Vedhamissakena: Perils of the Transmission of the Buddhadhamma Bryan Levman Abstract It is a well known fact of Buddhist history that the Buddha’s teachings were not written down for at least 300 years after his Parinibbāna; they were transmitted orally until some time in the first century B.C. when they were committed to writing in Śri Lanka. Although the Pāli canon is accepted as a fairly accurate representation of the Buddha’s beliefs and teachings, there are still many ambiguities and inconsistencies in it, which have intrigued and puzzled commentators for generations. This is largely due to anicca, i.e. change; because of the natural evolution of language phonology, even the Buddha’s words, transmitted from generation to generation through the bhāṇaka (“reciter”) system can change. Fortunately, when there is more than one version of his teachings that have come down to us - as, for example, in the case of the northern Buddhist Sanskrit (BS) P.H.D. Student University of Toronto Canadian Journal of Buddhist Studies, Number Five, 2009 ©2009 by Nalanda College Buddhist Studies Comparing parallel Pāli and Sanskrit versions of the Buddha’s teachings reveal an underlying linguistic stratum which is a common source for both. Although we may never be able to ascertain the exact words of the Buddha, we know his teachings were transmitted orally by bhāṇakas (reciters) in one or more middle-Indic dialects. As the religion spread into different regions of India the words also changed, adapted to local dialects. When the teachings were committed to writing around the first century B. C., the Pāli and Buddhist Sanskrit forms were sometimes contradictory, reflecting the redactors’ different interpretations of the oral transmission. By comparing these different forms, it is possible to isolate a proto-form which explains the ambiguities and is closer to the original transmission. This is a case in point, comparing an incident from the Pāli Mahāparinibbāna sutta and its Sanskrit parallel, the Mahāparinirvāṇa sūtra.