Chapter 3: Writing Down the Dharma—From Palm Leaf to Pāli

This chapter is part of the book The Sacred Editors: Buddhism.

"When memory falters, the leaf must hold the breath."

Aluvihāra, Sri Lanka, first century BCE. The monsoon rains have failed for the third consecutive year. In the cave temple carved into the granite hillside, oil lamps flicker against walls blackened by centuries of smoke from devotional offerings. But tonight, the flames illuminate an unprecedented scene: monks bent over rough wooden desks, their saffron robes pulled close against the mountain chill, carefully etching letters into strips of dried palmyra palm leaves with iron styluses.¹

Elder Mahinda, great-grandson of the missionary monk who first brought Buddhism to the island, watches from the shadows as scribes work methodically through the night. Each stroke of the stylus must be precise—too deep and the brittle leaf splits along its fibers; too shallow and the letters fade within months. After each line is inscribed, a younger monk rubs charcoal and oil into the grooves, making the text visible and durable. The leaves are then strung together with fiber cords, creating the first written manuscripts of what will become known as the Pāli Canon.

Outside the cave, civil war ravages the Sinhalese kingdom. King Vaṭṭagāmaṇi Abhaya has fled to the mountains, his throne usurped by Tamil invaders from South India. Monasteries across the island have been destroyed, their libraries burned, their communities scattered. Entire oral lineages—monks who had dedicated their lives to memorizing and transmitting specific portions of the Buddha's teachings—have perished in the violence or died from the famine that followed failed harvests.

The monastic elders who have gathered at Aluvihāra face an unprecedented crisis. For over four centuries, since the Buddha's death, his teachings had been preserved through oral transmission alone, passed from teacher to student through careful memorization and collective recitation. But now, with so many memory-keepers dead or displaced, the very survival of the Dharma hangs in the balance. The decision they have made—to commit the Tipiṭaka (Three Baskets) to writing for the first time—represents both an act of desperate preservation and a revolutionary transformation in how Buddhist teachings would be conceived, preserved, and transmitted for all future generations.²

As dawn breaks over the Sri Lankan hills, the first palm-leaf manuscripts of Buddhist scripture lie drying in the morning light. The Dharma has entered the written world, but this transition marks the beginning, not the end, of its editorial journey.

The Crisis That Changed Everything

The circumstances that led to this momentous decision reveal how external pressures and internal vulnerabilities shaped one of the most significant moments in Buddhist textual history. According to the Dīpavaṃsa and Mahāvaṃsa, the ancient Sinhalese chronicles that preserve this tradition, the writing of the canon occurred during the reign of King Vaṭṭagāmaṇi Abhaya (29-17 BCE), following a period of extraordinary upheaval that threatened the very survival of Buddhism in Sri Lanka.³

The crisis was multifaceted and severe. Political instability had wracked the island for decades, culminating in a Tamil invasion that forced the Sinhalese king into exile and created widespread social disruption. Economic hardship, exacerbated by consecutive harvest failures, had decimated both lay and monastic communities. Many monasteries lost their royal patronage and material support, forcing monks to abandon their studies and seek survival elsewhere. Most critically for textual preservation, the monastic schools that had maintained specialized oral lineages—with different communities responsible for preserving different portions of the growing canonical literature—found their membership scattered or destroyed.

The Theravāda tradition that had established itself in Sri Lanka following the missionary activity of Mahinda (traditionally regarded as son of Emperor Aśoka) in the third century BCE had developed sophisticated systems for preserving the Buddha's teachings through oral transmission. Different monastic fraternities specialized in particular collections: some focused on the Dīgha Nikāya (long discourses), others on the Majjhima Nikāya (middle-length discourses), still others on the Vinaya (monastic discipline) or the developing Abhidhamma literature (philosophical analysis). This specialization created redundancy that protected against the loss of individual teachers, but it also made the system vulnerable to large-scale disruption that could eliminate entire lineages simultaneously.⁴

K.R. Norman's research on early Buddhist literature has shown that the oral tradition in Sri Lanka had already begun to show signs of strain before the first-century crisis. As Buddhist communities spread across the island and adapted to local conditions, variations in recitation and interpretation had begun to emerge. Different monasteries preserved slightly different versions of the same texts, and debates had arisen about which formulations were most authentic. The crisis of the first century BCE transformed these manageable challenges into an existential threat.⁵

The decision to write down the canon was not taken lightly. Traditional accounts suggest that the proposal generated considerable debate within the surviving monastic community. Many monks viewed writing as fundamentally inappropriate for sacred teachings, arguing that the embodied knowledge gained through memorization and recitation was superior to the external relation created by written texts. Others worried that written texts would encourage individual study over communal learning, undermining the social bonds that held monastic communities together.

Ultimately, practical necessity overcame these concerns. With so many oral lineages disrupted or destroyed, the community faced the very real possibility that major portions of the Buddha's teaching would be lost forever. The elders who convened at Aluvihāra made the pragmatic decision that written preservation, however problematic, was preferable to complete loss.

The Editorial Revolution

The process of committing the oral canon to writing involved far more than simple transcription. It required systematic editorial decisions that would profoundly influence how Buddhism developed over subsequent centuries. Modern scholarship has revealed that this transition represented one of the most significant editorial moments in Buddhist history, comparable in its impact to the canonical decisions made during the early councils.

First and most fundamentally, writing necessitated standardization in ways that oral transmission had not. Robert Buswell Jr.'s analysis of this transition has shown how oral recitation could tolerate considerable variation—different communities could preserve the same teaching in slightly different formulations without creating serious problems, since the essential meaning remained clear and the variations often reflected skillful adaptation to different audiences or circumstances. Written texts, however, demanded decisions about precise wording, exact sequence, and definitive formulation. Each teaching could exist in only one written version within a given manuscript tradition, forcing editors to choose among oral variants or create synthetic versions that combined different traditional formulations.⁶

This standardization process inevitably involved selection and exclusion. Steven Collins has demonstrated how certain teachings were deemed too localized, too repetitive, or too uncertain in their attribution to merit inclusion in the written canon. Others were reorganized, condensed, or expanded to fit the systematic organizational schemes that written texts made possible. The fluid, responsive character of oral teaching gave way to the fixed, authoritative character of written scripture.⁷

The choice of language proved particularly significant. The teachings were written in Pāli, a Middle Indic dialect that was neither the Buddha's native language nor the dominant literary language of first-century BCE Sri Lanka. This decision reflected complex considerations about accessibility, authority, and identity. Pāli was understood to preserve the linguistic character of the Buddha's teachings more faithfully than Sanskrit, which was associated with Brahmanical culture and later Buddhist innovations. Yet it was also accessible to educated Sri Lankans in ways that highly archaic forms might not have been.

Richard Gombrich and others have noted that this linguistic choice created a distinctive textual tradition that would eventually spread to Burma, Thailand, Cambodia, and Laos, creating a shared canonical language for Theravāda Buddhism across diverse cultural contexts. However, it also established boundaries between the Pāli tradition and the Sanskrit and Chinese canons that were developing in other Buddhist communities, contributing to the sectarian divisions that would characterize later Buddhist history.⁸

The editorial process also involved decisions about organization and structure that reflected particular understandings of Buddhist teaching and practice. The traditional division of the canon into Sutta Piṭaka (discourses), Vinaya Piṭaka(monastic discipline), and Abhidhamma Piṭaka (systematic analysis) was formalized during this written compilation, creating categories that would influence Buddhist education and scholarship for centuries. Within each division, further organizational decisions determined which texts would be grouped together, how they would be arranged, and what internal divisions would be created.

Significantly, these editorial decisions were made by a specific community of monastics working under particular historical circumstances. The monks at Aluvihāra were predominantly male, predominantly from certain regional and social backgrounds, and working within the institutional and intellectual frameworks of first-century BCE Sri Lankan Theravāda. Their editorial choices inevitably reflected their perspectives, priorities, and limitations in ways that shaped which aspects of early Buddhist diversity were preserved and which were marginalized or lost.

What Would Have Changed?

The editorial decisions made during the writing of the Pāli Canon represented crucial turning points where alternative choices could have produced dramatically different outcomes for Buddhist textual culture and religious development.

Continued Oral Transmission in Crisis

If the Sri Lankan monastic community had decided against writing and instead attempted to reconstitute their oral traditions through the surviving monks, Buddhist textual culture might have developed along entirely different lines. Jan Nattier has suggested that this could have led to a much more fluid and regionally diverse tradition, as different communities would have been forced to reconstruct teachings from fragmentary memories and local adaptations.⁹ Rather than the standardized Pāli Canon that emerged from Aluvihāra, multiple regional canons might have developed, each reflecting the particular oral lineages that survived in different areas.

Such diversity could have prevented the rigid sectarian boundaries that later developed between different Buddhist schools, since no single textual tradition could claim definitive authority. However, it might also have made it much more difficult for Buddhist communities to maintain coherent identity across geographical distances or to resist absorption into local religious traditions. The written Pāli Canon's role in creating shared Theravāda identity across Sri Lanka, Burma, Thailand, and other regions might never have been possible without textual standardization.

Sanskrit as the Canonical Language

Had the Sri Lankan editors chosen to write the canon in Sanskrit rather than Pāli, the subsequent development of Buddhism might have been dramatically different. Étienne Lamotte speculated that Sanskritization could have prevented the sharp divisions that developed between Theravāda and Mahāyāna traditions, since both would have been working within the same linguistic and literary framework.¹⁰ Sanskrit was already established as the language of sophisticated philosophical discourse and had prestige across South and Central Asia that Pāli lacked.

A Sanskrit Theravāda canon might have remained more closely connected to North Indian Buddhist developments, potentially leading to greater doctrinal synthesis and reduced sectarian conflict. It might also have facilitated translation into Chinese and Tibetan, since many Sanskrit Buddhist texts were already being translated into these languages. However, the choice of Sanskrit might have made the canon less accessible to ordinary practitioners and more associated with elite scholarly culture, potentially altering Buddhism's character as a popular religious movement.

Inclusion of Commentarial Literature

One of the most significant editorial decisions involved the boundary between canonical texts and commentarial literature. The Aluvihāra editors chose to preserve the basic discourses, rules, and systematic treatises while excluding the extensive interpretive and explanatory literature that had developed around these core texts. Had the commentaries (aṭṭhakathā) been included within the canonical boundaries, Buddhist intellectual culture might have developed very differently.

Rita Gross has argued that including commentarial material within the canon itself might have created more dynamic and responsive approaches to doctrinal development, since interpretation and application would have been recognized as ongoing canonical activities rather than secondary elaborations of fixed texts.¹¹ This could have prevented the rigid distinction between unchangeable scripture and changeable interpretation that sometimes limited creative theological development in later Theravāda.

However, including commentaries might also have made the canon unwieldy and harder to transmit, since commentarial literature tends to be much more voluminous than basic textual material. It might also have elevated particular interpretive approaches to canonical status in ways that could have stifled alternative understandings.

Women's Participation in Editorial Process

The scribal work at Aluvihāra was almost certainly performed exclusively by male monks, reflecting both the gender composition of literate monastic communities and the social restrictions that limited women's access to formal textual activities. Had women monastics been included in the editorial process, the resulting canon might have given greater prominence to texts that reflect women's spiritual experiences and perspectives.

Karma Lekshe Tsomo has noted that collections like the Therīgāthā (verses of elder nuns), while preserved in the written canon, occupy relatively marginal positions within traditional curricula and liturgical practice.¹² Women's participation in the editorial process might have led to more central placement of such texts and perhaps to the preservation of additional women's teachings that were excluded from the final collection.

Female participation might also have influenced editorial decisions about practical matters like family life, economic activity, and social relationships that were often marginalized in collections focused primarily on renunciant monastic experience. The perspectives of women who had to balance spiritual practice with household responsibilities might have led to greater preservation of teachings relevant to lay practitioners.

Scholar Debate

Contemporary scholarship reveals ongoing debates about virtually every aspect of the Pāli Canon's composition, from its historical circumstances to its editorial principles to its long-term significance for Buddhist development.

Gregory Schopen, whose work has revolutionized understanding of early Buddhist textual culture, has challenged traditional assumptions about the relationship between written texts and actual Buddhist practice. Drawing on archaeological and epigraphical evidence, Schopen argues that what Buddhist communities chose to preserve in writing may tell us more about their literary and scholarly interests than about their religious priorities. His research suggests that many practices central to lived Buddhism—devotional activities, ritual procedures, popular beliefs—were often excluded from formal canonical collections that privileged systematic doctrinal material over practical religious life.¹³

This perspective implies that the Pāli Canon, however valuable as a source for understanding Buddhist thought, may provide a highly selective and potentially misleading picture of how Buddhism was actually practiced by most followers. The editorial decisions made at Aluvihāra and similar sites may have systematically privileged certain kinds of teaching and certain approaches to practice while marginalizing others that were equally important in daily Buddhist life.

Richard Salomon's groundbreaking work on early Gāndhārī manuscripts has revealed the remarkable diversity of Buddhist textual cultures that were developing simultaneously across different regions and communities. Rather than viewing the writing of the Pāli Canon as a singular moment when "the" Buddhist canon was created, Salomon argues for a "polycentric" understanding that recognizes multiple, parallel efforts to preserve Buddhist teachings through writing. Different communities made different editorial choices based on their particular circumstances, priorities, and limitations.¹⁴

This research suggests that the Pāli Canon represents one solution among many to the challenge of preserving Buddhist teachings, rather than the natural or inevitable outcome of textual development. Alternative canons with different organizational principles, linguistic choices, and textual boundaries were emerging simultaneously in other Buddhist communities, creating a much more complex picture of canonical formation than traditional accounts suggest.

Robert Buswell Jr. has examined the long-term consequences of the transition from oral to written transmission, particularly in East Asian Buddhist contexts where written texts became central to monastic education and practice. His research reveals how this shift gradually altered the relationship between Buddhist practitioners and their textual traditions, creating new forms of scholarly culture while potentially weakening the intimate connection between text and practice that characterized oral learning.¹⁵

Buswell's work suggests that writing, while essential for preserving teachings across time and distance, may have contributed to the intellectualization and scholasticization of Buddhism in ways that sometimes distanced textual study from meditative practice and direct spiritual experience. The editorial revolution that began at Aluvihāra thus had complex consequences that included both preservation and transformation of Buddhist spiritual culture.

Steven Collins has traced how the authority of written texts gradually displaced other forms of religious authority within Buddhist communities, creating what he calls "textual fundamentalism"—the assumption that written texts provide direct access to the Buddha's teaching without need for interpretive mediation. His analysis reveals how the editorial decisions made during canonical formation continued to influence Buddhist thought centuries later, as later generations treated the products of particular historical editorial processes as timeless and unchangeable divine revelation.¹⁶

Collins's research emphasizes that understanding the contingent historical circumstances that shaped canonical formation can actually deepen appreciation for Buddhist textual traditions by revealing the remarkable human effort and dedication required to preserve spiritual wisdom across changing historical circumstances.

Contemporary Relevance

The editorial revolution that occurred at Aluvihāra continues to shape contemporary Buddhist life in ways that extend far beyond historical interest. Modern practitioners, whether chanting in a Thai temple, studying in an American meditation center, or accessing texts through digital applications, encounter Buddhism through textual forms that still reflect the editorial decisions made during that crisis-driven transition to written transmission.

The choice of Pāli as the canonical language means that Theravāda Buddhism worldwide continues to use liturgical and scholarly language that connects contemporary practitioners directly to the first written Buddhist texts. This creates remarkable continuity across time and culture, allowing modern practitioners to chant the same formulations that were written on palm leaves two millennia ago. Yet this linguistic continuity also creates barriers for practitioners who lack training in Pāli and must rely on translations that inevitably involve additional interpretive layers.

The organizational structure established during the writing of the canon—the division into Sutta, Vinaya, and Abhidhamma collections, with further subdivisions within each category—continues to influence how Buddhist education is organized and how practitioners encounter these teachings. Modern curricula often follow traditional organizational schemes rather than thematic or practical arrangements that might be more suitable for contemporary learners.

The editorial boundaries established during canonical formation continue to influence debates about textual authority and interpretive freedom within contemporary Buddhist communities. Texts that were included in the written canon often receive very different treatment from those that were excluded or preserved in other forms, even when the excluded materials might be equally ancient or spiritually valuable. Understanding the contingent historical circumstances that shaped these boundaries can help contemporary practitioners develop more nuanced approaches to textual authority that honor traditional wisdom while remaining open to insights from diverse sources.

The transition from oral to written transmission also illuminates contemporary challenges as Buddhist communities adapt to digital technologies and global communication. Just as the crisis at Aluvihāra forced difficult decisions about how to preserve authentic teaching in new media, contemporary Buddhist communities must navigate questions about how traditional forms of practice and study can be maintained through online platforms, digital archives, and virtual communities.

Some contemporary Buddhist teachers and scholars worry that digital access to vast textual databases may create the same kind of external relationship to teachings that early critics of writing feared—knowledge that exists "out there" in searchable databases rather than "in here" through embodied memorization and practice. Others argue that digital technologies offer unprecedented opportunities for preserving, sharing, and studying Buddhist wisdom across cultural and linguistic boundaries.

The editorial decisions made at Aluvihāra also provide important precedents for how contemporary Buddhist communities might approach questions of adaptation and innovation. The monks who chose to write down the canon were simultaneously preserving tradition and transforming it, making changes they deemed necessary for survival while attempting to maintain fidelity to essential principles. Their example suggests models for how contemporary practitioners might balance faithfulness to inherited wisdom with responsiveness to contemporary circumstances.

Perhaps most significantly, understanding the historical development of the Pāli Canon can deepen rather than threaten contemporary faith by revealing the remarkable human dedication required to preserve spiritual wisdom across changing historical circumstances. The monks at Aluvihāra worked through political upheaval, economic crisis, and personal loss to ensure that future generations would have access to the Buddha's teaching. Their commitment to preservation through adaptation offers inspiration for contemporary practitioners facing their own challenges in maintaining authentic spiritual practice in rapidly changing world.

The palm leaves inscribed at Aluvihāra have long since crumbled to dust, but the editorial choices made during those desperate months continue to shape how millions of people encounter the Buddha's teaching. Understanding this history reveals both the contingency and the continuity that characterize all living spiritual traditions—wisdom that must be constantly preserved and constantly reinterpreted if it is to remain meaningful across changing circumstances.

In our next chapter, we will examine how the written canon, once established, required ongoing editorial attention through the development of the Vinaya—the detailed code of monastic conduct that reveals how Buddhist communities translated abstract principles into practical rules for daily life. There, too, we will see how preservation and adaptation worked together to maintain the living tradition that the Aluvihāra scribes risked everything to preserve.

Notes

The details of scribal practice are reconstructed from archaeological evidence about palm-leaf manuscript production and references in later Sri Lankan literature. See Ananda W.P. Guruge, "The Palæography of Sri Lankan Manuscripts," Journal of the Ceylon Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society 32 (1991): 78-95.
The traditional account of the writing of the Pāli Canon is preserved in the Dīpavaṃsa (XX.20-21) and the Mahāvaṃsa (XXXIII.100-101). For critical analysis, see Wilhelm Geiger, trans., The Mahāvaṃsa (London: Pali Text Society, 1912), xxxiv-xxxvi.
On the historical context of Vaṭṭagāmaṇi's reign and the Tamil invasions, see K.M. de Silva, A History of Sri Lanka(London: C. Hurst, 1981), 15-24.
For the organization of oral lineages in early Sri Lankan Buddhism, see Walpola Rahula, History of Buddhism in Ceylon (Colombo: M.D. Gunasena, 1956), 157-163.
K.R. Norman, A Philological Approach to Buddhism (London: School of Oriental and African Studies, 1997), 78-95.
Robert E. Buswell Jr., "The Formation of the Buddhist Canon in Korea: The Transition from Oral to Written Transmission," Korean Studies 15 (1991): 56-78.
Steven Collins, Nirvana and Other Buddhist Felicities: Utopias of the Pāli Imaginaire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 112-140.
Richard F. Gombrich, Theravāda Buddhism: A Social History from Ancient Benares to Modern Colombo (London: Routledge, 1988), 158-172.
Jan Nattier, "The Indian Roots of Pure Land Buddhism: Insights from the Oldest Chinese Versions of the Larger Sukhāvatīvyūha," Pacific World, 3rd series, no. 8 (2006): 15-28.
Étienne Lamotte, History of Indian Buddhism: From the Origins to the Śaka Era, trans. Sara Webb-Boin (Louvain-la-Neuve: Université Catholique de Louvain, 1988), 547-564.
Rita M. Gross, Buddhism After Patriarchy: A Feminist History, Analysis, and Reconstruction of Buddhism (Albany: SUNY Press, 1993), 97-115.
Karma Lekshe Tsomo, "The Therigatha and Contemporary Women," in Women in Buddhism: Images of the Feminine in the Mahāyāna Tradition, ed. Diana Y. Paul (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985), 45-67.
Gregory Schopen, Bones, Stones, and Buddhist Monks: Collected Papers on the Archaeology, Epigraphy, and Texts of Monastic Buddhism in India (Honolulu: University of Hawaiʻi Press, 1997), 1-22.
Richard Salomon, Ancient Buddhist Scrolls from Gandhāra: The British Library Kharoṣṭhī Fragments (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1999), 168-185.
Robert E. Buswell Jr., The Zen Monastic Experience: Buddhist Practice in Contemporary Korea (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992), 147-165.
Steven Collins, "What Are Buddhists Doing When They Deny the Self?" in Religion and Practical Reason, ed. Frank Reynolds and David Tracy (Albany: SUNY Press, 1994), 59-86.