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Beginner to Sutras- Which should one should I read first?
TheEccentric
Hampshire, UK Veteran
Before now I have never read any Sutras, just eBooks written about Buddhism and have decided to study Buddhist texts as well as they would be the purest form of the Dharma and a Buddhist who does not read Sutras would be like a Christian who does not read the Bible. I have found a website http://buddhasutra.com/ which has a complete collection of translations of Buddhist sutras, which one should a begginner start off with?
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( I've given an alternative site because the version on the buddhasutra site has lots of commentary and is difficult to follow )
Have a look here, you can browse by sutra topics.
That site you gave is great too. By the way, there are no complete collections of translated Buddhist sutras. There are possibly thousands of untranslated ones remaining in the Tibetan and Chinese traditions.
and also that is a great first sutta
many of the suttas may not connect with you or may seem confusing, you can always shelve these suttas for another time.
Beginners should read the sutras because it will give them a grasp of the dharma, in some cases more so then any dharma book. I didn't truly start to understand mindfulness of the breath until i read the sutta on it.
A lot of them are repetitive because monks memorize them. For example, we chant the Heart Sutra at retreats, and just the few times I've done it I probably have it about half memorized without trying. It's not my goal to memorize them, but just because of how the words flow, it's easy to have them stuck in your head, and they were constructed with that purpose.
let us not forget that the suttas were not written down until 500 years after the buddha's parinibbana. During the time of the Buddha and for that period after it was handed down in the form of oral tradition. as Karasti stated repetition helps memorization, hence why the suttas are this way, as they were written down exactly as recited for 500 years.
and if you may have doubts of the accuracy of an oral tradition. Anthropologists who study the few cultures with oral tradition today have found that the people who's job it is to remember stories and morality tales and pass them on, do so with extreme accuracy, to the point where they have as much or more information as found in the bible in their head and they can repeat it word for word.
I'm not trying to say one is better than the other, or that people don't have some great sugestions here. I am personally glad that I read the Lotus Sutra first, and later came to see how inclusive it is of other Buddhist concepts as I go along and learn the "basics" after first reading such a complicated sutra. I like the context inclusiveness that the LS and SoIM gives to later sutra studies. I'm also new and have no clue what I'm talking about. lol
But a lot or suttas and sutras have more than one commentary ( often with conflicting interpretations ), and defining "authentic" isn't straightforward.
Some of these belief systems are cults and can have dangerous results on people
@Todd248, I hardly think so. If @BhikkhuJayasara is commenting, I don't think we need worry.
Incidentally, this thread is
5 years old!
At the time it was first published, our beloved Bhikkhu had only just put his foot on the road to ordination. He was not a monk then. The name & avatar were a much later addition (Admin kindly updated his title to match his ordination) but I doubt very much this thread needs reviving.
In any case, perhaps, if you have a mind, rather than introducing an arguably inflammatory remark, you should actually expand and explain what you mean....