Sutta · Pāli: sutta; Skt: sūtra

Sutta is the Pali word for a discourse, and sūtra is its Sanskrit form. Access to Insight’s glossary defines it as “Literally, ‘thread’; a discourse or sermon by the Buddha or his contemporary disciples”. The thread is worth keeping in mind: a sutta is usually an occasion rather than a treatise, with a place, a questioner and a moment, on which the teaching is strung.

The suttas are gathered in the Sutta Pitaka, one of the three “baskets” of the Pali Canon, beside the Vinaya Pitaka of monastic rules and the Abhidhamma Pitaka. Access to Insight describes it as “the collection of suttas, or discourses, attributed to the Buddha and a few of his closest disciples, containing all the central teachings of Theravada Buddhism”. It is divided into five nikāyas: the Dīgha, “the ‘long collection’”; the Majjhima, “the ‘middle-length collection’”; the Saṃyutta, “the ‘grouped collection’”; the Aṅguttara, “the ‘further-factored collection’”; and the Khuddaka, “the ‘collection of little texts’”. That is why suttas are cited by initials and number, as DN, MN, SN or AN, so that a reference finds the same discourse in any translation. See the Pali Canon.

The word travels further in Mahayana. There sūtra covers a far larger scriptural literature, much of it outside the Pali collections: the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy refers, for instance, to “Mahāyāna scriptures” and to the “Mahā-parinirvāṇa Sūtra”. So a text called a sutta is almost always one of these Pali discourses, while sutra is used much more broadly.