Hinduism and Buddhism: An Historical Sketch v1.c19.25

v1.c19.25

The Majjhima-Nikâya is a collection of 152 discourses of moderate (majjhima) length. Taken as a whole it is perhaps the most profound and impassioned of all the Nikâyas and also the oldest. The sermons which it contains, if not verbatim reports of Gotama’s eloquence, have caught the spirit of one who urged with insistent earnestness the importance of certain difficult truths and the tremendous issues dependent on right conduct and right knowledge. The remaining collections, the Samyutta and Anguttara, classify the Buddha’s utterances under various headings and presuppose older documents which they sometimes quote¹. The Samyutta consists of a great number of suttas, mostly short, combined in groups treating of a single subject which may be either a person or a topic. The Anguttara, which is a still longer collection, is arranged in numerical groups, a method of classification dear to the Hindus who delight in such computations as the four meditations, the eightfold path, the ten fetters. It takes such religious topics as can be counted in this way and arranges them under the numbers from one to eleven. Thus under three, it treats of thought, word and deed and the applications of this division to morality; of the three messengers of the gods, old-age, sickness and death; of the three great evils, lust, ill-will and stupidity and so on.