Four hundred years without writing.
How did Buddhist scriptures survive?
You've probably played the game of 'Telephone' as a child.
Ten people line up.
A message passes from the first person to the last.
The content becomes unrecognizable.
Now imagine this:
Scale up the game ten thousand times.
Not ten people,
but tens of thousands.
Not one sentence,
but millions of words.
Not for one afternoon,
but for four hundred years.
This was the real situation for Buddhist scriptures.
The Buddha never wrote down a single word.
He taught for forty-five years,
and it all lived in his disciples' memories.
In the last episode, we discussed how,
right after the Buddha passed away,
Mahakasyapa convened 500 Arhats for the First Council.
Ananda recited the Sutta Pitaka,
Upali recited the Vinaya Pitaka,
and 500 people verified it line by line
to reach a consensus.
But take note:
nothing was written down at that council.
The original meaning of 'Council' is 'communal chanting.'
The entire process was oral from start to finish.
Five hundred people synchronized their memories speech;
then, they carried the unified version
away in their minds.
This is why what happened next is so astonishing.
After that first council,
another four hundred years passed
before the scriptures were first committed to writing.
Four hundred years—
roughly the time from the Jiajing era of the Ming Dynasty to today.
During this period,
all Buddhist scriptures
survived solely through the mouths and ears of people.
Hello,
everyone.
I'm Wang Lijie.
Today, we're discussing
a nearly overlooked period in Buddhist history.
A history without heroes,
without sectarian wars,
and without dramatic conflict.
Yet, it might be more critical than any sectarian dispute.
Because if anything went majorly wrong during these 400 years,
all the scriptures we read today
would be untrustworthy.
So, did something go wrong?
To answer that,
we first need to understand one thing:
passing knowledge through memory
was not a Buddhist invention in ancient India.
Buddhism learned this practice.
A thousand years before the Buddha was born,
the core scriptures of Brahmanism,
the Vedas,
were already maintained through pure oral tradition.
No writing,
no bamboo slips,
no palm leaves.
Everything relied on the human brain.
And the precision of this maintenance
was unbelievably high.
How extreme was the Brahmins' memorization training?
They invented a technique called 'Patha' (recitation styles).
For a passage of scripture,
you don't just memorize it forward.
You must memorize it backward,
cross-referenced,
and in staggered patterns.
For example,
if the original text is 1-2-3-4-5,
you first recite it forward:
'1-2-3-4-5.'
Then recite it backward.
Five, four, three, two, one.
Then recite it in overlapping pairs.
One, two.
Two, one.
One, two.
Two, three.
Three, two.
Two, three.
Three, four.
Four, three.
Three, four.
Four, five.
Five, four.
Four, five.
Does it sound like you're doing math?
Exactly.
This isn't just about memory.
It's a mathematical redundancy check.
Like today's data storage,
you don't just store one copy.
You store multiple copies,
each in a different sequence.
If an error occurs anywhere,
it's caught through cross-validation.
A Brahmin student
spends four to seven years,
ten hours a day,
memorizing a single Veda.
Not just the gist;
not a single syllable can be wrong,
not even the intonation can change.
In 2003,
UNESCO declared the Vedic oral tradition
as Intangible Cultural Heritage.
The reason:
It's one of history's most precise memory systems.
For 3,000 years,
the Vedic texts have remained virtually unchanged.
The Buddhist Sangha
grew out of this culture of memory.
Many early monks
were Brahmins before ordaining.
The memory training they received from childhood
was brought directly into Buddhism.
You could say
Buddhist oral tradition
stands on the shoulders of Brahmin memory techniques.
But Buddhism faced a unique challenge.
The Vedas are metrical poetry
with strict rhythm and syllable rules.
The rhythm itself is a validation tool.
If you sing a syllable wrong,
the tune is off,
and you'll hear it yourself.
But the Buddha spoke in prose.
He wasn't reciting poetry;
he was holding conversations.
His words had no fixed meter,
no rhyme,
and the volume was much larger.
The Buddha spoke for 45 years.
The resulting Pali Canon,
in word count alone, exceeds the Encyclopedia Britannica.
How do you manage such volume?
The answer is division of labor.
The Sangha developed a professional system
known as the "Chanter" system,
or Bhanaka in Pali.
Different monks
were specialized in memorizing different scriptures.
Some groups memorized the Digha Nikaya,
others the Majjhima Nikaya,
others the Samyutta Nikaya,
others the Anguttara Nikaya.
Some specialized in Jataka tales,
and others in the Dhammapada.
Every group of Chanters
was a living database node.
Every reciter was a living node in a vast database.
They stayed in different monasteries,
across different regions,
and even different countries,
each maintaining the specific portion of the scriptures they were responsible for.
Moreover, this system featured a sophisticated design.
Have you ever read a Buddhist sutra?
Every sutra begins with the same four characters:
'Thus have I heard.'
This was the standard format used by Ananda during the First Council.
It means,
'The following content,
I personally heard the Buddha speak.'
Then it immediately specifies the location:
'At one time, the Buddha was at [Place X],'
followed by the audience:
'together with a [number] of monks.'
This fixed opening format
might look like mere bureaucracy,
but it is actually a metadata tag.
It locks in three core pieces of information: time, place, and audience.
This allows future generations to at least roughly determine the context of the teaching.
Think about it.
With four hundred years of oral transmission,
without this formatted header information,
who would eventually remember where or to whom a teaching was given?
These words aren't just for ritual;
this is information engineering.
Does this architecture look familiar to you?
Today, when we talk about distributed storage
or distributed databases,
this is the same principle.
Data is not kept in one place,
but is scattered across multiple nodes.
If any single node fails,
the system doesn't crash,
and nodes can cross-verify each other.
What was the verification mechanism for the Buddhist Sangha?
It was periodic group recitation.
During major Dharma assemblies,
and during the annual Vassa—the three months of the Indian rainy season—
monks would not travel;
they would gather in one place to practice together.
One person would recite,
while the others listened.
If someone missed a single word,
those around them would correct it immediately.
This was human error-correcting code.
Furthermore,
the structure of the sutras themselves
was designed for easy memorization.
Have you ever felt that sutras are incredibly wordy?
The same passage
is repeated over and over again.
After explaining how eye-consciousness works,
it repeats for ear, nose, tongue, body, and mind consciousness.
The exact same content is repeated five more times,
with only a single word changed.
That's not wordiness;
that's mnemonic technology.
Repetition is the oldest and most reliable memory aid.
When a fixed sentence pattern appears repeatedly,
your brain automatically encodes it as a pattern.
You don't need to memorize it word-for-word;
you just memorize the pattern
and fill in the variables.
It's like a template function in programming:
write it once,
call it infinitely.
Then there is the numerical numbering.
The Buddha loved using numbers to organize knowledge:
The Four Noble Truths,
The Eightfold Path,
The Twelve Links of Dependent Origination,
The Five Aggregates,
The Six Sense Bases,
The Thirty-Seven Factors of Enlightenment.
Why are there always specific numbers?
Because numbers are the best memory anchors.
If you know there are eight parts to the path,
by the time you reach the sixth, you know there are two left.
Numbers themselves act as check codes.
Thus, the repetition and numbering in Buddhist scriptures
are not literary choices,
but engineering necessities.
From the start, these texts were not meant to be read;
they were meant to be recited.
Now,
no matter how well-designed the system was,
there is one question you cannot avoid.
Over four hundred years,
passed down through countless generations,
did the message get distorted along the way?
To this question,
modern scholars have given a very interesting answer.
As you know, Buddhism branched into different schools during its spread.
One branch is called Theravada.
Their scriptures were preserved in Pali,
known today as the Pali Canon.
They circulated mainly in Sri Lanka and Southeast Asia.
Another branch is called Sarvastivada.
Their scriptures were later translated into Chinese
and preserved in the Chinese Tripitaka,
known as the Agamas.
These two lineages
diverged around the time of King Ashoka,
roughly the 3rd century BCE.
From then on,
one stayed in South Asia,
while the other reached East Asia via Central Asia.
Different languages,
different regions,
and different monastic communities
developed independently for nearly five hundred years.
Then, scholars did something remarkable.
They compared the Pali Nikayas with the Chinese Agamas,
side by side, page by page.
The results were stunning.
Regarding core doctrines,
the two systems are almost identical.
The Four Noble Truths,
the Eightfold Path,
the Twelve Links of Dependent Origination,
the Five Aggregates,
the Law of Dependent Origination—
all these core elements
match across both versions.
They aren't just "roughly similar";
they are highly consistent in structure and key doctrinal points.
What does this mean?
It means that before the split,
these core teachings were already firmly established.
Even after the split,
following independent paths for centuries,
the essentials remained unchanged.
Of course,
there are differences in details.
The order of some scriptures varies,
certain story details differ,
and some explanatory passages vary in length.
But the framework of core doctrine
is strikingly consistent.
Oral tradition, when it comes to preserving core teachings,
is surprisingly reliable.
However, the parts that did get distorted
are also worth noting.
What is most easily lost in oral tradition?
Context.
The Buddha spoke to specific people
within specific scenarios.
What he said to a mother who had just lost her child
and what he said to a proud Brahmin scholar
might be similar in content,
but the context was completely different.
Oral tradition can preserve the words,
but the information regarding "why he said this
to that person at that moment"
gradually wore away.
This is why we often see a situation in later generations
where two sects quote the same scripture
to reach completely opposite conclusions.
It's not that the texts were wrong;
it's that the context was lost.
It's like a brilliant doctor leaving behind a room full of prescriptions.
The prescriptions themselves are well-preserved,
but the information about "who they were for" is gone.
When different people get the same prescription,
it produces completely different results.
The medicine isn't wrong;
the problem is you don't know who it was prescribed for.
Consider this scenario:
The Buddha tells someone obsessed with asceticism,
"You don't need to torture yourself."
But to someone indulging in pleasure, he says,
"You cannot merely focus on satisfying your desires."
The meaning of these two statements is completely different,
even opposite in direction.
But if you strip away the context
and keep only the words,
future generations reading these two lines
will be confused.
"Does the Buddha want me to enjoy life or not?"
This isn't a fault of the language;
it's simply something written words inherently cannot do.
Have you ever had this experience?
You send a message to a friend,
and they interpret it completely differently from what you meant.
Because text has no tone,
no facial expressions,
and no context of the moment you said it.
Now imagine,
that message wasn't sent to a friend,
but read by a stranger 400 years later.
After 400 years of oral transmission,
what survived was the skeleton.
But the flesh and blood—
the living scenes, expressions, and tones—
were gradually eroded away during the process.
Alright.
So how did the scriptures finally move from speech to paper?
The story takes place in Sri Lanka,
around the 1st century BCE.
The King of Sri Lanka at the time was Vattagamani Abhaya.
During his reign,
Sri Lanka suffered through severe warfare and famine.
Massive numbers of monks died,
and the transmission chains of many chanting sanghas were broken.
The monks suddenly realized a terrifying fact:
If there were another Great Famine,
or if another group of core chanters died,
the Buddha's teachings might disappear from the world entirely.
Not because they were banned,
not because they were burned,
but because everyone who remembered them was dead.
Think about this image:
A chanter
spends 20 years memorizing the entire Digha Nikaya.
He is the living vessel of that scripture.
If he dies,
and hasn't trained a qualified successor,
that scripture vanishes with him.
Gone forever.
Not hidden in a corner waiting to be found,
but completely erased from the universe.
This fear
finally outweighed the monks' faith in oral tradition.
And so,
with the King's support,
monks gathered at a cave temple called Aluvihara.
For the first time, the entire Pali Canon was inscribed on palm leaves.
That cave temple still exists today
in Matale, central Sri Lanka.
It is regarded by locals as one of the holiest Buddhist sites.
This happened roughly between 29 BCE and 17 BCE,
nearly 400 years
after the Buddha's Parinirvana.
The 400-year era of oral tradition
thus came to an end.
But if you think writing it down solved everything,
you'd be wrong.
After it was written down,
Oral tradition did not disappear immediately.
For a considerable period of time,
written manuscripts and oral transmission coexisted.
Monks did not fully trust what was written on palm leaves.
Palm leaves could rot,
be eaten by insects,
or be damaged during transport.
Human memory, however,
though imperfect,
is a living, self-correcting system
as long as the chain of transmission remains unbroken.
Manuscripts are static.
If a mistake is made in copying,
it remains wrong forever.
Living memory versus dead words—
which one is truly more reliable?
Instinctively, you might think
it is written text.
Black and white,
irrefutable proof.
But that is not necessarily true.
The problem with text is
it gives you a false sense of certainty.
When you see a beautifully printed sutra,
you think, "This is exactly what the Buddha said."
But you don't know how many times it was copied,
whether errors were made each time,
or if anyone intentionally added or deleted anything.
Oral tradition has a quality text lacks:
it is alive.
Every recitation is a collective verification.
If one person misses a word,
the group corrects them.
When one generation passes,
the next takes over.
As long as the community exists,
the memory lives on.
Buddhist oral tradition
is essentially a human-based, distributed version control system.
Each reciter is a node;
each collective recitation is a sync and verification;
each council is a version merge.
Textualization,
on the other hand, is like taking a snapshot of a version
and turning it into a static copy.
You get a file that can be preserved long-term,
but you lose that living capacity for error correction.
From mouth to paper,
it wasn't just a technical upgrade;
it was also a loss of information.
However,
without that transition to writing,
could the sutras have survived two thousand years?
Probably not.
India later faced many devastating blows.
Buddhism was nearly wiped out in its homeland.
If they had relied solely on oral tradition,
once the chain of transmission broke,
everything would have been lost.
It was because of manuscripts—
physical carriers that could be copied, transported, and translated—
that the sutras could cross oceans
to reach China,
Japan,
and all of East and Southeast Asia.
Oral tradition and textualization
each have their own costs
and their own merits.
Speaking of which,
I want you to reflect on something.
Think of the most important realizations of your life,
those moments that truly changed how you see the world.
Were they gained through reading words,
or through a face-to-face conversation,
or an unexpected experience?
Likely the latter.
You can write that experience down,
but the written words
are never the experience itself.
People who read your words
receive information;
but you, living that moment,
attained a transformation.
What the Buddha saw beneath the Bodhi tree
was an experience,
not a piece of text.
He spent forty-five years trying to convey it through words;
then he passed,
leaving words behind.
Those words were chanted for four hundred years,
then written onto palm leaves.
With every step of transmission,
one moves further from the original experience under that tree.
Yet, every step of transmission
also gives more people the chance to follow these words
toward their own tree.
This may be the greatest insight from four centuries of oral tradition:
Language is never the truth itself,
but it is the best signpost toward it.
The value of a signpost
lies not in its beauty,
but in the accuracy of its direction.
Up to this point,
we have spent eleven episodes
journeying from Indian thought before the Buddha
to the end of the oral era after his Nirvana.
We witnessed one man's enlightenment,
the establishment of a community,
the tension among his closest disciples,
the power politics of the First Council,
and four hundred years of silent, faithful transmission.
But during those seemingly silent centuries,
something even bigger was quietly unfolding.
The teachings the Buddha left behind
were being interpreted differently
by different people
in different regions.
Initially, those differences were tiny,
small enough to be ignored.
But as time passed,
they grew larger,
becoming impossible to overlook—
massive enough to require renegotiation.
In the next episode,
before we officially enter the age of schisms,
we need to do one thing:
Stop;
look back.
After these eleven episodes,
how far have we actually come?
Early Buddhism—
before all subsequent evolutions occurred—
what were its original "factory settings"?
These aren't just trivial academic questions;
they are your only anchor points for judging
the development of all sects over the next two millennia.
What are your thoughts on today's content?
In your opinion, which is closer to the truth:
oral tradition or written records?
Let's discuss in the comments.
I am Wang Lijie,
see you next time.