The PSIBC - Pāli & Sanskrit International Buddhist Community is pleased to announce the organization of a series of forums with a view to study seminal texts in the Pāli & Sanskrit Buddhist traditions.

Theravāda, the school of the Elders, began to take shape in India in around 250 BCE. It is considered the most orthodox form of Buddhism and has followers mainly in Southeast Asia especially in Sri Lanka, Thailand, Myanmar, Cambodia and India. Mahāyāna, the Great Vehicle, slowly came into being around the 1st century BCE, with contemporary followers mainly in Tibet, India, China, Japan, Vietnam, and Korea.

The Theravāda canon is written in Pāli while the Mahāyāna literature is in Sanskrit. Therefore, it is evident that the Buddha’s teachings have been transmitted to our current times from the two major languages, Sanskrit and ‘Pāli’. Orally transmitted Theravāda Buddhism spread from India to Sri Lanka where it was recorded as the Pāli Ti-Piṭaka. The Sarvāstivāda Ti-Piṭaka were mostly transmitted in Sanskrit and many Mahāyāna sūtras such as the Prajñāpāramitā sūtras were composed in different registers of Sanskrit. The Buddhist use of classical Sanskrit for literary purposes possibly began with Asvaghoṣa [100 CE], author of the ‘Buddhacarita’ and one of the earliest Sanskrit dramatists. Buddhist thinkers like Nāgārjuna, Āryadeva, Asaṅga, Vasubandhu, Dignāga, Sthiramati, Dharmakīrti, Bhāviveka, Candrakīrti, etc., also wrote in Sanskrit. The Sanskrit tradition also includes texts in ancient Central Asian languages such as Ghandhāri.

As such, His Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama explained in his book Buddhism: One Teacher, Many Traditions (Wisdom Publications, Boston, 2014), that we will speak of two principal Buddhist traditions according to the language they came to be written in – the Pāli and Sanskrit traditions.