In Buddhism, an āgama (आगम Sanskrit and Pāli, Tibetan: ལུང་ (Wylie: lung) for "sacred work" or "scripture") is a collection of early Buddhist texts.
The five āgama together comprise the Suttapiṭaka of the early Buddhist schools, which had different recensions of each āgama. In the Pali Canon of the Theravada, the term nikāya is used. The word āgama does not occur in this collection.
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Early Buddhist texts (EBTs), early Buddhist literature or early Buddhist discourses are parallel texts shared by the early Buddhist schools. The most widely studied EBT material are the first four Pali Nikayas, as well as the corresponding Chinese Āgamas. However, some scholars have also pointed out that some Vinaya material, like the Patimokkhas of the different Buddhist schools, as well as some material from the earliest Abhidharma texts could also be quite early.
Besides the large collections in Pali and Chinese, there are also fragmentary collections of EBT materials in Sanskrit, Khotanese, Tibetan, and Gāndhārī. The modern study of early pre-sectarian Buddhism often relies on comparative scholarship using these various early Buddhist sources.
Sassatavada (Pali), also śāśvata-dṛṣṭi (Sanskrit), usually translated "eternalism", is a kind of thinking rejected by the Buddha in the nikayas (and agamas). One example of it is the belief that the individual has an unchanging self. Views of this kind were held at the Buddha's time by a variety of groups.
The Buddha rejected this and the opposite concept of ucchedavada (annihilationism) on both logical and epistemic grounds. He proposed a Middle Way between these extremes, relying not on ontology but on causality.
Nikāya (निकाय) is a Pāli word meaning "volume". It is often used like the Sanskrit word āgama (आगम) to mean "collection", "assemblage", "class" or "group" in both Pāḷi and Sanskrit. It is most commonly used in reference to the Pali Buddhist texts of the Tripitaka namely those found in the Sutta Piṭaka. It is also used to refer to monastic lineages, where it is sometimes translated as a 'monastic fraternity'.
The term Nikāya Buddhism is sometimes used in contemporary scholarship to refer to the Buddhism of the early Buddhist schools.
Samatha (Pāli samatha Sanskrit: śamatha शमथ; Chinese: 止; pinyin: zhǐ), "calm," "serenity," "tranquility of awareness," and vipassanā (Pāli vipassanā; Sanskrit: vipaśyanā विपश्यना; Sinhala: විදර්ශනා), literally "special, super (vi-), seeing (-passanā)", are two qualities of the mind developed in tandem in Buddhist practice.
In the Pāli Canon and the Āgama these qualities are not specific practices, but elements of "a single path," and are "fulfilled" with the development (bhāvanā) of mindfulness (sati) and meditation (jhāna) and other path-factors. While jhāna has a central role in the Buddhist path, vipassanā is rarely mentioned separately, but is usually described along with samatha.
The Khuddaka Nikāya (lit. 'Minor Collection') is the last of the five Nikāyas, or collections, in the Sutta Pitaka, which is one of the "three baskets" that compose the Pali Tipitaka, the sacred scriptures of Theravada Buddhism. This nikaya consists of fifteen (Thailand), fifteen (Sri Lanka follows Buddhaghosa's list), or eighteen books (Burma) in different editions on various topics attributed to Gautama Buddha and his chief disciples.
The word khuddaka in the title means ‘small’ in Pali and Nikāya is ‘collection’. The equivalent collection in the Chinese and Tibetan canons is the Kṣudraka Āgama, but there is substantial variation among the collections.