Sutta Piṭaka
Discourses from the Pāli Canon
translated by Ṭhānissaro Bhikkhu
Introduction
See also the note on the translations and the note regarding Access to Insight.
Dīgha Nikāya
The Dīgha Nikāya, or Long Collection, is named after the length not of the collection, but of its individual suttas. There are 34 in all, many of them among the most polished literary compositions in the Pali Canon. This anthology contains complete translations of twelve suttas, and partial translations of two.
Majjhima Nikāya
The Majjhima Nikāya — the Middle Collection — is the second collection in the Sutta Piṭaka. It takes its name from the length of the discourses it contains: shorter than those in the Long Collection, longer than those in the Connected and Numerical Collections.
Saṁyutta Nikāya
The Saṁyutta Nikāya, a collection of short to medium-length discourses, takes its name from the way the discourses are organized into groups connected (saṁyutta) by a particular theme.
Aṅguttara Nikāya
The Aṅguttara Nikāya, a collection of short to medium-length discourses, takes its name from the way the discourses are grouped by the number of their parts (aṅga), with the number growing progressively higher (uttara) with each group.
Khuddaka Nikāya
The Khuddaka Nikāya (Collection of Short Discourses) consists of fifteen texts, seven of which are available on this website:
- Khuddakapāṭha: Short Passages
- Dhammapada: An anthology of verses attributed to the Buddha
- Udāna: Exclamations
- Itivuttaka: A collection of 112 short discourses
- Sutta Nipāta: A collection of poems
- Theragāthā: Poems of the Elder Monks
- Therīgāthā: Poems of the Elder Nuns
Offline edition
The sutta translations can also be browsed and read offline by downloading an eBook version. The entire Sutta Piṭaka, with full hyperlinked cross-references provides a similar, if not superior experience, to online browsing (or even offline browsing with a mirrored website stored locally). Page loading and following cross-references are snappier without internet latency, and the eBooks have some additional features like nested tables of contents, bookmarking, note taking and highlighting. There’s also the ability to load them onto handheld devices and eReaders like the Kindle or Kobe, and eReaders are particularly good for taking into the wilderness because of their light weight and extremely long battery life.
Due to the internal structure of the eBooks (specifically the epub, azw3 and mobi formats), even very large ones like this hardly lag in navigation and page rendering, even on the oldest, smallest and most underpowered devices. On a computer, the responsiveness is immediate. Large pdfs, on the other hand, are basically unusable on small devices, and not recommended even for powerful computers.
All that is needed is an eReader. For Kindles, the azw3 format is better, but the mobi also works. For everything else, the epub format is the best. For a laptop or desktop computer, Calibre is free and excellent eReader software that works on Windows, OSX and Linux. For Android eBookDroid is free and popular, and the iPhone has iBooks installed by default.
