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WorkGautama Buddha

The Book of the Kindred Sayings

Thousands of the Buddha's short sayings, sorted by subject: causation, the self, the senses, the path.

by Gautama Buddha1,969 passages held

  • Pali, the original language
  • English, a translation held here, and your language
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Original title
Saṃyutta Nikāya
Original language
Pali

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Overview

Nobody agrees how many discourses the Saṃyutta Nikāya holds. The Pali Text Society's editor counted 2,889, Bhikkhu Bodhi's translation has 2,904, and the old commentaries give 7,762, because many pieces repeat one teaching with a single term changed. The count says what kind of book this is: the "Connected" or "Grouped" discourses, short sayings sorted by subject into fifty-six groups. Like the other collections, it was handed down by word of mouth, attributed to the Buddha and his disciples, and written down in Sri Lanka in the first century BCE. A parallel collection from another early school, the Saṃyukta Āgama, survives in Chinese translation. The Society's English version came out between 1917 and 1930 as The Book of the Kindred Sayings. Caroline Rhys Davids made the first two parts — the first with the Sinhalese monk Sūriyagoḍa Sumaṅgala, the second with help from F. L. Woodward — and Woodward made the last three. Their English calls the dhamma "the Norm". The first four parts are held here in that English; the fifth only in Pāli. The collection's five books follow a plan. The first gathers discourses that contain verses, exchanges with gods, with Māra the tempter and with King Pasenadi of Kosala. The second opens on causation, the chain of dependent origination (paṭicca-samuppāda), in which ignorance leads link by link to birth, ageing and death: suffering has conditions, and it ends when they end. The third takes apart the five aggregates (khandhas) that make up a person — body, feeling, perception, mental formations and consciousness — and finds a lasting self in none of them: the teaching of anattā, not-self. The fourth turns to the six senses and their objects and closes on the questions the Buddha would not answer. The fifth, the Mahāvagga, collects the sayings on the path, and among them the discourse the tradition counts as his first sermon.

Key concepts

What is dependent origination?

It is the claim that suffering arises from conditions, each depending on the one before: ignorance, activities, consciousness, name-and-shape, the senses, contact, feeling, craving, grasping, becoming, birth, and then ageing and death. Remove one condition and what depends on it falls. Sāriputta's image is two sheaves of reeds leaning on each other: pull one away and the other drops, as consciousness and name-and-shape hold each other up.

What are the five aggregates?

They are the five heaps a person is made of: body, feeling, perception, activities (the mind's habits and intentions) and consciousness. Nothing else is found when a person is examined. The sayings call them the five groups of grasping, because each is what people cling to as 'me'. Seeing each one as fleeting, the sayings promise, ends the clinging.

What does anattā, not-self, mean?

It means that none of the five aggregates is a self. The argument runs: if body were the self, it would not fall sick, and one could say 'let my body be thus, let it not be thus'. Since body cannot be commanded, it is not the self, and the same holds for feeling, perception, activities and consciousness. What is fleeting and painful is not fit to be called 'mine, I, my self'.

What does the Buddha mean by 'the all'?

'The all' is the six senses with their objects: eye and shapes, ear and sounds, nose and scents, tongue and tastes, body and things touched, mind and mind-states. Anyone who claims to teach another 'all' beyond these, the Buddha says, is talking idly and could not make it good. The whole of experience, and so the whole of the problem, lies within these six pairs.

What are the three kinds of feeling?

Pleasant, painful and neutral, the three tones any experience can carry. Feeling arises from contact, the meeting of a sense with its object, and craving arises from feeling: we want more of the pleasant and less of the painful. That is why the sayings treat feeling as the point to watch. Seen as it rises and passes, a feeling need not turn into craving.

Themes of the book

What this book returns to, gathered into themes and ordered by how much of the text each one occupies.

Suffering Has Conditions

If suffering simply happened, nothing could be done about it. The sayings on causation ask what it depends on, link by link, and what follows when one link gives way.

Conditioned by ignorance come activities, by activities consciousness, and so on through name-and-shape, the senses, contact, feeling, craving and grasping to birth, ageing and death; from the ceasing of ignorance comes the ceasing of all. Stripped to its bones the law reads: this being, that becomes, this not being, that becomes not. It is offered as a middle between 'everything exists' and 'nothing exists', and it makes the question 'who feels?' unfit: the fit question asks what feeling is conditioned by.

  • dependent origination
  • ignorance
  • craving
  • cessation
  • suffering
  • rebirth
  • karma
  • feeling

Enter a dialogue

Five Heaps, and No Self

A person seems to be one solid thing that owns a body and a mind. The sayings on the aggregates take that thing apart and ask whether anything is left that deserves the name of self.

Body, feeling, perception, activities and consciousness are each fleeting, and what is fleeting and unhappy is not fit to be regarded as 'This is mine, this am I, this is my self'. Body is like a lump of foam carried down the Ganges, perception like a mirage at noon, the activities like a plantain trunk, which has no pith however far it is peeled. The five heaps are the burden, craving the taking up of it. Asked flatly whether there is a self, the Buddha stays silent, and explains why to Ānanda afterwards.

  • aggregates
  • non-self
  • impermanence
  • attachment
  • non-attachment
  • insight
  • knowledge
  • wisdom

Enter a dialogue

The Senses and Their Bond

Eye and shapes, ear and sounds: this is where a life is lived from moment to moment. The fourth book asks where the bondage really lies, in the senses, in their objects, or in something that arises between them.

Two oxen, one black and one white, are tied by a single yoke. The black is not the bond of the white, nor the white of the black: the yoke is. So the eye is not the fetter of shapes, nor shapes of the eye. The fetter is the desire and lust that arise between them. Six animals tied together, a snake, a crocodile, a bird, a dog, a jackal and a monkey, each pull toward its own haunt, until, tethered to a strong post, they tire and lie down. That post is mindfulness of the body.

  • mindfulness
  • feeling
  • desire
  • craving
  • attachment
  • concentration
  • meditation
  • liberation

Enter a dialogue

Gods, Kings and the Tempter

The first book is mostly verse, and those who question the Buddha in it are gods, a king and Māra, the tempter. What does an awakened person say to each of them?

A god asks how he crossed the flood, and is told: without halting and without striving. Rohitassa, a god who in a former life walked for a hundred years looking for the end of the world, learns that it cannot be reached by walking and lies within this fathom-long body. King Pasenadi, grieving his grandmother, hears that all beings are mortal. And when Māra asks the nun Vajirā who made 'the being', she answers that the word, like 'chariot', names parts put together.

  • faith
  • teaching
  • wisdom
  • ethical conduct
  • awakening
  • renunciation
  • karma
  • rebirth

Enter a dialogue

Within this work

passages held
1,969
distinct concepts
851
by passages held, corpus-wide
#25

What this book thinks together

The wheel takes this book’s leading concepts and shows how often they come up together. The wider the band between two, the more of its passages speak of both. Among them, most often together: “meditation” and “mindfulness”.
Concept co-occurrence, strongest first 8 concepts, joined by 28 pairings. 80 pairings reach beyond these concepts and are not drawn.
ConceptPaired conceptShared passages
meditationmindfulness85
liberationsuffering72
impermanencesuffering65
liberationmeditation61
impermanenceliberation60
cravingliberation53
liberationrebirth53
cravingsuffering47
liberationmindfulness43
liberationspiritual practice40
rebirthsuffering37
cravingimpermanence24
cravingrebirth24
spiritual practicesuffering20
mindfulnessspiritual practice18
meditationspiritual practice17
impermanencemeditation15
cravingmindfulness14
impermanencemindfulness14
mindfulnesssuffering14
impermanencerebirth12
mindfulnessrebirth9
cravingmeditation7
impermanencespiritual practice6
meditationsuffering6
meditationrebirth5
rebirthspiritual practice5
cravingspiritual practice4

Works held

The author's work in order, this book marked in place. Your-language title first, the original beneath it where the two differ; side chips show which full texts are held.

  1. 1892 Buddhistische Anthologie

    A book assembled by its translator, not a book of the canon, and the start of a sequence: Neumann went on to translate the Dhammapada in 1893 and the verses of the monks and nuns in 1899.

     DE
  2. Dialogues of the Buddha (Dīgha Nikāya)

    Of the five collections of the Buddha's discourses in the Pāli Canon, this one comes first and holds the longest pieces. Many of them stage an encounter: a brahmin, a king or a rival ascetic arrives with a question.

     EN
  3. Psalms of the Early Buddhists I: Psalms of the Sisters (Therīgāthā)

    The companion to the Theragāthā, the verses of the elder monks, and less than half its length.

     EN
  4. Psalms of the Early Buddhists II: Psalms of the Brethren (Theragāthā)

    Twenty-one chapters ordered by the length of each poem, from single verses up to Vaṅgīsa's seventy-one, ascribed to the Buddha's first monks.

     EN
  5. Sutta-Nipāta

    An anthology rather than a single discourse: five chapters of verse and verse-dialogue, gathered into the miscellaneous fifth collection of the canon.

     DEEN
  6. The Book of the Kindred Sayings (Saṃyutta Nikāya) you are here PIEN
  7. The Dhammapada (Dhammapada)

    The best known of the canon's verse anthologies, filed with the miscellaneous fifth collection. Many of its verses recur elsewhere in the canon, and several early schools kept their own version.

     EN
  8. The Middle Length Discourses of the Buddha (Majjhima Nikāya)

    Where the Dīgha stages debates, this collection shows the Buddha at work as a teacher, with monks, householders and ascetics. Neumann's version, the first complete one in a European language, keeps the German spelling of the 1890s, with forms such as giebt and Gleichniss.

     DE
  9. The Udāna: Inspired Utterances of the Buddha (Udāna)

    Prose scenes, each with its verse: a mixed form among the books of the miscellaneous fifth collection, where the Dhammapada and the Theragāthā are verse alone.

     DE
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