Prologue: Who Edits Awakening?

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

"Thus have I heard..."

The old monk sits cross-legged beneath the latticed beams of a stone cave. Outside, in the sweltering heat of the Ganges plain, monsoon clouds gather over Rājagṛha. But inside the Saptaparṇi Cave, a hush holds the assembled five hundred monks in place. This is no ordinary gathering. It is the First Council—the first attempt to save the Buddha's words from vanishing into the uncertainty of human memory.¹

The Buddha is gone. Just three months earlier, his body was laid to rest beneath sal trees at Kushinagar, his final words a cryptic call to "strive with diligence." No scriptures were left behind. No written legacy. Only memories remain—fragile, fallible, human memories carried by disciples who had followed him for decades but now faced a world without their teacher.

Mahākāśyapa, one of the Buddha's senior disciples, fears the Dharma will be lost to forgetfulness, or worse, transformed by rival interpretations already forming among different groups of followers. He calls this gathering during the rainy season retreat to recite and preserve the teachings. Ānanda, the Buddha's devoted attendant for the last twenty-five years, is pressed into service despite initial doubts about his spiritual attainment. "Thus have I heard," he begins with the formula that would become canonical, and the words flow—sermons from Deer Park, dialogues with kings, parables told under bodhi trees—chanted in rhythmic cadence, shaped by collective memory and communal agreement.²

But even here, in this first act of preservation, decisions must be made. Which teachings were actually spoken by the Buddha? Which phrasing best reflects his intended meaning? Should they be adapted for clarity, or preserved exactly as remembered? And what of the disagreements already simmering beneath the surface about discipline, doctrine, and authority?

This, too, is editing.

The story of the Buddhist canon begins not with ink, but with voice—with communal memory shaped by urgency, reverence, and human discretion. And from that very first council, the question that has haunted all sacred traditions takes root here as well: Who edits awakening?

The Messiness of Remembering the Unwritten

For centuries after the Buddha's death around 480 BCE, his teachings remained oral. No scrolls. No books. No singular canon. The Dharma lived in the breath of monastics who memorized thousands of lines and passed them down generation after generation through carefully structured recitation practices inherited from Vedic traditions. These monks and nuns were more than reciters—they were editors, transmitters, and interpreters, tasked with keeping the Buddha's insight alive in an impermanent world.³

But impermanence shaped their work too. As Buddhism spread beyond its Gangetic heartland, dialects diverged. Geography pulled communities apart. Political upheavals scattered monastics across kingdoms and empires. The recitations split into different versions—some adapted to local linguistic needs, others expanded with stories and cosmologies that reflected regional cultures. What had once been a single stream of oral memory became a delta, flowing through Sri Lanka, Kashmir, Gandhāra, and eventually into Central Asia, China, and beyond.

Modern scholars like Gregory Schopen and Charles Hallisey have shown that the traditional account of the First Council, while foundational to Buddhist self-understanding, likely represents a later idealization of what was actually a much more complex and protracted process of textual formation.⁴ Archaeological evidence suggests that early Buddhist communities were far more diverse in their practices and beliefs than the unified picture presented in later canonical accounts. The councils themselves—if they occurred as described—probably involved smaller groups of influential monks rather than the massive assemblies of later legend.

And still, for centuries, the teachings were not written down.

The reasons were complex and culturally specific. In many early Indian traditions, writing was associated with commerce, legal contracts, or secretive knowledge—not sacred truth meant to be shared openly. The spoken word carried spiritual power that inscribed text seemed to lack. Memorization was deemed more reliable than fragile manuscripts that could be destroyed by insects, moisture, or political upheaval. And for a teaching so rooted in direct experience and personal transformation, the idea of fixing it in written form felt paradoxical—how do you inscribe the doctrine of no-self in permanent ink?⁵

According to traditional accounts preserved in the Dīpavaṃsa and Mahāvaṃsa, it wasn't until the first century BCE—nearly four centuries after the Buddha's death—that monastics in Sri Lanka finally committed the Pāli Canon to writing. The decision came under pressure from war, famine, and perceived doctrinal decay that threatened the survival of oral lineages. The threat of total loss prompted a radical shift: from breath to palm leaf, from chant to script.⁶

The Buddhist canon had entered the written world, but this transition marked the beginning, not the end, of its editorial journey.

Human Hands in Sacred Transmission

Once writing began, editing took on new dimensions and complications. The act of preservation no longer depended solely on human memory, but on materials, scribes, and the complex culture of manuscript production. Palm leaves cracked in tropical humidity. Bark paper disintegrated over decades. Ink faded or smudged. Copyists made errors—sometimes inadvertent, sometimes intentional corrections based on their understanding of doctrine or grammar.

The great Chinese pilgrim and translator Xuanzang, who traveled to India in the seventh century CE, spent years rendering Sanskrit sutras into elegant Chinese, making thousands of linguistic choices that still reverberate in East Asian Buddhist liturgy today. In Tibet, translation became a systematic national project under royal patronage, with precise glossaries and government oversight ensuring consistency. In Japan, collections of Zen koans were compiled and edited centuries after the masters who supposedly uttered them, creating literary works that shaped an entire tradition's understanding of enlightenment.⁷

Across the Buddhist world, texts were written, rewritten, classified, canonized, and sometimes deliberately forgotten. Some sutras existed in dozens of versions across different languages and regions. Others appeared suddenly in the historical record—texts claiming ancient origins but bearing linguistic and doctrinal features that suggested much later composition. Were these forgeries? Pious expansions? Or legitimate revelations inspired by authentic Buddhist insight transmitted through non-textual means?

Leading scholars like Jan Nattier and Paul Harrison have demonstrated how many of the Mahāyāna sutras—some of the most beloved texts in modern East Asian Buddhism—often bear clear marks of composition in Chinese cultural contexts rather than Indian origins, despite their claims to ancient Sanskrit sources. Their profound teachings on emptiness, compassion, and Buddha-nature have inspired countless practitioners across centuries. But they also raise fundamental questions about textual authority: Who wrote them? When? And on whose spiritual authority do they rest?⁸

In a tradition that teaches the ultimate unreliability of fixed identity and permanent essence, these editorial fingerprints become both intellectually problematic and spiritually evocative. Perhaps the multiplicity of sources reflects the very teaching about the constructed nature of all phenomena.

Awakening Is Not Exempt from Editing

Buddhism, more than most religious traditions, teaches that nothing remains unchanged. That fundamental insight includes scripture itself.

There was no Buddhist equivalent of the Council of Nicaea, no central ecclesiastical authority with the power to define canonical boundaries for all communities. Instead, Buddhist canons formed through gradual accumulation and local consensus, through royal patronage and scholarly persuasion, through practical needs and sectarian competition. What counted as authoritative scripture in Thailand might be completely unknown in Mongolia. A sutra revered in Korea might be absent from Sri Lankan collections. The Tibetan Kangyur contains hundreds of texts never found in the Pāli Canon. The Chinese Taishō Tripiṭaka includes acknowledged apocryphal sutras never translated back into Sanskrit. Even today, the term "Buddhist canon" conceals a diversity so vast that most scholars now speak of Buddhist canons, plural.⁹

Yet for all this textual variance and editorial complexity, Buddhist communities across cultures have continued to chant, study, and organize their lives around these texts with profound devotion and spiritual seriousness. Perhaps the multiplicity is not a flaw requiring correction but a reflection of the Dharma itself: context-sensitive, skillful in means, naturally adaptive to different spiritual needs and cultural circumstances.

The traditional Buddhist teaching of upāya—skillful means—suggests that truth adapts its expression to the capacity and needs of its audience. If this principle applies to the Buddha's own teaching methods, why not to the preservation and transmission of his words across different historical periods and cultural contexts?

Still, important questions remain. If the Buddha's teachings were inevitably shaped by human voices across centuries, which voices were amplified and which were silenced? How did political regimes, linguistic shifts, monastic institutions, and sectarian rivalries affect the preservation of awakening? What wisdom was lost along the way through accident, persecution, or deliberate suppression? And what, against all historical odds, miraculously survived?

The Sacred Editors of the Dharma

This book explores those questions through the lens of specific historical moments, scholarly discoveries, and contemporary challenges. It is not an attempt to expose errors or undermine sacred traditions that have sustained millions of practitioners across centuries and cultures. Rather, it represents a recognition that every sacred text—no matter how revered—was touched, shaped, and transmitted by human hands working within particular historical circumstances.

In Buddhism, those hands belonged to an remarkably diverse group: anonymous monks chanting under torchlight in Gandhāran monasteries, royal scribes in Tibetan courts, Chinese nuns copying sutras as devotional practice, Sinhalese scholars preserving Pāli commentaries during colonial occupation, and contemporary software engineers creating digital databases that make ancient wisdom globally accessible.

The Dharma was never frozen in time or preserved in pristine isolation. It moved—across empires and oceans, across languages and cultural boundaries, across centuries of political upheaval and spiritual renewal. At every stage, someone made choices about what to preserve, how to translate, when to adapt, and why to include or exclude particular teachings. This book tells the stories of those choices and the people who made them.

So, who edits awakening?

In a tradition where ultimate truth cannot be fully captured in words, and where form is always recognized as empty of inherent existence, perhaps the more profound question is: How does the Dharma survive and flourish at all across such vast temporal and cultural distances?

It survives through memory and mistake, through intention and accident, through careful preservation and creative adaptation. It survives because people loved these teachings enough to give their lives to shaping, protecting, and transmitting them. And perhaps—in ways that transcend our usual understanding of authorship and authority—that very human process of loving engagement was itself a form of wisdom, a continuation of the Buddha's own teaching activity through the devoted efforts of countless followers.

This book tells the story of how human beings across twenty-five centuries have participated in editing the words of awakening. In doing so, it invites contemporary readers not to lose faith in these texts, but to gain deeper reverence—for the historical processes that preserved them, for the people who dedicated their lives to transmission, and for the profound teaching about impermanence that somehow makes authentic spiritual wisdom possible even within, or perhaps especially through, the contingent forms of human culture and historical change.

Let the journey begin.

Notes

The account of the First Council is preserved in the Cullavagga of the Pāli Vinaya and various Sanskrit sources, though modern scholars debate its historical details. See Charles S. Prebish, "A Review of Scholarship on the Buddhist Councils," Journal of Asian Studies 33, no. 2 (1974): 239-254.
The formula "Thus have I heard" (evaṃ me sutaṃ) became the standard opening for sutras across all Buddhist traditions, emphasizing the role of disciples as faithful transmitters rather than authors. See Peter Harvey, An Introduction to Buddhism, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 21-25.
On oral transmission practices in early Buddhism, see Alexander Wynne, "The Oral Transmission of Early Buddhist Literature," Journal of the International Association of Buddhist Studies 27, no. 1 (2004): 97-127.
Gregory Schopen, "Archaeology and Protestant Presuppositions in the Study of Indian Buddhism," History of Religions 31, no. 1 (1991): 1-23; Charles Hallisey, "Roads Taken and Not Taken in the Study of Theravāda Buddhism," in Curators of the Buddha, ed. Donald S. Lopez Jr. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 31-61.
On the cultural attitudes toward writing in ancient India, see Johannes Bronkhorst, "The Earliest Buddhist Texts and the Early Buddhist Attitude towards the Spoken and the Written Word," in The Buddhist Forum, vol. 7, ed. Tadeusz Skorupski (London: School of Oriental and African Studies, 2002), 27-41.
The Mahāvaṃsa (33.100-101) describes the writing down of the Pāli Canon during the reign of King Vaṭṭagāmaṇi Abhaya. See Wilhelm Geiger, trans., The Mahāvaṃsa (London: Pali Text Society, 1912), 234-235.
For Xuanzang's translation methods, see Antonino Forte, A Jewel in Indra's Net: The Letter Sent by Fazang in China to Uisang in Korea (Kyoto: Italian School of East Asian Studies, 2000). On Tibetan translation projects, see Matthew T. Kapstein, The Tibetan Assimilation of Buddhism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000).
Jan Nattier, A Few Good Men: The Bodhisattva Path according to The Inquiry of Ugra (Honolulu: University of Hawaiʻi Press, 2003); Paul Harrison, "Searching for the Origins of the Mahāyāna: What Are We Looking For?" The Eastern Buddhist 28, no. 1 (1995): 48-69.
On the diversity of Buddhist canons, see Jonathan Silk, "What, If Anything, Is Mahāyāna Buddhism?" Numen 49, no. 4 (2002): 355-405; Peter Skilling, "Scriptural Authenticity and the Śrāvaka Schools," The Eastern Buddhist 41, no. 2 (2010): 1-47.

The Messiness of Remembering the Unwritten

Human Hands in Sacred Transmission

Awakening Is Not Exempt from Editing

The Sacred Editors of the Dharma

Notes

Further Reading