The Pali Canon (Tipitaka)

Theravada Buddhists affirm the Pali Canon, the Tipitaka or "three baskets," as the authoritative scripture preserving the word of the Buddha. Composed in the Pali language and organised into the baskets of monastic discipline (Vinaya), discourses (Sutta), and higher doctrine (Abhidhamma), it was transmitted orally for centuries before being committed to writing in Sri Lanka around the first century BCE. Theravada regards it as the most complete and reliable record of the Buddha's teaching and the standard against which doctrine and practice are measured.

Tradition places the Canon's commitment to writing at a council convened during the reign of the Sri Lankan king Vattagamani Abhaya, conventionally dated to around 29 to 17 BCE, at the Aluvihare cave monastery, undertaken because famine and civil war were thinning the ranks of monks who had preserved the texts orally and threatening the chain of memorised transmission. Because of this documented history of oral transmission across some four centuries before being fixed in writing, and periodic council recensions before and after, textual scholars generally regard elements of the Canon as having been shaped and expanded over time even as Theravada tradition holds the whole to preserve the Buddha's actual words with high fidelity.