Buddhist Philosophy in India and Ceylon c6.s1.34

c6.s1.34

Within the Nikāyas themselves it is impossible to establish any very definite chronological strata. The division is artificial: into long texts, called Suttas in a terminology which differs from the use of Brahmanical texts; middle sized texts; texts united by subject matter—understood very vaguely; and texts grounded on a numerical basis in accordance with the regrettable practice of Buddhism, late and early, to form groups of ideas on the basis of number. There is some ground for treating this last Nikāya as younger than the other three⁴ but while the *Saṃyutta Nikāya* may be suspected of being late, it is impossible to assert⁵ that the *Dīgha* is as a whole the oldest source of our knowledge of Buddhism. What is clear from the enormous amount of common material, both verse and prose, is that the Nikāyas, as we have them, are redactions of floating material, in which old and new are commingled; it is unnecessary to go further and postulate one master mind for the redaction of each Nikāya⁶; the theory is open to the objection that it requires too much subjective judgement to discover the master mind, even measuring its mastery on the Buddhist standard of relevancy. The texts of the *Khuddaka Nikāya* still less admit of reference to any one period; they contain old matter and new, even within the limits of one and the same text. That we have in the *Udāna* or *Itivuttaka* the actual words of the Buddha is wholly implausible, and old as the *Suttanipāta* is reckoned, we find already the Buddha surrounded with an elaborate mythology. The *Jātaka* book is a strange conglomerate of old and new verses with new prose; some of its tales, as we know from Buddhist sculpture and a stray citation or two, go back to the Asokan epoch or shortly after; as folk-lore its contents are often of undeniable age, but as Buddhist fables their antiquity is uncertain.