Early Buddhist Oral Tradition: Textual Formation and Transmission

by Anālayo

A fascinating investigation into the formation and transmission of the early Buddhist oral tradition.

For hundreds of years after his death, the Buddha’s teachings were transmitted orally, from person to person. In this volume, acclaimed scholar-monk Bhikkhu Analayo examines the impact of such oral transmission on early Buddhist texts, be these monastic rules, verses, or prose portions of the early discourses. He scrutinizes various oral aspects of these texts, surveying evidence for memory errors, the impact of attempts at systematization, and instances of additions and innovations. Finally, he explores the implications of the nature of these texts as the final product of centuries of oral transmission and evaluates the type of conclusions that can—and cannot—be drawn based on them.

In-depth but still accessible, Early Buddhist Oral Tradition is an engrossing and enlightening inquiry into the early Buddhist oral tradition.

Genres: Buddhism

312 pages, Hardcover

Published July 5, 2022

About the author

Ven. Anālayo, born in 1962, was ordained a Buddhist monk in Sri Lanka in 1995, completing his Ph.D. on satipaṭṭhāna at the University of Peradeniya in 2000. He is a contributor to the Encyclopaedia of Buddhism.

Reviews

[Jeanne Ann · Rating 5 out of 5]

This quite scholarly (i.e., not particularly easy to read) book is nevertheless fascinating and extremely valuable for any serious student of Buddhism who wants to understand how to think about the problem of "what the Buddha taught," given that nothing that the Buddha said was written down for 400 years, but was preserved through a necessarily fallible human process of oral recitation.

[Ross · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a must read for anyone interested in oral traditions, not just Buddhist ones. It really fills in a gap in the popular (or at least my personal) understanding of oral transmissions. Namely, that there is not just one sort of it. Not every oral tradition functions like that of Greece or Serbia. Even Buddhist and Vedic oral traditions were radically different in how they function. A wonderful book.