from Part I - Background and Context
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 13 October 2022
This chapter surveys the corpus of early Buddhist texts that have survived the passage of time and can be consulted by scholars. These comprise the complete canon of the Theravāda school written in Pali, a significant amount of the canon in Sanskrit belonging to the Sarvāstivāda school, plus more in Chinese translation, and substantial portions of the canons of other schools, also preserved in Chinese. Determining whether particular texts were early or later, along with analysis of their mode of transmission, enables them to be evaluated as sources for comparative analysis. This rather technical chapter concludes with a discussion of difficulties encountered in drawing parallels between texts from different schools in different languages.
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