22 Facts About Buddhist sutras

Buddhist sutras texts are those religious texts which belong to the Buddhist sutras tradition.

The earliest Buddhist sutras texts were not committed to writing until some centuries after the death of Gautama Buddha.

The oldest surviving Buddhist sutras manuscripts are the Gandharan Buddhist sutras texts, found in Afghanistan and written in Gandhari, they date from the first century BCE to the third century CE.

The content of such a discourse was then to be collated with the Buddhist sutras, compared with the Vinaya, and evaluated against the nature of the Dharma.

The most widely studied early Buddhist sutras material are the first four Pali Nikayas, as well as the corresponding Chinese Agamas.

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Warder hold that early Buddhist sutras texts contain material that could possibly be traced to the historical Buddha himself or at least to the early years of pre-sectarian Buddhism.

The Chinese Buddhist canon contains a complete collection of early sutras in Chinese translation, their content is very similar to the Pali, differing in detail but not in the core doctrinal content.

Early Buddhist sutras schools preserved other types of texts which developed in later periods, which were variously seen as canonical or not, depending on the tradition.

The different Buddhist sutras schools had their own collections of these tales and often disagreed on which stories were canonical.

Buddhist sutras poetry is a broad genre with numerous forms and has been composed in many languages, including Sanskrit, Tibetan, Chinese and Japanese.

Buddhist sutras poetry was written in popular Indian languages, such as Tamil and Apabhramsa.

Sri Lankan literature in the vernacular contains many Buddhist sutras works, including as classical Sinhala poems such as the Muvadevavata and the Sasadavata as well as prose works like the Dhampiyatuva gatapadaya, a commentary on words and phrases in the Pali Dhammapada.

Burmese Buddhist sutras literature developed unique poetic forms form the 1450s onwards, a major type of poetry is the which are long and embellished translations of Pali Buddhist sutras works, mainly jatakas.

Mahayana Buddhist sutras are generally regarded by the Mahayana tradition as being more profound than the sravaka texts as well as generating more spiritual merit and benefit.

The Mahayana sutras are traditionally considered by Mahayana Buddhists to be the word of the Buddha.

Various Mahayana Buddhist sutras warn against the charge that they are not word of the Buddha, showing that they are aware of this claim.

Several Mahayana Buddhist sutras depict important Buddhas or Bodhisattvas not found in earlier texts, such as the Buddhas Amitabha, Akshobhya and Vairocana, and the bodhisattvas Maitreya, Manjusri, Ksitigarbha, and Avalokiteshvara.

Hundreds of Mahayana Buddhist sutras have survived in Sanskrit, Chinese and Tibetan translation.

Some Mahayana Buddhist sutras are thought to display a distinctly tantric character, like some of the shorter Perfection of Wisdom Buddhist sutras and the Mahavairocana Sutra.

Buddhist sutras produced the Pramana-samuccaya, and later Dharmakirti wrote the Pramana-varttika, which was a commentary and reworking of the Dignaga text.

Buddhist sutras poetry was an important contribution to the literature of the tradition.

Buddhist sutras Tantras are key texts in Vajrayana Buddhism, which is the dominant form of Buddhism in Tibet, Bhutan and Mongolia.