Blurb:

This article offers further support for Lance Cousins’ thesis that the Pāli canon,
written down in the first century BCE in Sri Lanka, was based largely on
a Theriya manuscript tradition from South India. Attention is also given to
some of Cousins’ related arguments, in particular, that this textual transmission
occurred within a Vibhajjavādin framework; that it occurred in a form
of ‘proto-Pāli’ close to the Standard Epigraphical Prakrit of the first century
BCE; and that that distinct Sinhalese nikāyas emerged perhaps as late as the
third century CE.