What Is a Sutra — and Why Are There So Many Different Ones?

A word that meant a thread

The Sanskrit word sūtra originally meant “thread,” “cord,” or something that binds things together. From this developed the sense of a concise rule or saying that, like a thread, holds together a broader teaching. The term is not uniquely Buddhist; other Indian philosophical and religious traditions used it as well. In Buddhism it acquired a somewhat different use and became a term for a discourse or text that transmits the Buddha’s teaching, or a teaching that Buddhist tradition recognizes as consistent with the Buddha’s Dharma.

In Pāli, the form corresponding to Sanskrit sūtra is sutta. For that reason, in Theravāda or Pāli contexts we will usually speak of suttas, and in Sanskrit and Mahāyāna contexts of sutras. The difference between the two terms does not by itself indicate two different kinds of teaching; it is primarily a linguistic difference. Behind both words, however, lies a much larger story about how Buddhist teachings were preserved, organized, and transformed.

The Buddha did not write down his discourses

The earliest Buddhist teachings existed in a culture in which knowledge was transmitted largely by word of mouth. The texts we read today therefore did not arise because Siddhartha Gautama sat down and wrote books. Buddhist tradition tells us that after his death his disciples gathered, memorized, and recited the teachings together. Whatever degree of literal historicity we assign to traditional accounts of the first Buddhist councils, the early texts themselves display strong features of oral transmission: repetition, fixed formulas, lists, rhythmic structures, and entire passages that recur again and again in almost the same form. According to Theravāda tradition, the Pāli suttas were transmitted orally for several generations before being written down; the tradition places their inscription in Sri Lanka around the 1st century BCE.

There is therefore a considerable span of time between the historical Buddha and the oldest surviving manuscripts. A modern historian cannot simply take a sentence from a sutra and claim, “These exact words were spoken by the Buddha.” What historians can do is compare different early textual traditions and look for teachings, structures, and narratives that occur independently in several versions. It is precisely this comparative work that allows us to speak more cautiously about older layers of Buddhist tradition.

One teaching, several surviving traditions

The Pāli Canon of Theravāda Buddhism contains the Sutta Piṭaka, the “Basket of Discourses.” Its main collections are the Dīgha Nikāya, Majjhima Nikāya, Saṁyutta Nikāya, and Aṅguttara Nikāya, alongside the Khuddaka Nikāya with a range of additional texts. But this is not the only surviving version of the early Buddhist textual world. Other early Buddhist schools had their own collections known as the Āgamas. Much of this material was lost in its original Indian languages, but many texts survived in early Chinese translations and, in part, in Sanskrit or Tibetan. Numerous parallels exist between these collections; for example, the Chinese Dīrgha Āgama contains texts that have relatives in the Pāli Dīgha Nikāya, although the two collections are not identical.

This is extremely important for the history of Buddhism. If a similar discourse appears in two traditions that once separated and then developed independently for centuries, we have stronger grounds for thinking that the core of that text goes back to a period before their separation. For this reason, research on early Buddhism does not speak only of “Pāli texts,” but also of their parallels. A good example is the discourse on the Four Noble Truths and the setting in motion of the wheel of Dharma. Versions of this teaching survive in Pāli, Sanskrit, Chinese, and Tibetan. They are not identical word for word, but their common core points to a very ancient layer of the tradition.

The repetition that can sometimes tire a modern reader of early suttas belongs to the same story. The Buddha says something, then repeats the same point with another example, a disciple summarizes his words, and the narrator describes the event again. In a printed book this may look redundant; in an oral culture, repetition aided memory. The same applies to numbered lists such as the Four Noble Truths, the Noble Eightfold Path, the five aggregates, the six sense fields, and the seven factors of awakening. The texts were not originally shaped primarily for silent reading, but for listening, recitation, and memorization. The early texts even contain direct references to learning teachings by heart, repeating them aloud, and preserving them through hearing. Repetition is therefore not necessarily a sign of poor writing, but a trace of a technology of transmission from a time before the book.

When different kinds of sutras appear

If we move directly from the early Pāli discourses to the Heart Sutra, the Lotus Sutra, or the Avataṃsaka, the change is obvious. The language shifts, the cosmology expands, and we encounter multitudes of bodhisattas or bodhisattvas, innumerable worlds, many buddhas, buddha-fields, and new philosophical emphases. Concepts such as emptiness (*śūnyatā*), the bodhisattva path, and the perfection of wisdom (*prajñāpāramitā*) become especially important, and later so does buddha-nature. These are primarily sutras associated with Mahāyāna. Their earliest layers begin to appear centuries after the lifetime of the historical Buddha, while some early Mahāyāna texts were translated into Chinese as early as the 2nd century CE, which means they must have existed before then.

Mahāyāna did not understand these texts merely as “new philosophical books.” It treated them as Buddhavacana — the word of the Buddha, or an authentic expression of the Buddha’s teaching. Here the traditional and historical-critical perspectives diverge. Historians have no evidence that the historical Gautama literally spoke the Heart Sutra, the Diamond Sutra, or the Lotus Sutra in the forms in which we know them today; their textual histories point to later composition and development. Within Mahāyāna traditions, however, the question of the “word of the Buddha” was not always restricted to the modern idea of a verbatim transcript of sentences uttered by a historical individual at a particular place and time. What also mattered was whether a text expressed the true Dharma — a teaching that leads toward awakening.

Some Mahāyāna traditions developed narratives according to which certain deeper teachings had long been hidden, guarded, or revealed only when people were ready for them. The Prajñāpāramitā tradition, for example, knew the story that some texts had been hidden among the nāgas and later revealed to Nāgārjuna. Historians treat such accounts as part of religious tradition, not as independently verified historical reports. Both levels are nevertheless worth understanding: one tells us how a community understood its sacred texts, while the other tries to determine when and in what historical environment those texts actually emerged.

Buddhism has no single canon

When we speak of “Buddhist scriptures,” we therefore need to be careful. Theravāda preserved the Pāli Canon, or Tipiṭaka. East Asian Buddhism preserved the vast Chinese Buddhist Canon, which contains not only Mahāyāna sutras but also the highly important early Āgamas. Tibetan Buddhism has the Kangyur, a collection of texts traditionally understood as translations of the Buddha’s word, and the Tengyur, a vast collection of Indian commentaries and treatises. The Tibetan Kangyur itself contains hundreds of sutras of different lengths and kinds. These collections overlap, but they are not identical. The question “Which sutras does Buddhism recognize?” therefore has no single answer. A better question is: Which Buddhist tradition — and which canon?

Different sutras can therefore appear contradictory at first sight. They were not all composed in the same period, environment, or for the same purpose, and they often answer different questions. An early sutta may analyze why none of the five aggregates can be regarded as a permanent self; a Mahāyāna sutra may speak of the emptiness of all phenomena; another may speak of buddha-nature. The same diversity appears in practice: some texts emphasize meditation, others ethical life, others wisdom, devotion to Buddha Amitābha, or the bodhisattva resolve to work for the liberation of all beings. The history of Buddhism is therefore not the history of one unchanged textbook, but of more than two millennia of interpreting, preserving, spreading, and transforming teachings.

This does not mean that the sutras are unrelated to one another. The differences are real, but it would be equally mistaken to claim that different Buddhist traditions share nothing but a name. Many foundational themes recur across very different periods: impermanence, suffering or the unsatisfactoriness of conditioned existence, causality, non-attachment, ethics, meditative transformation of the mind, wisdom, and liberation. Even when later traditions interpret these themes differently, they often build on an older vocabulary and conceptual world. We can therefore say two things at once: Buddhist sutras are not a single text written in one period, but neither are they a random collection of unrelated books. They are layers in a long textual and religious history.

How we will read the sutras

Before asking what a particular sutra “teaches,” we should first ask which tradition it comes from, in which language it is preserved, whether parallel versions exist, approximately which historical period it belongs to, and whether it is an early sutta, a Mahāyāna sutra, or a still later layer. It is also important to distinguish between what a religious tradition says about the text’s origin and what comparative textual history can establish about it.

That is what we will do in the articles that follow. We will not force all sutras into a single explanation of Buddhism, nor will we automatically dismiss everything that arose later. We will try to determine what each text actually says, where it comes from, what it inherited from earlier traditions, and what it added that was new. Behind the phrase “the Buddha’s sutras” lies not one book, but almost two thousand years of the development of one of the largest textual traditions in human history.

Sources and literature

Primary texts and reference editions

• SuttaCentral — early Buddhist texts, translations, and parallels; for Pāli texts, Bhikkhu Sujato as the principal digital reference translation.
• 84000: Translating the Words of the Buddha — a reference digital corpus for published Tibetan canonical Mahāyāna translations.

Research and verification literature

• Allon, Mark. The Composition and Transmission of Early Buddhist Texts with Specific Reference to Sutras. Hamburg Buddhist Studies 17. projektverlag, 2021.
• Anālayo, Bhikkhu. Early Buddhist Oral Tradition: Textual Formation and Transmission. Wisdom Publications, 2022. ISBN 978-1-61429-827-4.

Note: verification sources are part of the editorial apparatus. Where the original edition used during reconstruction was not preserved, a standard reference edition is not presented as though it were the presumed original source of the article.