Theriya Networks and the Circulation of the Pali Canon in South Asia: The Vibhajjavādins Reconsidered

Abstract

This article offers further support for Lance Cousins’ thesis that the Pāli canon, written down in the first century BCE in Sri Lanka, was based largely on a Theriya manuscript tradition from South India. Attention is also given to some of Cousins’ related arguments, in particular, that this textual transmission occurred within a Vibhajjavādin framework; that it occurred in a form of ‘proto-Pāli’ close to the Standard Epigraphical Prakrit of the first century BCE; and that that distinct Sinhalese nikāyas emerged perhaps as late as the third century CE.