Religious Texts
- Thread starter Thoreau
- Start date
Thoreau
Valued Senior Member
SOB! I didn't mean to click on the Tengyur. And apparently I made a mistake. I thought the Pali and Triptaka were two separate texts. They are the same. (I'd be a horrible Buddhist lol). I have always heard them referred to as Triptaka (or tipitaka), and rarely the Pali. Mods - can you change that?
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The Tao Te Ching
The Platform Sutra of Hui Neng, Sixth Patriarch of Zen Buddhism
Han Shan, The Cold Mountain Poems
The Platform Sutra of Hui Neng, Sixth Patriarch of Zen Buddhism
Han Shan, The Cold Mountain Poems
Yazata
Valued Senior Member
I haven't read any of them cover-to-cover.
The Pali Canon and its commentaries are where most of my interest is directed these days, though I still dabble in reading the Bible (mostly the New Testament). The Pali Canon isn't a single bound book like the Bible, it's a lot bigger than that and is an entire collection of texts. Some of it is of interest largely to monks (the Vinaya), some of it is aimed at beginners and laypeople, and some of it is extremely technical. Parts of it (some Abhidhamma books) still haven't been translated into English as far as I know. And reading this stuff (the Abhidhamma in particular) calls for the use of commentaries and secondary literature, some of it quite ancient and hard to locate in English, which complicates things still further.
It's not a small task. I don't expect to read all of it in my lifetime.
It's ok, it's certainly a major canonical collection of religious texts, 225 commentaries and treatises written by various Indian and Tibetan Buddhist scholars and teachers and preserved today in Tibetan. (I haven't read any of it, though I have several of the texts on my e-reader.)
Its companion the Kangyur is basically the Tibetan version of the Tripitaka, though it sometimes contains different texts, and sometimes different textual versions of the same texts, compared to the Pali and Chinese Tripitakas. Exploring those differences and their significance keeps many university scholars busy and at this point it hasn't been fully explored. (To even approach it requires facility in a number of obscure languages.)
No, it's cool. There's a Chinese Tripitaka as well as the Pali one, with very different contents in many cases. And there's the Kangyur too. (Pali is an ancient language, no longer spoken today, similar to Sanskrit.)
The word 'tripitaka' means 'three baskets', referring to how the monks' ancient palm leaf manuscripts were organized. Some early Buddhist schools had two baskets (divisions) and others more than three, but the 'three baskets' name kind of caught on and was used to refer to the whole body of teachings that were believed (probably unhistorically in some cases) to come directly from the Buddha. The three Pali divisions (baskets) are Vinaya (the monks' rules), Sutta (the Buddha's teaching discourses), and Abhidhamma (later scholastic elaboration of the suttas, which my or may not have been piously attributed by the schools to the Buddha personally).
The thing is, different early Indian schools created their own somewhat different collections. And then writings from different school's collections found their way into China and Tibet one by one, where they were collected into Tripitakas once again, sometimes including multiple versions of the same text. And then in China and Tibet, the massive collection of Mahayana Sutras was added to the earlier material for centuries, expanding it tremendously. Unlike the Theravada, in the Mahayana the Buddhist canon was never entirely closed, Bible-style, and restricted to a fixed and defined collection of texts. (The Theravadans' Pali canon did close around the time of Christ.) So the Chinese and Tibetan canons continually grew and grew over a thousand more years, ending up much larger than the Pali canon, consisting of the equivalent of thousands of books. Even Buddhists aren't sure how many there are and certainly nobody has ever read all of them. It's hard enough just to catalog them.
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Thoreau
Valued Senior Member
I had to do the Bible as a kid, cover to cover, and had a couple of opportunities to repeat the task in a completely critical vein. In my early adult phase I ended up in a Hare Krishna temple, after I got separated from my belongings on a trip, and these folks gave me free room and board and a heavy dose of indoctrination. I skimmed through the Bhagavad Gita, out of astonishment more than anything else, so I guess I could say cover to cover, but it wasn't a thorough read. I'm not sure if it qualifies but I read an animist text cover to cover, a religion in another place I was visiting, one that attracted a lot of literate locals, so they came up with a text almost the way the some of the American Anabaptists came up with their own texts. So that was kind of unusual. Up until the hostage crisis in Iran I had been following some of the revolutionary ideas springing up in that region, expecting something like the Arab spring we saw last year. So when these people came to power and turned out to be so bitter, I took it up to methodically read the Koran cover to cover, but only in search of their definitions and motivations behind their message. These and other materials I have read have interested me merely as a way of understanding other cultures, although I have read some Buddhist commentary that draws metaphors for the mind that I found intriguing, though still not with any religious ideation attached.
