The Khuddaka Nikāya (‘Minor Collection’) is the last of the five nikayas ("collections") in the Sutta Pitaka of the Pali Canon. This nikaya consists of fifteen (Thailand), seventeen (Sri Lanka), or eighteen books (Burma) in different editions on various topics attributed to the Buddha and his chief disciples.
The Pali term khuddaka in the title means "small"; and nikāya means "collection".
The Ksudraka Agama is a parallel collection from the Sanskrit tradition.
Professor Hirakawa Akira has stated[1] that the Khuddaka Nikaya represent a stage in the development of the Pali Canon / Agamas in which new material was not added any more to the rest of the Sutta Pitaka, but was added to a 'Khuddaka Pitaka' instead. This Khuddaka Pitaka was the repository for materials that were left out of the four Agamas/Nikayas (the Digha Nikaya, Majjhima Nikaya, Samyutta Nikaya and Anguttara Nikaya) and thus included both early and late texts. Some of the other schools that included a Khuddaka Pitaka in their canons were the Mahisasaka, Dharmaguptaka and Mahasanghika. The Khuddaka Nikaya of the Theravada school is the only complete extant example of such a Khuddaka Pitaka.[1] Some texts from the Dharmaguptaka Kṣudraka Āgama are preserved in Chinese and Tibetan translation, and fragments of Gandhari versions have also been discovered.[2]
On the dating of the various books in the Khuddaka Nikaya, Oliver Abeynayake notes that:
The Khuddaka Nikaya can easily be divided into two strata, one being early and the other late. The texts Sutta Nipata, Itivuttaka, Dhammapada, Therigatha (Theragatha), Udana and Jataka belong to the early stratum. The texts Khuddakapatha, Vimanavatthu, Petavatthu, Niddesa, Patisambhida, Apadana, Buddhavamsa and Cariyapitaka can be categorized in the later stratum.[3]
The Khuddaka Nikaya contains the following texts:
The full list of 18 books are included in the inscriptions approved by the Burmese Fifth Council and in the printed edition of the text recited at the Sixth Council.
The final three texts in the list above (16-18) are typically regarded as Paracanonical texts.