Sacred sources: the Tripitaka and the Bible

The principles, rules and rites of every religion are reflected in its sacred sources; religious studies examines these sources not as articles of faith but historically and philologically. The main text collection of Buddhism, the Tripitaka (“three baskets”), is preserved in Pali and is therefore called the “Pali Canon”; it consists of the Vinaya (rules for monks), the Sutta (accounts of the Buddha and his disciples) and the Abhidhamma (systematic teaching), and the Dhammapada is a well-known collection within the Sutta, containing the idea that hatred is not answered with hatred. According to tradition, the texts were first passed on orally and written down in Sri Lanka in the 1st century BC; in 19th-century Mandalay (Burma), at the order of King Mindon, the text was carved on more than 700 marble slabs (1860s), and a Buddhist council held there in 1871 recited and checked it. In Christianity the Bible consists of the “Old Testament” and the “New Testament”; the Old Testament was written mostly in Hebrew (parts in Aramaic) and the New Testament in ancient Greek, and the text corresponding to the Old Testament in Judaism is called the “Tanakh”. Its translations include the Greek “Septuagint” of the 3rd–2nd centuries BC, the Latin “Vulgate” of the late 4th–early 5th century, an English version from the circle of John Wycliffe in the late 14th century, and the Church Slavonic edition printed at Ostroh in 1581. Parts of the Bible appeared in Uzbek from the 1990s, and a complete translation was presented in 2017. For Muslims the Qur’an is the word of God revealed to the Prophet Muhammad; it consists of 114 suras made up of verses. Believers treat sacred texts with special respect, while scholars also study the historical setting of a text and its various interpretations: different communities may interpret the same text differently.