The earliest form of the Buddhist canon was committed to memory and then committed to palm‐leaf in Pali, an ancient Middle Indo-Aryan tongue closely related to the vernacular spoken in northern India around the sixth century BCE. Pali served as the vehicle for what later became known as the Theravāda Tripiṭaka—three “baskets” of teachings covering discipline (Vinaya), discourses (Sutta), and higher doctrinal training (Abhidhamma).

While initially transmitted entirely by recitation, the first surviving inscriptional evidence of the written Pali Canon appears in Sri Lanka around 29 BCE, during the reign of King Vattagamani Abhaya. Monastic communities gathered under the Bodhi tree at Aluvihāra Temple to engrave the texts onto ola leaves, safeguarding them against time and tropical decay.

Fast-forward to today, and the same Pali texts have gone digital—SuttaCentral and similar projects offer searchable databases, while AI tools help translate and cross-reference Vinaya rules with modern ethical debates. Despite linguistic shifts over millennia, that original Pali voice remains the closest link to the Buddha’s own instructions, echoing down through chants in monasteries from Myanmar to Thailand and well beyond.