wichaa › Subjects › Buddhist Canonical › Sutta
The discourse basket — the Suttapiṭaka, the recorded teachings of the Buddha — and at 973 witnesses the largest single sub-genre in the whole archive. Where the parent canonical genre is the Tipiṭaka entire, this is its narrative and doctrinal heart.
But the interesting question is never "is the Suttapiṭaka here." It is: out of several thousand discourses, which ones did a northern temple actually pick up, copy, and copy again? The catalogue answers that, and the answer is not the answer a Pali textbook would predict.
Count every variant spelling and the ranking inside these 973 comes out like this:
Inference — that shape is a preaching syllabus, not a library catalogue. Verse you can quote, the sermon that founded the religion, the blessings text every household knows, and the discourse that tells a householder how to treat his parents, teacher, wife, friends, servants and monks. The Majjhima and Saṃyutta are present because a serious library holds them; the Dhammapada is present a hundred and fifteen times because monks kept needing another copy.
Look at the titles and a single word keeps appearing: โวหาร, wohan — the vernacular preaching version, the discourse rendered into Lan Na for delivery. 211 of the 973 Sutta witnesses carry it, more than one in five. Alongside them sit 42 นิสัย / nissaya copies, the Pali carried line by line with an interlinear construe, which is why the sutta corpus and the grammar & lexicography corpus overlap so heavily.
Inference — between them, wohan and nissaya are a quarter of the basket, and both exist for the same reason: somebody had to stand up and say this out loud, in a language the congregation spoke. The Pali is the authority; the Lan Na is the delivery. A witness that says Wohan mahasamainya sut is not a copy of a discourse. It is a script.
The best-hidden thing in this sub-genre is a series. Scattered through Wat Sung Men's holdings are six fascicles with matching titles and numbers:
Inference — this is a serialised preaching cycle on how the great ones died, numbered at least to ten, of which six fascicles survive here — and the numbering means at least four more once existed.
Tradition holds — the choice of subjects is not sentimental. Bāhiya was killed by a cow in the street, minutes after hearing the shortest teaching the Buddha ever gave and becoming an arahant on the spot. Dabba the Mallian was the community's lodging-officer, falsely accused of seducing a nun by two monks he had put in bad quarters — a case that lives in the Vinaya, not the suttas — and at the end he rose into the air and burned away, leaving no ash. Mahāmoggallāna, foremost in psychic power, was beaten to death by hired bandits and could not use a single power to stop it. Ānanda, who had heard every discourse, is remembered as dying in mid-air over a river so that neither bank's kingdom could fight the other for his relics. The point of such a cycle is exactly the mismatch: the deaths are ordinary, or worse than ordinary, and the attainment is untouched.
Sitting nearby is another Sung Men fascicle that is pure argument: Payasi sut — four witnesses, all at Wat Sung Men, dated 1831, 1837 and two in 1842, two of them in wohan sermon form. Tradition holds — Prince Pāyāsi is the canon's materialist. He does not believe in a next world and he runs experiments to prove it: he seals a condemned man in a jar to watch for the soul escaping when he dies, has another weighed alive and then dead to see whether the body gets lighter, has a third flayed layer by layer to find where the life is hiding. The elder Kumāra-Kassapa answers him not with scripture but with counter-analogies, until the prince gives in. Inference — that one northern temple copied this argument four times in eleven years, and turned half those copies into vernacular sermons, says something about what its preachers thought a congregation would sit still for.
Some discourses in this basket were not copied to be understood. They were copied to be deployed.
The clearest object is ms 246 at Wat Phra That Chang Kham Worawihan in Nan, whose title is a shopping list: อาฏานาติยสูต, มหาสะมัยยะสูต, ธัมมจัก — ฉบับปูชาปาทรักขณะ. The Āṭānāṭiya, the Mahāsamaya, and the Dhammacakka, bound together as "the edition for worship and guarding." Three discourses, one purpose.
This is the seam where the discourse basket becomes performed, efficacious speech — where a sutta is functionally a katha. Follow it into the liturgy corpus and it never comes back.
Canonical to the core: 955 of 973 on palm-leaf (98%), only 15 on mulberry paper. Script is 865 Tham Lanna with a substantial 95 Tham Lao wing and ten Shan. Language runs 680 Pali-and-Lan Na against 237 monolingual Pali — a quarter of the basket carries no vernacular at all, because the discourse is Pali.
747 of the 973 are dated, running 1501 to 1985 — the widest span of any of the three baskets. The earliest is the Aṭṭhakathā on the Mūlapaṇṇāsa of the Majjhima-nikāya, monolingual Pali on palm-leaf, dated CS 863 — 1501 CE — at Wat Phra That Chang Kham Worawihan in Nan. Not the sutta: the commentary on the sutta. Inference — the oldest surviving discourse-basket witness in this collection is a teaching text, which is a fair summary of the whole sub-genre.
Concentration is extreme. Wat Sung Men holds 527 of the 973 (54%), with Phrae supplying 551 in total, Lampang 193, Nan 65 and Chiang Mai 64. 89 of Sung Men's sutta witnesses are dated to the single year 1836 — the hinge of the copying campaign described on the parent genre page. Read the concentration as the keystone-library effect, not as a map of where the discourses were used. Every muang recited the suttas; one library preserved the copies. Behind Sung Men come Wat Lai Hin Luang (81), Wat Ban Luk (58), Wat Na Pang (29) and Wat Duang Di (24) — you can walk them on the Atlas.
Auto-derived from the catalogue and the curiosity bots — refreshed automatically, not hand-written. Each note links to its finding.
The live connections graph and any current curiosity-bot findings.