Buddhist Canonical › Sutta

What this is

This is the discourse basket — the Suttapiṭaka, the recorded teachings of the Buddha, and the largest single sub-genre in the whole collection at 973 witnesses. Where the parent canonical genre is the Tipiṭaka as a whole, this is its narrative and doctrinal heart: the nikāya collections copied out for study and recitation.

What it holds

The titles name the classical structure directly. The Majjhimanikāya (the Middle-Length Discourses) recurs through its divisions — Mūlapaṇṇāsa, Majjhimapaṇṇāsa — and beside it sit the Saṃyuttanikāya (Sagāthāvagga saṃyuttanikāya) and the protective discourses that cross into liturgy (the Āṭānāṭiya sutta). A large share come glossed: the nisai / nissaya titles (Nisai attha nibata, Nisai katha sattati nipata) are the sutta read through a word-by-word vernacular gloss — scripture and its teaching-apparatus bound together, which is why the sutta corpus and the grammar corpus overlap so heavily.

The shape of the collection

It is canonical to the core: 98% palm-leaf (955 of 973) and the oldest datable stratum in the collection — dated witnesses run 1501–1985, reaching further back than any other sub-genre. It is also the most heavily concentrated: Wat Sung Men alone holds 527 of the 973 (54%), with Phrae supplying 551. Read that concentration as the keystone-library effect, not as a map of where the discourses were used — every muang recited the suttas, but one library preserved the bulk of the surviving copies. Script is mostly Tham Lanna with a notable 95 Tham Lao and 237 monolingual Pali witnesses — the discourse is Pali, so a quarter of the corpus carries no vernacular at all.

Notes

• None of it is wichaa-priority — and that is expected. Zero of the 973 are flagged research-priority; the Suttapiṭaka is the best-documented material in the collection, exactly the kind of canon a great library preserves. Its value here is as the doctrinal baseline against which the efficacious genres are read.
• The gloss is the interesting seam. The nissaya suttas are where scripture meets pedagogy; separating the plain Pali discourse from its Lan Na gloss is the obvious next pass, and would connect this sub-genre directly to the grammar & lexicography corpus.
• Where the katha lives. Several sutta titles are really katha — recited protective verse (Panca nibat katha, Nitsai katha thammapata) — the point at which the discourse basket shades into performed, efficacious speech.