Chris Deziel, Demand Media Siddhartha Gautama, or the historical Buddha, taught for 45 years, but none of what he said was transcribed as he spoke it. Instead, it was preserved in the memories of his disciples, who passed it on orally. By the third century B.C., some 200 years after the Buddha died, monks had compiled a collection of writings on leaves and stored them in three separate baskets. They are the earliest and most important collections of Buddhist texts.
The Tripitaka
In Sanskrit, a basket is a pitaka, so tripitaka (tipitaka in Pali, the probable language of the Buddha) means “three baskets.”…
