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The canon is often known by the name of Tripiṭaka or Three Baskets. When an excavation was made in ancient India it was the custom to pass up the earth in baskets along a line of workmen and the metaphorical use of the word seems to be taken from this practice and to signify transmission by tradition. The three Pitakas are known as Vinaya, Sutta, and Abhidhamma.
Even Mr Bradley says "the soul is a particular group of psychical events in so far as those events are taken merely as happening in time ." There is a smack of the Pitakas about this, although Mr Bradley's philosophy as a whole shows little sympathy for Buddhism but a wondrous resemblance both in thought and language to the Vedânta.
But there is no proof of this Sinhalese origin. According to Sinhalese tradition all three Pitakas were introduced into Ceylon by Mahinda in the reign of Asoka, but only as oral tradition and not in a written form.
From Kapilavatthu the Buddha is said to have gone to Sâvatthî, the capital of Kosala where Pasenadi was king, but now we lose the chronological thread and do not find it again until the last years of his life. Few of the numerous incidents recorded in the Pitakas can be dated.
But still though the Pitakas emphasize the empirical duality of sense-organs and sense-objects, they also supply a basis for the doctrines of Nâgârjuna and Asanga, which like much late Buddhist metaphysics insist on using logic in regions where the master would not use it.
Then follows a similar account of the Sâmaññaphala sutta and we are told that Ânanda was "questioned through the five Nikâyas." That is no doubt an exaggeration as applied to the time immediately after the Buddha's death, but it is evidence that five Nikâyas were in existence when this chapter was written . Lines of growth are clearly discernible in the Vinaya and Sutta Pitakas.
It is sometimes said that the only real Buddhists are the members of the Sangha and there is some truth in this, particularly in China, where one cannot count as a Buddhist every one who occasionally attends a Buddhist service. But on the other hand Gotama accorded to the laity a definite and honourable position and in the Pitakas they notify their conversion by a special formula.
This is also attested by the Pitakas, for some of the most important and subtle arguments and expositions are put into the mouths of nuns . Indeed the objections raised by the Buddha, though emphatic, are as arguments singularly vague and the eight rules for nuns which he laid down and compared to an embankment built to prevent a flood seem dictated not by the danger of immorality but by the fear that women might aspire to the management of the order and to be the equals or superiors of monks.
In the passage quoted the Buddha speaks as if only an effort of will were needed to enter into the first Jhâna, but tradition, supported by the Pitakas , sanctions the use of expedients to facilitate the process. Some are topics on which attention should be concentrated, others are external objects known as Kasina.
The narrators resemble those Indian artists who when carving a story in relief place all the principal figures in one panel without attempting to mark the sequence of the incidents which are represented simultaneously. For the connection of events with the Buddha's teaching the compilers of the Pitakas had an eye; for their connection with his life none at all.
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