Tripitaka · Pāli: tipiṭaka; Skt: tripiṭaka

The name is a picture. Access to Insight glosses it as “Pali ti, ‘three,’ + pitaka, ‘baskets’”, and the canon it names is “the collection of primary Pali language texts which form the doctrinal foundation of Theravada Buddhism”. The baskets sort the library by what each part is for. The Vinaya Piṭaka holds “texts concerning the rules of conduct governing the daily affairs within the Sangha”, and it “also includes the stories behind the origin of each rule”. The Sutta Piṭaka is “the collection of suttas, or discourses, attributed to the Buddha and a few of his closest disciples”, divided in Pali into five nikāyas; the Dhammapada sits inside the last of them. The Abhidhamma Piṭaka is where “the underlying doctrinal principles presented in the Sutta Pitaka are reworked and reorganized into a systematic framework”.

None of it began on paper. After the Buddha’s death the teachings “continued to be passed down orally within the monastic community”, and the canon was only later “fixed in writing, by Sri Lankan scribe-monks”.

There is also more than one Tripitaka. The ancient schools each transmitted their own Abhidharma, but, the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy notes, “only two complete canonical collections are preserved”: the Sarvāstivāda’s, which survives “in full only in their ancient Chinese translations”, and the Theravāda’s in Pali, “though each school specifies a different set of texts”. So the word names a shape that several canons share rather than a single book, and the Theravada version of that shape is the Pali canon.