Buddhist texts can be categorized in a number of ways. The Western terms "scripture" and "canonical" are applied to Buddhism in inconsistent ways by Western scholars: for example, one authority refers to "scriptures and other canonical texts", while another says that scriptures can be categorized into canonical, commentarial and pseudo-canonical. A rather more definite division is that between Buddhavacana (the Word of the Buddha) and other texts. The former, including the Sutras (Sanskrit) or Suttas (Pali), are held to be the literal words of the historical Buddha or close approximations thereof. The latter are the various commentaries on canonical texts and other treatises on the Dharma, as well as collections of quotations, histories, grammars, and other texts. Sometimes texts that are considered commentaries by some are regarded by others as Buddhavacana. Within Buddhavacana, there is a chronological difference between the early Buddhist texts (e.g. the Pali Canon and the Agamas), and the Mahayana sutras. Whereas some scholars believe that some portions of the Pali Canon and Agamas could contain the actual substance of the historical teachings (and possibly even the words) of the Buddha, this is not the case for the Mahayana sutras, for which only adherence to the spirit of the Buddha would be claimed by non-fundamentalist Mahayanists.

Some of these distinctions are arbitrary, and some texts fall between categories or can be associated with more than one. Many later Chinese scriptures were explicitly not of Indian origin, but have been widely accepted as valid sutras (經) on their own merits by Chinese and East Asian Buddhists of the Mahayana (大乘) tradition.

Recently an important archaeological discovery was made, consisting of the earliest known Buddhist manuscripts, recovered from the ancient civilization of Gandhara in north central Pakistan (near Taxila just south west of the capital Islamabad). These fragments, written on birch bark, are dated to the 1st century and have been compared to the Dead Sea scrolls in importance. Donated to the British Library in 1994, they are now being studied in a joint project at the University of Washington