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  TABLE 2

  Thematic Analysis of the Saṃyutta Nikāya

  Comparison of the Pāli SN with the Chinese Saṃyuktāgama is particularly instructive and reveals a remarkable correspondence of contents arranged in a different order. I already alluded just above to some differences in organization, but it is illuminating to examine this in more detail.5 The Chinese version contains nine major Vaggas (following Anesaki, I use the Pāli terms and titles for consistency). The first is the Khandhavagga (our III), the second the Saḷāyatanavagga (our IV), the third the Nidānavagga (our II), which latter also contains the Saccasaṃyutta (56) and the Vedanāsaṃyutta (36), departing markedly from SN in these allocations. Then follows a fourth part named Sāvakavagga, without a counterpart in the Pāli version but which includes among others the Sāriputta- (28), Moggallāna- (40), Lakkhaṇa- (19), Anuruddha- (52), and Cittasaṃyuttas (41). The fifth part, whose Pāli title would be Maggavagga, corresponds to SN Mahāvagga (our V), but its saṃyuttas are arranged in a sequence that follows more closely the canonical order of the sets making up the thirty-seven aids to enlightenment: Satipaṭṭhāna (47), Indriya (48), Bala (50), Bojjhaṅga (46), and Magga (45); this part also includes the Ānāpānasati- (54) and Sotāpattisaṃyuttas (55), while a series of small chapters at the end includes a Jhānasaṃyutta (53) and an Asaṅkhatasaṃyutta (43). The sixth Vagga of the Saṃyuktāgama is without a Pāli parallel but contains the Opammasaṃyutta (20) and a collection of suttas on sick persons which draws together texts distributed among various chapters of SN. Then, as the seventh book, comes the Sagāthāvagga (our I), with twelve saṃyuttas—all eleven of the Pāli version but in a different order and with the addition of the Bhikkhusaṃyutta (21), which in this recension must contain only suttas with verses. Finally comes a Buddha-or Tathāgatavagga, which includes the Kassapa- (16)and Gāmanisaṃyuttas (42), and an Assasaṃyutta, “Connected Discourses on Horses.” This last chapter includes suttas that in the Pāli Canon are found in the Aṅguttara Nikāya.

  THE ROLE OF THE SAṂYUTTA AMONG THE FOUR NIKĀYAS

  Prevalent scholarly opinion, fostered by the texts themselves, holds that the principal basis for distinguishing the four Nikāyas is the length of their suttas. Thus the largest suttas are collected into the Dīgha Nikāya, the middle length suttas into the Majjhima Nikāya, and the shorter suttas are distributed between the Saṃyutta and the Aṅguttara Nikāyas, the former classifying its suttas thematically, the latter by way of the numberof items in terms of which the exposition is framed. However, in an important groundbreaking study, Pāli scholar Joy Manné has challenged the assumption that length alone explains the differences between the Nikāyas.6 By carefully comparing the suttas of DN with those of MN, Manné concludes that the two collections are intended to serve two different purposes within the Buddha’s dispensation. In her view, DN was primarily intended for the purpose of propaganda, to attract converts to the new religion, and thus is aimed mainly at non-Buddhists favourably disposed to Buddhism; MN, in contrast, was directed inwards towards the Buddhist community and its purpose was to extol the Master (both as a real person and as an archetype) and to integrate monks into the community and the practice. Manné also proposes that “each of the first four Nik̄yas came about in order to serve a distinct need and purpose in the growing and developing Buddhist community” (p. 73). Here we shall briefly address the question what purposes may have been behind the compilation of SN and AN, in contradistinction to the other two Nikāyas.

  In approaching this question we might first note that the suttas of these two Nikāyas provide only minimal circumstantial background to the delivery of the Buddha’s discourses. With rare exceptions, in fact, a background story is completely absent and the nidāna or “setting” simply states that the sutta was spoken by the Blessed One at such and such a locale. Thus, while DN and MN are replete with drama, debate, and narrative, with DN especially abounding in imaginative excursions, here this decorative framework is missing. In SN the whole setting becomes reduced to a single sentence, usually abbreviated to “At Sāvatthī, in Jeta’s Grove,” and by the fourth book even this disappears. Apart from the Sagāthāvagga, which is in a class of its own, the other four books of SN have little ornamentation. The suttas themselves are usually issued as direct proclamations on the doctrine by the Buddha himself; sometimes they take the form of consultations with the Master by a single monk or group of monks; occasionally they are framed as discussions between two eminent monks. Many suttas consist of little more than a few short sentences, and it is not unusual for them simply to ring the permutations on a single theme. When we reach Part V whole chains of suttas are reduced to mere single words in mnemonic verses, leaving to the reciter (or to the modern reader) the task of blowing up the outline and filling in the contents. This indicates that the suttas in SN (as also in AN) were, as a general rule, not targetted at outsiders or even at the newly converted, but were intended principally for those who had already turned for refuge to the Dhamma and were deeply immersed in its study and practice.

  On the basis of its thematic arrangement, we might postulate that, in its most distinctive features as a collection (though certainly not in all particulars), SN was compiled to serve as the repository for the many short but pithy suttas disclosing the Buddha’s radical insights into the nature of reality and his unique path to spiritual emancipation. This collection would have served the needs of two types of disciples within the monastic order. One were the doctrinal specialists, those monks and nuns who were capable of grasping the deepest dimensions of wisdom and took upon themselves the task of clarifying for others the subtle perspectives on reality opened up by the Buddha’s teachings. Because SN brings together in its major saṃyuttas the many abstruse, profound, and delicately nuanced suttas on such weighty topics as dependent origination, the five aggregates, the six sense bases, the factors of the path, and the Four Noble Truths, it would have been perfectly suited for those disciples of intellectual bent who delighted in exploring the deep implications of the Dhamma and in explaining them to their spiritual companions. The second type of disciples for whom SN seems to have been designed were those monks and nuns who had already fulfilled the preliminary stages of meditative training and were intent on consummating their efforts with the direct realization of the ultimate truth. Because the suttas in this collection are vitally relevant to meditators bent on arriving at the undeceptive “knowledge of things as they really are,” they could well have formed the main part of a study syllabus compiled for the guidance of insight meditators.

  With the move from SN to AN, a shift in emphasis takes place from comprehension to personal edification. Because the shorter suttas that articulate the philosophical theory and the main structures of training have found their way into SN, what have been left for inclusion in AN are the short suttas whose primary concern is practical. To some extent, in its practical orientation, AN partly overlaps with SN Mahāvagga, which treats the various groups of path factors. To avoid unnecessary duplication the redactors of the canon did not include these topics again in AN under their numerical categories, thereby leaving AN free to focus on those aspects of the training not incorporated in the repetitive sets. AN also includes a notable proportion of suttas addressed to lay disciples, dealing with the mundane, ethical, and spiritual concerns of life within the world. This makes it especially suitable as a text for the edification of the laity.

  From this way of characterizing the two Nikayas, we might see SN and AN as offering two complementary perspectives on the Dhamma, both inherent in the original teaching. SN opens up to us the profound perspective reached through contemplative insight, where the familiar consensual world of persons and things gives way to the sphere of impersonal conditioned phenomena arising and perishing in accordance with laws of conditionality. This is the perspective on reality that, in the next stage in the evolution of Buddhist thought, will culminate in the Abhidhamma. Indeed, the conn
ection between SN and the Abhidhamma appears to be a close one, and we might even speculate that it was the nonsubstantialist perspective so prominent in SN that directly gave rise to the type of inquiry that crystallized in the Abhidhamma philosophy. The close relationship between the two is especially evident from the second book of the Pāli Abhidhamma Piṭaka, the Vibhaṅga, which consists of eighteen treatises each devoted to the analysis of a particular doctrinal topic. Of these eighteen, the first twelve have their counterparts in SN.7 Since most of these treatises include a “Suttanta Analysis” (suttantabhājaniya) as well as a more technical “Abhidhamma Analysis” (abhidhammabhājaniya), it is conceivable that the Suttanta Analyses of the Vibhaṅga were the primordial seeds of the Abhidhamma and that it was among the specialists in SN that the idea arose of devising a more technical expository system which eventually came to be called the Abhidhamma.

  The Aṅguttara Nikāya serves to balance the abstract philosophical point of view so prominent in SN with an acceptance of the conventional world of consensual realities. In AN, persons are as a rule not reduced to mere collections of aggregates, elements, and sense bases, but are treated as real centres of living experience engaged in a heartfelt quest for happiness and freedom from suffering. The suttas of this collection typically address these needs, many dealing with the practical training of monks and a significant number with the everyday concerns of lay followers. The numerical arrangement makes it particularly convenient for use in formal instruction, and thus it could be easily drawn upon by senior monks when teaching their pupils and by preachers when preparing sermons for the lay community. AN is replete with material that serves both purposes, and even today within the living Theravāda tradition it continues to fulfil this dual function.

  The preceding attempt to characterize each Nikāya in terms of a ruling purpose should not be understood to imply that their internal contents are in any way uniform. To the contrary, amidst a welter of repetition and redundancy, each displays enormous diversity, somewhat like organisms of the same genera that exhibit minute specific differences absolutely essential to their survival. Further, it remains an open question, particularly in the case of SN and AN, whether their blueprints were drawn up with a deliberate pedagogical strategy in mind or whether, instead, the method of arrangement came first and their respective tactical applications followed as a matter of course from their groundplans.

  RELATIONSHIP WITH OTHER PARTS OF THE CANON

  Due partly to the composition of the suttas out of blocks of standardized, transposable text called pericopes, and partly to common points of focus throughout the Sutta Piṭaka, a considerable amount of overlapping can be discovered between the contents of the four Nikāyas. In the case of SN, parallels extend not only to the other three Nikāyas but to the Vinaya Piṭaka as well. Thus we find three SN suttas of great importance also recorded in the Vinaya Mahāvagga, represented as the first three discourses given by the Buddha at the dawn of his ministry: the Dhammacakkappavattana, the Anattalakkhaṇa, and the Ādittapariyāya (56:11; 22:59; 35:28).8 In the Vinaya, too, there are parallels to the SN suttas on the Buddha’s encounters with Māra (4:4, 5), on his hesitation to teach the Dhamma (6:1), on his first meeting with Anāthapiṇḍika (10:8), on the secession of Devadatta (17:35), and on the tormented spirits seen by Mahāmoggallāna (19:1–21). While it is possible that both the Vinaya and SN received this material via separate lines of oral transmission, in view of the fact that the narrative portions of the Vinaya Piṭaka appear to stem from a later period than the Nikāyas, we might conjecture that the redactors of the Vinaya drew freely upon texts preserved by the Saṃyutta reciters when composing the frameworks for the disciplinary injunctions.

  SN includes as individual suttas material which, in DN, is embedded in larger suttas. The most notable instances of this are segments of the Mahāparinibbāna Sutta (e.g., at 6:15; 47:9; 47:12; 51:10),but wefind as well a few snippets shared by the Mahāsatipaṭṭhāna Sutta (47:1, 2; 45:8) and a short (cūḷa) version of the Mahānidāna Sutta (12:60). The latter shares with its larger counterpart (DN No. 15) only the opening paragraph but thereafter diverges in a completely different direction. Again, any solution to the question of borrowing can only be hypothetical.

  The compilers of the canon seem to have laid down stringent rules governing the allocation of texts between SN and AN, intended to avoid extensive reduplication when a doctrinal theme is also a numerical set. Still, within the bounds set by that condition, a certain amount of overlapping has taken place between the two Nikāyas. They hold in common the suttas on Rohitassa’s search for the end of the world (2:26), on the lion’s roar (22:78), on the ten qualities of the stream-enterer (12:41 = 55:28), on the death of Kokālika (6:9–10), on the five hindrances (46:55, but in AN without the section on the enlightenment factors), as well as several large blocks of text that in SN do not constitute separate suttas.

  It is, however, between SNand MNthat the boundary appears to have been the most permeable, for SN contains five whole suttas also found in MN (22:82; 35:87, 88, 121; 36:19), as well as the usual common text blocks. We cannot know whether this dual allocation of the suttas was made with the general consent of the redactors responsible for the whole Sutta Piṭaka or came about because the separate companies of reciters responsible for the two Nikāyas each thought these suttas fitted best into their own collections. But in view of the fact that in SN several suttas appear in two saṃyuttas, thus even in the same Nikāya, the first alternative is not implausible. Suttas from SN have also found their way into the smaller works of the Khuddaka Nikāya—the Suttanipāta, the Udāna, and the Itivuttaka—while the correspondence between verses is legion, as can be seen from Concordance 1 (B).

  LITERARY FEATURES OF THE SAṂYUTTA

  Of the four Nikāyas, SN seems to be the one most heavily subjected to “literary embellishment.” While it is possible that some of the variations stemmed from the Buddha himself, it also seems plausible that many of the more minute elaborations were introduced by the redactors of the canon. I wish to call attention to two distinctive features of the collection which bear testimony to this hypothesis. We might conveniently call them “template parallelism” and “auditor-setting variation.” The texts that exhibit these features are collated in Concordances 3 and 4 respectively. Here I will explain the principles that lie behind these editorial devices and cite a few notable examples of each.

  Template parallels are suttas constructed in accordance with the same formal pattern but which differ in the content to which this pattern is applied. The template is the formal pattern or mould; the template sutta, a text created by applying this mould to a particular subject, the “raw material” to be moulded into a sutta. Template parallels cut across the division between sạyuttas and show how the same formula can be used to make identical statements about different categories of phenomena, for example, about the elements, aggregates, and sense bases (dhātu, khandha, āyatana), or about path factors, enlightenment factors, and spiritual faculties (maggaṅga, bojjhaṅga, indriya). The recurrence of template parallels throughout SN gives us an important insight into the structure of the Buddha’s teaching. It shows that the teaching is constituted by two intersecting components: a formal component expressed by the templates themselves, and a material component provided by the entities that are organized by the templates. The application of the templates to the material components instructs us how the latter are to be treated. Thus we are made to see, from the template suttas, that the constituent factors of existence are to be understood with wisdom; that the defilements are to be abandoned; and that the path factors are to be developed.

  The templates are in turn sometimes subsumed at a higher level by what we might call a paradigm, that is, a particular perspective offering us a panoramic overview of the teaching as a whole. Paradigms generate templates, and templates generate suttas. Thus all one need do to compose different suttas is to subject various types of material to t
he same templates generated by a single paradigm.

  SN abounds in examples of this. One prevalent paradigm in the collection, central to the Dhamma, is the three characteristics of existence: impermanence (anicca), suffering (dukkha), and nonself (anattā). This paradigm governs whole series of suttas both in SN 22 and SN 35, the royal saṃyuttas of Parts III and IV, respectively; for it is above all the five aggregates and the six pairs of sense bases that must be seen with insight in order to win the fruits of liberation. The “three characteristics paradigm” generates four common templates: impermanent, etc., in the three times; the simple contemplation of impermanence, etc.; impermanent, etc., through causes and conditions; and, most critical in the Buddha’s soteriological plan, the “what is impermanent is suffering” template, which sets the three characteristics in relation to one another.

  Another major paradigm is the triad of gratification, danger, and escape (assāda, ādīnava, nissaraṇa), which generates three templates. At AN I 258–60 we find these templates used to generate three suttas in which the material content is the world as a whole (loka). SN, apparently drawing upon certain ways of understanding the concept of the world, contains twelve suttas churned out by these templates—three each in the saṃyuttas on the elements and the aggregates (14:31–33; 22:26–28), and six in the saṃyutta on the sense bases (35:13–18; six because the internal and external sense bases are treated separately). This paradigm is in turn connected to another, on the qualities of true ascetics and brahmins, and together they give birth to three more recurrent templates on how true ascetics and brahmins understand things: by way of the gratification triad; by way of the origin pentad (the gratification triad augmented by the origin and passing away of things); and by way of the noble-truth tetrad (modelled on the Four Noble Truths: suffering, its origin, its cessation, and the way to its cessation). These templates generate suttas on the four elements, gain and honour, the five aggregates, feelings, and the faculties. The last template is also applied several times to the factors of dependent origination, but strangely they are all missing in the Saḷāyatanasaṃyutta.