Three Buddhist Vocabularies: Computational Stylometry of the English Pali Canon across Sutta, Vinaya, and Abhidhamma

2026-06-24

AI Summary

This study presents the first systematic comparison of English translations of the Pāli Tipiṭaka—Sutta, Vinaya, and Abhidhamma—focusing on stylistic and lexical differences. Employing computational stylistics, the analysis integrates Zipf’s law fitting, MATTR-500 for lexical diversity, numeral density metrics, and Jaccard and Szymkiewicz–Simpson overlap coefficients across multiple translations. Results indicate that Vinaya texts conform most closely to Zipf’s law, while Abhidhamma exhibits the highest lexical diversity and significantly elevated numeral density. Inter-translational lexical overlap is as low as 24.2%, yet nearly half of the core vocabulary is shared across sectarian Vinaya versions. The project also releases an open-source expanded corpus, highlighting how textual genre and translational choices profoundly shape the stylistic profiles of Buddhist English renderings.

Abstract

We present a computational stylometric analysis of the Tipitaka across all three Pitakas in English translation, extending earlier work on the Sutta Pitaka alone. The corpus spans 134,831 segments from Bhikkhu Sujato's Sutta Pitaka (114,591 segments, CC0), Bhikkhu Brahmali's Vinaya Pitaka (7,923 segments, CC0 2026), I.B. Horner's 1938 Vinaya translation (2,826 segments), three English translations of the Abhidhammattha Sangaha compendium (2,077 segments), and cross-tradition Vinaya texts from the Dharmaguptaka and Mulasarvastivada schools. We compute Zipf rank-frequency distributions with OLS-fitted exponents, Moving Average TTR (MATTR-500), numeral-word density, and vocabulary overlap (Jaccard and Szymkiewicz-Simpson coefficients). Main findings: (1) all corpora show Zipf-consistent distributions (R2 > 0.989); the Vinaya is closest to ideal Zipf slope -1 and the Sangaha corpus deviates most, with 'consciousness' displacing grammatical particles at rank 8; (2) MATTR-500 shows the Sutta and Vinaya Theravada are nearly identical in lexical diversity (0.399 and 0.400), while the Sangaha corpus is genuinely more diverse (0.560), confirmed by size-controlled subsampling; (3) the Sangaha corpus has the highest numeral-word density (3.26%), consistent with its systematic enumeration of mental and material categories; (4) the Mulasarvastivada Vinaya shares 20.0% vocabulary (Jaccard) and 49.1% (overlap coefficient) with the Theravada Vinaya, reflecting shared legal heritage across two millennia; (5) two English translations of the same Vinaya source text share only 24.2% of their vocabulary across 88 years, with 'musing' versus 'absorption' for jhana and 'defeat' versus 'expulsion' for parajika as the most diagnostic shifts. All results are point estimates; no significance testing is conducted. Code and data are released as open-source extensions to the Darshana Graph corpus (arXiv:2606.18222).

Problem

• computational stylometry
• Pali Canon
• lexical diversity
• vocabulary overlap
• Buddhist texts

Innovation

• computational stylometry
• Pali Canon
• lexical diversity
• Zipf's law
• cross-tradition comparison