What is the Pali Canon, and why do we read the Majjhima Nikāya in particular? How far can these texts be trusted?

The Pali Canon (Tipiṭaka, “three baskets”) is the canonical collection of the Theravāda, preserved in Pali. The Majjhima Nikāya is the second of its collections of discourses, and the club picked it itself, on editorial grounds.

The three baskets. The Vinaya Piṭaka holds the monastic code with the stories of how each rule came about, sections on the running and procedures of the community (Khandhaka), and a late reference digest (Parivāra). The Sutta Piṭaka holds the discourses of the Buddha and the senior disciples. The Abhidhamma Piṭaka is a technical analysis of the same material; it is placed in a later layer than the body of the suttas, though the early mātikās may have taken shape before its final redaction. The club does not read the Abhidhamma.

The Sutta Piṭaka consists of five Nikāyas. The Dīgha Nikāya - 34 long discourses. The Majjhima Nikāya - 152 discourses of middle length. The Saṃyutta Nikāya - thousands of short suttas grouped by topic, by person and by doctrinal heading. The Aṅguttara Nikāya - suttas arranged by numerical groups, from one item up to eleven. The Khuddaka Nikāya - a mixed collection with the Dhammapada, the Sutta Nipāta, the Theragāthā and other texts; its contents differ between Theravāda recensions. The first four Nikāyas, together with their parallel Āgamas, make up the main core of the early Buddhist texts. That does not mean everything inside them is of one age, or that the Khuddaka and the Vinaya hold no early material.

Why the Majjhima. The length of a sutta lets us work through the whole of it in one session, and the interlocutors are as varied as they come - brahmins, ascetics of other schools, kings, monastics, doubtful lay people; alongside the doctrine there are descriptions of practice and biographical episodes. In the Dīgha the discourses are too long for a single conversation, while the Saṃyutta and Aṅguttara are shorter and more scattered - handier as a reference, worse as continuous reading.

Translations. In English the club works from Bhikkhu Bodhi (The Middle Length Discourses of the Buddha - Ñāṇamoli’s draft translation as edited by Bodhi, with his introduction and notes) and from Bhikkhu Sujato’s open translation on SuttaCentral. In Russian the main body of texts is SV’s translations on SuttaCentral and theravada.ru; these were made from English rather than directly from Pali.

How far they can be trusted. The texts were transmitted orally for several centuries - in lineages of specialist reciters (bhāṇaka) and through group recitation; they were written down in Sri Lanka, by the Sri Lankan chronicles, at the end of the 1st century BCE. The repetitions and fixed formulas are at once a mnemonic device and a mark of oral formulaic style. They held the wording, but did not rule out divergences between lineages of transmission. There is an external check as well: the main surviving Chinese parallel collection is the Madhyama Āgama (Taishō 26, translated in 397-398, usually associated with the Sarvāstivāda); it corresponds to the Majjhima largely, but not completely and not one to one. Individual parallels turn up in Sanskrit and Gāndhārī fragments.

That leaves three different levels of trust, and they are worth keeping apart. Comparative evidence supports the preservation of a large part of the shared early material across independent lines of transmission, though it does not by itself confirm the accuracy of all the later transmission of the Pali text specifically. It supports the reconstruction of teaching that existed before the schools divided too, with caveats: divergences show up not only in framing and in who is addressed, but sometimes in structure and doctrine. What historical and comparative methods do not establish is that any given sutta holds the verbatim words of the historical Buddha.

The canon offers its own test - the four great references (AN 4.180). What is heard from the Buddha himself, from a community with authoritative elders, from a group of such elders or from a single one of them is neither to be accepted outright nor rejected: it is to be set against the suttas and the Vinaya. This is an internal criterion of authority, not historical proof. MN 95 adds caution of another kind: neither faith, nor preference, nor oral tradition, nor reasoning, nor a view accepted after reflection entitles anyone on its own to say “only this is true”. “Faithfulness to the suttas” means exactly that here - look at what the text says, and do not swap it for a retelling.

Where to read: MN 95, AN 4.180.