in the Ti-Pitaka (Skt. Tri-Pitaka), the Pali Canon. And yet, though the Southern Buddhist commonly assumes that there cannot be any but a literal interpretation of the Buddha’s teachings, the Pali Scriptures contain many parables and metaphorical expressions, some of which the lāmas regard as symbolical and confirmatory of their own esoteric tradition, and to which they thus claim to hold—perhaps not without good reason—the initiate’s key.
The lāmas grant that the Ti-Pitaka (‘Three Pitakas, or Baskets’ [of the Law]) are, as the Southern Buddhist holds, the recorded Word (or Doctrine) of the Ancients, the Theravāda; but they claim that the Pitakas do not contain all the Word, that the Pitakas lack much of the Buddha’s yogīc teachings, and that it is chiefly these teachings which, in many instances, have been handed down esoterically to the present day. ‘Esoteric Buddhism’, as it has come to be called—rightly or wrongly—seems to depend in large measure upon ‘ear-whispered’ doctrines of this character, conveyed according to long-established and inviolable rule, from guru to shiṣḥya, by word of mouth alone.
The Pali Canon records that the Buddha held no doctrine secretly ‘in a closed fist’ (cf. Mahā Parinibbāṇa Sūttanta, Dīgha Nikāya II), that is to say, withheld no essential doctrine from the members of the Saṅgha (Priesthood), just as no guru nowadays withholds a doctrine necessary for the spiritual enlightenment of his initiated or accepted disciples. This, however, is far from implying that all such teachings were intended to be set down in writing for the uninitiated and worldly multitude, or that they ever were so recorded in any of the Canons. The Buddha Himself wrote down nothing of His teachings, and His disciples who after His death compiled the Buddhist Scriptures may not have recorded therein all that their Master taught them. If they did not, and there are, therefore, as the lāmas contend, certain unwritten teachings of the Buddha which have never been taught to those who were not of the Saṅgha, then there is, undoubtedly, an extra-canonical, or esoteric, Buddhism. An esoteric Buddhism thus conceived is not, however, to be
