Reciters, Councils, and the Palm Leaves at Aluvihare

Nothing was written for a long time, and the tradition does not treat that as a weakness. Memorisation was the technology. Monks specialised as bhanakas, reciters assigned to a particular collection, one lineage carrying the long discourses, another the middle-length, so that no individual held the whole canon and no single failure could lose it. The formulaic repetition that makes the discourses tedious to read is the machinery of that system: stock phrases and numbered lists are what allowed groups to check each other line by line.

The canon's own account of its fixing runs through councils. Theravada tradition places the first at Rajagaha shortly after the Buddha's death, where Ananda is said to have recited the discourses and Upali the discipline; a second a century later at Vesali over disputed monastic practice; and a third at Pataliputta under the emperor Ashoka, at which the Abhidhamma is said to have been settled and missions dispatched, including one to Sri Lanka. Historians treat the first two as legendary in detail while accepting that recitation assemblies of some kind lie behind them, and regard the third as a Theravada account not shared by other schools.

Writing came in Sri Lanka. The Sri Lankan chronicles record that during the reign of King Vattagamani Abhaya, in the face of famine and war that threatened the reciter lineages, monks assembled at Aluvihare near Matale and committed the canon and its commentary to palm leaf, conventionally dated to about 29 BCE. Theravada counts this as the fourth council. The original manuscripts do not survive, the Aluvihare library was destroyed in the nineteenth century, and scholars caution that the event marks the first complete written set rather than the first use of writing for Buddhist texts.