The Buddhist Canon

It has been argued that Buddhism does not have a canon in the sense that canon is understood in the Abrahamic religions (Corless: 212-215). It is certainly the case that the Mahāyāna canon was an open one even in India and continues to be so in the Tibetan tradition (Lancaster: 505); this is especially the case in terms of the gter ma ("treasure texts"; see Gyatso, in this volume). It is also the case that the Buddhist canon is not seen as an exclusive revelation granted to humans by an extra-human divine being, as is the canonical literature of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam.

The principal dissimilarity with the Abrahamic sense of canon, however, stems from the central hermeneutical principle of Buddhism—that the ultimate significance of a scriptural text lies neither in its literal meaning nor in the person from whom it comes, but rather in its ability to generate an awakening to reality (Thurman, 1978; Gómez: 535-536). As Roger Corless succinctly puts it, "The center of Buddhism is not the word of the Buddha, nor even the Buddha. It is bodhi, the enlightened mind.... The text is, in the final analysis, expendable in favor of the practitioner's own bodhi" (213).

Corless encapsulates the principle behind the well-known four reliances (rten pa bzhi) that are the foundation of Tibetan Buddhist hermeneutics—to rely on doctrines and not on persons, on the meaning of those doctrines in preference to the words, on the definitive meanings in preference to those requiring interpretation, and on nonconceptual wisdom in preference to conceptual knowledge (Thurman, 1978; Hopkins: 425; Thurman, 1984: 113ff.; Gómez: 535-536). This must nonetheless be balanced with the observation that an appeal to a scripture's provenance has been very important, both in India and Tibet. Later Indian and Tibetan Buddhists justified the claim that the Mahāyāna sūtras and tantras were canonical by citing the claim (made in the texts themselves) that they were the actual teachings of Buddha.

With this in mind, let me offer the following as a tentative minimal definition of "canon": a list or group of texts that are accorded special status because of their perceived authority, an authority attributed either to their source(s) or their transformative ability, but most often to both. Such "transformative ability" in the ultimate sense (in Buddhism) would be salvific: the ability of a text to enable one who hears or reads it to successfully engage in the practice[page 127] of meditation leading to nonconceptual wisdom realizing emptiness (śūnyatā). Less ultimate aims would be the successful practice of morality or the development of compassion. In terms of texts that deal with philosophical issues, a more mundane sort of transformative ability is seen in the explicatory power of an exegetical treatise. In a more traditionally ritual sense, transformative ability may also be seen in the recitation of a text, for example a Prajñāpāramitā sūtra, for the sake of alleviating illness.

There was, in Indian Buddhism, a three-part canon, the Tripiṭaka or "three baskets" (see Harrison, in this volume) consisting of the Sūtras (the discourses given by Śākyamuni Buddha during his forty-five year teaching career), the Vinaya (rules of conduct for the monastic community extracted from Śākyamuni's teachings), and the Abhidharma (the "higher teaching," systematic presentations and analyses of Buddha's teachings). Of these two categories of texts, only the first two are actual buddhavacana or "words of the Buddha" (see Hirakawa: 509ff.). Thus, even within the most basic canon, the three baskets, there is a hierarchy of privilege, with the Sūtras being accorded more authority than the Abhidharma.

With the rise of Mahāyāna Buddhism, even more buddhavacana was recognized—beginning with the Prajñāpāramitā sūtras and continuing in the tantras—and these were accorded an even higher status than the earlier sūtras by followers of the Mahāyāna (see Skorupski, in this volume). Additionally, texts explaining the Sūtra and Vinaya texts were written—the śāstras or "exegetical works"—and these also attained canonical status, not only through their explicatory power but also through their authorship by writers remembered by later Buddhists not only as philosophers but also as meditation masters. It is these texts—those current in later Indian Buddhism—that became the basis of the canon of Tibetan Buddhism. Buddhavacana became the bKa' 'gyur (literally "Word-translation") and the śāstras became the bsTan 'gyur ("teaching/ treatise-translation").

It is, therefore, inappropriate to maintain that some of these texts are canonical whereas others are "quasi-canonical." It is more accurate to say that there is a hierarchy of canonical texts in Tibetan Buddhism, with the status of individual less-privileged, lower-ranked texts (for example, the śāstras) shifting in dependence on who is doing the ranking.

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