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Showing all 80 suttas.
How to Test a Teaching
AN 3.65 · Kesamutta Sutta
Topics: Getting started
A practical starting point for judging a teaching: tradition, reasoning, and a teacher's authority are not sufficient on their own. Examine what happens when a teaching is put into practice.
Good Friendship Is the Whole Path
SN 45.2 · Upaḍḍha Sutta
Topics: Getting started · Four truths and path
Ānanda calls good friendship half the spiritual life; the Buddha calls it the whole. A short, social bridge from testing a teaching to actually developing the path.
The Man Struck by a Poisoned Arrow
MN 63 · Cūḷamālukya Sutta
Topics: Getting started
Why the teaching refuses to answer certain metaphysical questions. Directly answers the objection a skeptical reader will already be forming after the first text.
The Two Searches
MN 26 · Pāsarāsi Sutta
Topics: Getting started
The Buddha's own account of leaving home, studying under two teachers, and finding them insufficient. A narrative, not a doctrine — a human anchor before the vocabulary gets technical.
The First Teaching
SN 56.11 · Dhammacakkappavattana Sutta
Topics: Four truths and path
The first sermon: the four noble truths and the eightfold path, stated directly. It is foundational, but it reads better after Stage 1 sets the frame. Taken cold, its formulas can feel like a list to memorize, not a diagnosis to recognize.
What Ignorance Means
SN 56.17 · Avijjā Sutta
Topics: Four truths and path
A bhikkhu asks what ignorance means. The answer is precise: not seeing dissatisfaction, where it comes from, when it ends, and how to end it again.
True Whether or Not a Buddha Appears
AN 3.136 · Uppāda Sutta
Topics: Four truths and path · Not-self
Three short claims about everything that has been put together, and a frame that says they hold whether or not a Buddha ever appears.
What the Eightfold Path Means
SN 45.8 · Vibhaṅga Sutta
Topics: Four truths and path
The eightfold path unpacked one factor at a time: how to understand, speak, act, work, train, remember, and unify the heart.
Three Trainings Cover Everything
AN 3.88 · Tatiyasikkhā Sutta
Topics: Four truths and path
More than 150 monastic rules, gathered into three trainings: conduct, the mind, and discernment. You can repair minor mistakes, and even partial training still bears fruit.
One Arrow, Not Two
SN 36.6 · Salla Sutta
Topics: Four truths and path
The one-arrow/two-arrows teaching: physical pain versus the added mental suffering piled on top of it. Concrete, bodily, and immediately recognizable.
When Life Goes Up and Down
AN 8.6 · Dutiyalokadhamma Sutta
Topics: Four truths and path · Mind and senses
Gain and loss, praise and blame, pleasure and pain happen to everyone. The difference is whether they take over the heart.
What Keeps the World Human
AN 2.9 · Cariya Sutta
Topics: Getting started · Ethics and conduct
Two bright qualities protect the human world: conscience, the inward sense of integrity, and moral caution about harm and consequences.
Eight Streams of Benefit
AN 8.39 · Abhisanda Sutta
Topics: Ethics and conduct
The five precepts seen from the other side. Keeping them gives every being you might have harmed freedom from fear, and you come to share in that freedom.
The Dirty Cloth
MN 7 · Vattha Sutta
Topics: Ethics and conduct
A mind is like cloth: dye it while it is dirty and the colour comes out wrong. Ethics introduced through a simile instead of a rule list.
May All Beings Be Happy
Snp 1.8 · Metta Sutta
Topics: Ethics and conduct · Meditation
Ten verses on friendliness: the character it starts from, the wish for all beings to be happy, and a mother's care for her only child.
Living Like an Arahant for a Day
AN 8.41 · Saṅkhittūposatha Sutta
Topics: Ethics and conduct
The eight factors of the observance day: for one night and day, a lay disciple lives as the arahants live for life.
A Good Life Now and Later
AN 8.54 · Dīghajāṇu Sutta
Topics: Ethics and conduct
A householder asks how to live well now and later. Four things for this life, four drains on wealth, and four things for the life to come.
What Drives Harm—and What Ends It
AN 3.69 · Akusalamūla Sutta
Topics: Ethics and conduct · Mind and senses
The text traces greed, aversion, and delusion from their roots to their effects on action, speech, power, and the heart. Then it contrasts them with non-greed, non-aversion, and clarity.
Going With the Stream—or Against It
AN 4.5 · Anusota Sutta
Topics: Ethics and conduct · Four truths and path
Four ways of meeting the current: drifting with it, struggling against it, standing firm, and completing the crossing to dry land.
How Do You Cross the Flood?
SN 1.1 · Oghataraṇa Sutta
Topics: Four truths and path · Mind and senses
A deity asks how the Buddha crossed a flood. The answer refuses both standing still and forceful struggle, preserving a compact paradox.
Four Horses
AN 4.113 · Patoda Sutta
Topics: Ethics and conduct
Four kinds of horses, four kinds of people, and what it takes to move someone to practice. A jolt of urgency after three fairly calm texts.
Four Steps That Lead to the Path
SN 55.5 · Dutiyasāriputta Sutta
Topics: Four truths and path
What leads to the path, in four ordinary steps: find good company, hear the teaching, attend to it carefully, then practise in line with it. The first step is social, not inward.
Think Like a Thoroughbred
AN 11.9 · Saddha Sutta
Topics: Four truths and path
A wild colt tied to its trough can think of nothing but "Fodder, fodder!" The contrast with a trained horse becomes a contrast between two ways of sitting down to meditate.
Heedfulness Is the Path to the Deathless
Dhp 21-32 · Appamādavagga
Topics: Four truths and path
Twelve verses on one quality: heedfulness, the path to the deathless. Short, memorable, and the first verse page in the set.
The Path
Dhp 273-289 · Maggavagga
Topics: Four truths and path
Seventeen verses on the path: you must make the effort yourself, and seeing impermanence, unsatisfactoriness, and not-self is the way.
The Teaching of the Buddhas
Dhp 179-196 · Buddhavagga
Topics: Four truths and path
Eighteen verses on the Buddha, including the four-line summary of the whole teaching and what a real refuge is.
Two Kinds of Thinking
MN 19 · Dvedhāvitakka Sutta
Topics: Meditation
Sorting thoughts into two bins and learning what to do with each. The simplest possible entry point into mind-training.
Could This Be the Path to Awakening?
MN 36 · Mahāsaccaka Sutta
Topics: Meditation
A debater says some people train the body and others the mind. The Buddha answers with his own story: two teachers, self-torment that nearly killed him, and the memory that pointed another way. Through all of it, neither pain nor pleasure took over his heart.
The Water Vessel
MN 61 · Ambalaṭṭhikarāhulovāda Sutta
Topics: Ethics and conduct
The Buddha teaches his son Rāhula with a water vessel, emptied and turned upside down, and then a war elephant. His point: someone who feels no shame in lying has nothing left to hold them back. Then comes a nine-part check for any action of body, speech, or mind, before, during, and after it.
Seven Ways to Handle What Erodes the Mind
MN 2 · Sabbāsava Sutta
Topics: Meditation
Seven concrete methods for handling what erodes the mind: restraint, use, endurance, avoidance, removal, development. A toolkit, not a theory.
Six Things to Remember Anywhere
AN 11.12 · Dutiyamahānāma Sutta
Topics: Meditation · Mind and senses
Mahānāma asks how to practice in ordinary life while the Buddha is away. The answer gives five qualities to stand on and six things to remember while moving, working, or living with family.
Remembering the Dhamma While Breathing In and Out
MN 118 · Ānāpānasati Sutta
Topics: Meditation
Step-by-step instructions for remembering the Dhamma while breathing in and out. The first text on this list that is a practice manual rather than a teaching about practice.
The Four Foundations of Remembering
MN 10 · Satipaṭṭhāna Sutta
Topics: Meditation
The four foundations of remembering, and the longest, densest text so far. Not really a one-sitting read: it is the reference manual for the pieces above, worth returning to rather than finishing.
Remembering Directed to the Body
MN 119 · Kāyagatāsati Sutta
Topics: Meditation
A long practice sequence directing remembering to breathing, movement, the body's contents and fate, deep unification of mind, resilience, and ten claimed results.
Dwelling in Emptiness
MN 122 · Mahāsuññata Sutta
Topics: Meditation
The Buddha's own way of dwelling in emptiness. How to train toward it when the heart will not go there, and why a teacher who keeps correcting you is a friend.
Emptiness, Step by Step
MN 121 · Cūḷasuññata Sutta
Topics: Meditation
Emptiness, step by step: each time, notice what has dropped away and what remains, until only this living body remains.
What Does a Renunciant Gain?
DN 2 · Sāmaññaphala Sutta
Topics: Ethics and conduct · Meditation
A king asks what a renunciant actually gets out of the life. A full narrative walk through the gradual path from an outsider's curious, slightly skeptical point of view.
Ten Recognitions for a Sick Monk
AN 10.60 · Girimānanda Sutta
Topics: Meditation
Ten recognitions taught to a sick monk. Practical and, unusually for this stage, comforting.
Recollecting Death, One Breath at a Time
AN 6.19 · Maraṇassati Sutta
Topics: Meditation
Six monks say how they recollect death, each with less time than the last. The Buddha sorts the heedless from the heedful.
What Makes a Genuine Renunciant?
MN 39 · Mahā-Assapura Sutta
Topics: Ethics and conduct · Meditation
What actually makes someone a genuine renunciant, as opposed to someone who merely looks like one. Ethics and practice fused.
The Good Person and the Bad Person
MN 113 · Sappurisa Sutta
Topics: Ethics and conduct
Twenty-six things a monk might be proud of, from family to deep meditation, and how a good person refuses to rank themselves by them.
What Feeds and Starves the Hindrances
SN 46.51 · Āhāra Sutta
Topics: Meditation
What feeds the hindrances that block practice, and what starves them. A closing, practical text for this stage.
Conduct Is Where Practice Grows
SN 46.1 · Himavanta Sutta
Topics: Ethics and conduct · Meditation
Nāgas grow big enough for the ocean by first growing on a mountain. Conduct is put in the mountain's place: it is what the seven awakening factors get large on.
What Is Fit to Call Self?
SN 22.59 · Anattalakkhaṇa Sutta
Topics: Not-self
The second sermon. Not-self laid out as a clean, followable argument rather than an assertion.
The Snake and the Raft
MN 22 · Alagaddūpama Sutta
Topics: Not-self
The snake simile and the raft simile carry genuinely difficult not-self doctrine on strong enough imagery that it stays followable.
The Five Heaps
SN 22.48 · Khandha Sutta
Topics: Not-self
What the five heaps actually are, stated directly.
Putting Down the Burden
SN 22.22 · Bhāra Sutta
Topics: Not-self
The five heaps as a burden, ignorant wanting as picking it up, and its fading as putting it down. The second and third truths in one image.
What the Heaps Offer, and the Way Out
SN 22.26 · Assāda Sutta
Topics: Not-self
Before awakening, the Buddha asks three things of each of the five heaps: its appeal, its danger, and the way out.
Can You Pin Down the Tathāgata?
SN 22.86 · Anurādha Sutta
Topics: Not-self
Anurādha tries to place the Tathāgata outside four claims about what happens after death. The Buddha asks whether you can pin down the Tathāgata through the five heaps even here and now.
The Lingering Sense of 'I Am'
SN 22.89 · Khemaka Sutta
Topics: Not-self
A subtler point: even someone who has genuinely seen not-self can still carry a faint, hard-to-locate sense of "I am."
Don't Chase the Past or Long for the Future
MN 131 · Bhaddekaratta Sutta
Topics: Not-self
Do not chase the past or long for the future — but do not mistake that for a slogan about living in the moment. The explanation asks whether you are turning any part of present experience into self.
Not-Self at the Six Sense Doors
MN 148 · Chachakka Sutta
Topics: Not-self · Mind and senses
A systematic, almost mechanical working-through of not-self across every sense door. Dense, but by this point the pattern should be familiar.
Between 'It Exists' and 'It Doesn't'
SN 12.15 · Kaccānagotta Sutta
Topics: Dependent arising
One page, defining right view as the middle between "it exists" and "it doesn't." The clearest, shortest bridge into dependent arising.
Taken Over by Views
Iti 49 · Diṭṭhigata Sutta
Topics: Not-self · Dependent arising
Two views can take over: clinging to continued becoming, or treating annihilation as peace. The alternative is to see what has come to be without turning it into something permanent.
How the World Arises—and Ends
SN 12.44 · Loka Sutta
Topics: Dependent arising · Mind and senses
How the lived world grows through the six senses into wanting, taking experience personally, and dissatisfaction. And how that process ends, without the senses having to disappear.
Body and Mind Keep Changing
SN 12.61 · Assutavā Sutta
Topics: Dependent arising
An argument that runs the opposite way from what you expect. If you must identify with something, the body is the safer choice, because its changes are easy to see and the mind's are not.
From Dissatisfaction to Freedom
SN 12.23 · Upanisa Sutta
Topics: Dependent arising
The positive chain, dissatisfaction leading step by step to freedom, mirroring the well-known negative chain.
What Keeps a Life Going
SN 12.11 · Āhāra Sutta
Topics: Dependent arising
Four things that keep a life going, traced back to wanting and then all the way back along the chain. It shares its name with SN 46.51, a different text.
Dependent Arising, Term by Term
SN 12.2 · Paṭiccasamuppāda-vibhaṅga Sutta
Topics: Dependent arising
The standard formula of dependent arising, defined term by term.
Discovered, Not Invented
SN 12.20 · Paccaya Sutta
Topics: Dependent arising
Dependent arising as a pattern that holds whether or not anyone discovers it, kept apart from the changing things it runs through. And why someone who sees this stops questioning their own past and future.
Does the Same Consciousness Continue?
MN 38 · Mahātaṇhāsaṅkhaya Sutta
Topics: Dependent arising · Mind and senses
A monk holds a wrong view: that the same consciousness travels on unchanged. The Buddha corrects it and restates dependent arising as a reasoned story, not a bare formula.
Dependent Arising in Depth
DN 15 · Mahānidāna Sutta
Topics: Dependent arising
The deepest and longest exposition of dependent arising in the set. The capstone of this stage, not an entry point to it.
Right View from Many Angles
MN 9 · Sammādiṭṭhi Sutta
Topics: Four truths and path · Dependent arising
Right view examined through more than a dozen different doctrinal lenses in one text. Reads best as a review once the pieces it is reviewing are already familiar.
Questions and Answers on the Teaching
MN 44 · Cūḷavedalla Sutta
Topics: Mind and senses
A systematic question-and-answer exchange between two disciples, covering a wide sweep of doctrine efficiently.
The Longer Questions and Answers
MN 43 · Mahāvedalla Sutta
Topics: Mind and senses
The longer companion to MN 44, and the same format: two senior disciples working through the vocabulary point by point. Read it second — it assumes more.
The Four Bases of Power
SN 51.13 · Chandasamādhi Sutta
Topics: Meditation
One short formula, stated four times, defining the four bases of power. Useful mainly as a reference for how the effort formula is built.
The Five Faculties
SN 48.10 · Dutiyavibhaṅga Sutta
Topics: Meditation
Five definitions, one per faculty, each written as something a person does rather than something they have. The shortest place to see confidence, energy, remembering, unification of mind, and discernment treated as one set.
The Five Strengths
AN 5.14 · Vitthata Sutta
Topics: Meditation
The five strengths named and defined, in the same words SN 48.10 uses for the five faculties.
The Five Lower Fetters
MN 64 · Mahāmālukya Sutta
Topics: Mind and senses
The five lower fetters, and the companion piece to MN 63 — same disciple, later in his practice.
Who Counts as a Genuine Practitioner?
MN 11 · Cūḷasīhanāda Sutta
Topics: Ethics and conduct
Who counts as a genuine practitioner? The answer turns on whether a teaching can account for all four ways of taking things personally, including taking a doctrine of self personally.
The Six Fields of Experience
MN 137 · Saḷāyatanavibhaṅga Sutta
Topics: Mind and senses
A technical analysis of the six fields of experience.
The Four Truths in Detail
MN 141 · Saccavibhaṅga Sutta
Topics: Four truths and path
The four noble truths again, now in full analytical detail rather than the compressed form from Stage 2.
The Eightfold Path in Detail
MN 117 · Mahācattārīsaka Sutta
Topics: Four truths and path
A technical analysis of the eightfold path, factor by factor.
Six Things Examined
AN 6.63 · Nibbedhika Sutta
Topics: Four truths and path
One analytical frame applied six times over, to sensuality, feeling, recognition, the outflows, action, and dissatisfaction. Includes the line that defines action as intention.
The Fire Sermon
SN 35.28 · Āditta Sutta
Topics: Mind and senses
The fire sermon. Iconic imagery carrying a genuinely abstract point about the senses.
How Thought Snowballs
MN 18 · Madhupiṇḍika Sutta
Topics: Mind and senses
The honey-ball sutta, on how recognition snowballs into proliferating thought. Famously dense even by this collection's standards.
Household Life or Renunciant Life?
MN 99 · Subha Sutta
Topics: Ethics and conduct
A dialogue defending renunciant life against a brahmin's claim that household life is better. Good late-stage read for weighing the whole path against the alternative.
The Root of All Things
MN 1 · Mūlapariyāya Sutta
Topics: Not-self
"The root of all things." Traditionally regarded as one of the most difficult texts in the collection. Deliberately last: it rewards everything that came before it and rewards very little read cold.
The Two Nibbāna Elements
Iti 44 · Nibbānadhātu Sutta
Topics: Not-self
A short reference text defining the two nibbāna elements. Read it for one distinction: what has already happened to a living arahant's mind, and what happens to everything they feel.
Why There Is a Way Out
Ud 8.3 · Tatiyanibbānapaṭisaṁyutta Sutta
Topics: Four truths and path
One minute, and one argument: there would be no way out of what is born, made and conditioned unless there were something that is not. It says that there is, and nothing more about it.