An oral scripture
After the Buddha's death, monks preserved the teaching by memory and group recitation. Specialist reciters, called bhāṇakas, learned particular collections by heart and passed them on to their students. Repetition, lists and formulas, which make the texts feel repetitive to modern readers, were tools for accurate memory.
Written in Sri Lanka
The Dīpavaṃsa and the Mahāvaṃsa say that in the reign of King Vaṭṭagāmaṇī Abhaya, in the 1st century BCE, monks in Sri Lanka wrote down the three collections of the canon and their commentaries in books. The island had suffered famine and war, and the monks feared that the teaching might be lost if the reciters died.
Later Sri Lankan tradition places this at the Aluvihāra rock temple near Matale. The collection they wrote became the Pāli canon, the Tipiṭaka or 'three baskets': the discipline, the discourses and the Abhidhamma.
The oldest surviving manuscripts
No manuscript survives from that time. Palm leaf decays quickly in a tropical climate, and texts were copied again and again. Most surviving Pāli manuscripts are only a few centuries old.
The oldest Buddhist manuscripts found so far come from Gandhāra, in today's Pakistan and Afghanistan: birch-bark scrolls in the Gāndhārī language, from around the 1st century CE, first published in detail by Richard Salomon in 1999.
Why it matters
The movement from exclusively oral preservation toward written manuscript traditions profoundly affected the preservation, transmission and later translation of Buddhist teachings.
History and tradition
What historians can say
The chronicles' account of the writing of the Pāli canon is generally accepted by scholars in outline, although the canon continued to change afterwards. Writing down happened in several places and languages; the Gandhāran finds show that Buddhist texts were also being written in the north-west at about the same period.