The Pali Canon (Tipitaka) as authoritative scripture

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.

Reverence for the Pali Canon is central to Theravada identity and distinguishes it from the Mahayana traditions, which honour the early discourses but accord equal or higher authority to a large body of later Mahayana sutras that Theravada does not treat as the Buddha's word. The Canon's Vinaya still governs monastic life across Theravada lands, and its suttas anchor teaching and meditation. The affirmation thus names both a scripture and the conservative, text-centred self-understanding of the "Teaching of the Elders."

Modern comparative scholarship has strengthened confidence in an early common core behind the various Buddhist canons: the Pali suttas have close parallels in the Chinese Agamas, translations of Sanskrit and Prakrit texts preserved by other early schools such as the Sarvastivada, and where the two independently transmitted collections agree closely in content despite centuries of separate transmission, scholars take this as evidence for a shared early stratum of teaching predating the sectarian divisions. Where the collections diverge, in emphasis, added material, or organisation, scholars attribute the differences to later sectarian development, a finding consistent with Theravada's own claim to conservatism without settling the further, more contested, question of how close the earliest layer comes to the Buddha's own words.