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

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.