A Miscellany With a Genuinely Mixed Pedigree

The Khuddaka Nikaya's status as a genuine miscellany extends to its own canonical boundaries: unlike the other four nikayas, whose contents are essentially fixed across the Theravada world, different regional transmissions of the Pali Canon include somewhat different sets of texts within the Khuddaka Nikaya, with the Burmese, Sri Lankan and Thai editions all differing slightly on the precise final count and, in some cases, the inclusion of a small number of texts scholars regard as later compositions than the core canonical material, a genuine and openly acknowledged variation rather than a settled uniform list. This diversity reflects the collection's function within the tradition as something closer to an appendix or supplementary anthology than a unified composition, absorbing material of real value that emerged across a longer span of the tradition's early history than the more tightly bounded Digha, Majjhima, Samyutta and Anguttara collections. Despite, or perhaps because of, this looser editorial history, several of its individual texts, the Dhammapada above all, have achieved a reach and influence within and beyond Buddhism that vastly exceeds their modest place within the Sutta Pitaka's formal fivefold structure, cited, translated and studied as freestanding classics of world religious literature independent of most readers' awareness that the text originates as one component within this single, deliberately miscellaneous nikaya.