Bhāṇaka

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Bhāṇaka (

Academic consensus and Buddhist tradition holds that all early Buddhist traditions preserved their texts via oral transmission – significant evidence of this includes the structure and distinctive features of early Buddhist texts, the absence of Vinaya regulations dealing with writing and writing materials, and terms derived from practices of listening and recitation used to describe the Buddha's teaching and the acts of the early Sangha.^[1]

The bhāṇaka system is believed to have originated in India, but the majority of the literary and inscriptional evidence relating to bhāṇakas comes from Sri Lanka.^[2] Scholars suspect that the same techniques were used by the monks of all early Buddhist schools to fix and transmit the contents of the Agamas, but outside of the Theravada tradition little information about the pre-literary period of these traditions is available.^[3] The earliest evidence for the association of monks known as bhāṇaka with knowledge and recitation of specific parts of the Buddhist canon dates to the 2nd or 3rd century BCE.^[2][1]

All schools of Buddhism agree that shortly after the death of the

Theravada tradition

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Buddhaghosa reported that according to the oral tradition of the

No fixed date has been established for the end of the bhāṇaka tradition, but scholars generally believe that the tradition went into decline as the Buddhist canon increasingly began to be preserved through written texts.[3]^[2] Buddhaghosa wrote about the bhāṇakas as though they were contemporary in approximately the 5th century CE, but may have been reflecting the perspective of the earlier Sinhala commentaries – his remarks do not definitively establish that the bhāṇaka practice persisted into his own era.^[3][2][1]

The

• Oral tradition