Dear Holger,

thank you for your questions, which delightfully allowed me to revisit some of the interesting topics in Buddhist studies. Again I am not an expert in any of the research topics, and I recommend you take up further research on your own for more details. Also, my resources are nowadays very limited to the Web, hence may not be comprehensive.

According to Sri Lanka tradition, the Theravada school first put into writing the Pali texts in the first century BCE. These were done on Palm leaves near Matale in Sri Lanka. These first texts were probably written in the Brahmi script. The Sinhala script derived from the Brahmi script at around 70 CE, while the Devanagari script was not available until around 1200 CE. This is the earliest record of the transcription of the entire Tipitaka.

Unfortunately, palm leaves text usually does not last for more than a few hundred years. The climate in South Asia simply makes the conditions of preservation more difficult. So, we are not left with much from those days. I believe the oral tradition did not completely stop after the first written texts were completed, and also a new enterprise of making, distributing new copies and replacing the deteriorating copies immediately arose as a consequence of the first transcription effort.

I also believe that before this recorded event of a complete written Pali canon, there were already attempts or proposals to write portions or whole of the Tipitaka. This is without any textual or archeological evidence, merely my speculation from a sociological viewpoint.

In other parts of the world, the earliest evidences of Buddhist texts were Gandhari text written in the Kharosthi script. Several collections were found only recently in the Gandhara region of modern day Afghanistan. These consists of birch bark, palm leaf and vellum manuscripts. Much earlier to their discovery was another Gandhari manuscript of Dhammapada on a birch bark scroll discovered near Khotan in Xinjiang, China in 1893. These manuscripts were made no earlier than the first century CE, and they are in very fragile conditions now. These discoveries indicate that the effort to put the Buddha's teachings in writing has had a long history, and were carried out in many parts of the ancient Buddhist world by different people.

http://www.buddhanet.net/e-learning/history/b_chron-txt.htm

As for the favicon on tipitaka.net, there isn't really any particular meaning. When websites were allowed to have the favicon, tipitaka.net first had an icon with the outline of a bodhi leaf. At that time, most sites did not even have a favicon. Subsequently, new versions of web browser programs improved the graphics rendering of the little favicon, and the original bodhi leaf icon started to look outdated. Unfortunately, I do not have the working program and files to update the icon, so I decided in 2006 to create a new one. The most popular sites which I frequent most are Yahoo!, Google and Wikipedia, and the favicons they use are Y, G and W respectively. So, I decided to use T for Tipitaka.net. Instead of the roman letter T, I wanted something different. Unfortunately, I wasn't able to find any free Brahmi fonts at that time, so I decided to use Devanagari fonts instead. Hence, the current favicon we have is the syllable Ti in Devanagari, note that it is not the free-form consonant T (pronounced ta).


metta,
Yong Peng.

--- In Pali@yahoogroups.com, Holger Wicht wrote:

Can you tell me, in which Script the Tipitaka has been written down, when it was done the first time? I thought that was Devanagari.

And one more question, if it's okay to you: Can you tell me the meaning of the Devanagari sign that is used as Favicon on tipitaka.net?