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last millennium BCE. In recent decades, there has been some widely accepted research, the most influential of which has been done by Gregory Schopen, contesting the antiquity of the so-called Pāli canon. This goes against my position here that scholars are dealing with texts that present the early Theravāda tradition of the last centuries BCE. As Schopen would have it, the texts of the canon could have been composed as late as the fifth century CE because that is the time frame from which the earliest manuscripts date.1 However, the fifth century is also the time when the great Theravāda exegete Buddhaghosa composed his commentaries on almost the entirety of the Pāli canon. As Alexander Wynne pointed out, this position assumes that the commentaries were composed no later than the tipiṭaka, which is untenable.2 I would add that one also has to account for the pre-Buddhaghosa Sinhala-language commentaries on the tipiṭaka, which would push the dates of the Pāli canon even farther back. As Wynne succinctly put it, “The very existence of the commentaries presupposes a text tradition of some antiquity.”3 Furthermore, it is known from Theravāda sources4 that the tipiṭaka was committed to writing in the first century BCE. Given that no existing sources contradict this occurrence at this time, one is bound, I maintain, to accept the traditional account, at least until any evidence to the contrary emerges. And clearly, texts written down in the first century BCE would not just contain materials from that century but would consist of contents dating back at least a few if not several centuries before their inscription. It would be absurd to claim that the texts were created out of whole cloth in the first century, especially when there is much evidence to support that in previous centuries there existed specialists who committed to memory different sections of the tipiṭaka (see chapter 5 for a discussion of this phenomenon). Wynne also pointed out the conspicuous absence of any mention of the great third-century BCE Buddhist convert and monarch King Asoka.5 This would logically, then, place the origin of the texts prior to his celebrated reign.
Schopen and others have also insisted that the Pāli texts were wholly or at least mostly prescriptive, rather than historically descriptive, in