I'm slowly becoming familiar with the Pali Sutta-pitaka. It's not something I've been exposed to much through Zen, but I do think that if you're going to practice in any Buddhist tradition it's useful at least to know what it is and have some idea what's in it.
The Sutta-pitaka is a collection of the sermons and sayings of the historical Buddha and his senior disciples. The sermons were memorized and chanted for about four centuries before anyone wrote them down. Even so, this is the best record we have of what the historical Buddha actually might have said.
(For the record, the Pali Sutta-pitaka isn't the only version of the Sutta-pitaka; it's just the best known one, and it has more stuff in it that the other one, which is actually fragments of several Sanskrit versions patched together, but that's another post.)
One frustration with the Sutta-pitaka is the way it's organized. Frankly, it's a mess. I'm sure Theravada scholars get used to it, but I don't see a logical way to find anything in it unless you already know where to look. I've put together a brief Reader's Guide to the Sutta-pitaka, but here's why it's confusing:
The sermons are not presented chronologically, so you can't see any progression from the Buddha's first sermon to his last one. The Buddha's first sermon, for example, is not first, but buried in the middle somewhere. There are more than 10,000 suttas (sutras) in the Sutta-pitaka, so "buried" is not far from the truth.
In a few places there is some attempt to group suttas by subject matter, but it's inconsistent. The Sutta-pitaka is a collection of five collections, or "nikayas," and most of the nikayas group texts by length.
So you've got the nikaya of long discourses, and the nikaya of middle-length discourses, and the nikaya of little texts. As I understand it, the nikaya of "further factored" discourses then subdivides into a "Book of Ones," a "Book of Twos," etc., containing suttas in which the Buddha discussed one important thing, then two important things, etc. Only one nikaya, the collection of "connected discourses," sorts some suttas into groups with similar subjects.
So where does anything go? The Dhammapada can be found in the nikaya of little texts, which makes sense. The Metta Sutta is in that nikaya also, which also makes some sense, since it is short. But what if you just wanted to find the Buddha's sermon on loving-kindness, but didn't know how long it was?
By the same token, the really long Agganna Sutta is with the "long discourses," which doesn't help you find it unless you already know it's really long.
The Kalama Sutta, which is too short to be a middle-length discourse and too long to be a little text, was shuffled into the "further factored" collection. It's in the "Book of Threes," although I have no idea what "three" things the sutta is supposed to be about.
I suspect this organization was useful to the people who were attempting to memorize part of it, but it's hopeless for a reader or researcher. Fortunately, for the casual researcher there's this newfangled thing called "the Internet," in which you can use "search engines" to find suttas on particular subjects.
I don't believe (although I could be wrong) that we have a complete English translation of the entire Sutta-pitaka online yet, but big chunks of it can be found on the website Access to Insight. That's the first place I look.
As far as reading is concerned, one of the several sreasons it's generally not a good idea to learn about Buddhism by reading sutras on your own is that the organization of the Sutta-pitika defies making sense of it. Without a logical progression from one teaching to another, it's hard to see the elegant interconnection of teachings that really is there. I wonder if anyone has ever given any thought to re-organizing it?
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