka only as a convenient term.
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