For those of you who don't know, I've got an email prepared little book, about 40 pages long, you can print it out, in which I took 20 of the Suttas in the scriptures and I formatted them. First I wrote the Suttas up and slightly edited some. I didn't translate them, I edited them. I looked at about 6 or 7 different scholar's translated work, compared them to each other, chose what I felt was good grammar and also styled the text a little bit more for this day and age. I only adjusted and edited the grammar.
I prepared these 20 Suttas, not just to read the Suttas, but there's also comments at the end of every Sutta. Those comments are mine. But I'm not explaining the Sutta , I wasn't going to get involved in making a commentary about the Sutta, rather I made comments about how to read the Sutta, because Suttas are very difficult to read. So I prepared those 20 and the comments so that people could get a beginning way of looking at Suttas and understand how to read them so that they can understand them more easily. A Sutta is written in a certain way that's often like a skeleton. Unless you put some meat on it or know which parts actually can be expanded, it's difficult to see it in its breadth.
I'll give you an example. One of the 20 Suttas begins similar to this, "Terrible followers are attachments to gain, honor and fame. Serious harsh dangers to the attainment of the highest freedom from bondage." Now for a lot of people, they're going to look at that sentence, and they're going to say, "Oh yeah, gain, honor and fame, you can get your head big and whatever." So they read that much into it, because that's all the words are. This afternoon we're planning to give you a guided meditation on the eight worldly dhammas; gain and loss, praise and blame, fame and obscurity, pleasure and pain. Now in the Sutta, it only mentions gain, honor and fame. For a person who understands the eight worldly dhammas, they don't just see those 3, they see all 8, and they see even more as to the detailed study of the 8. In this way, although that Sutta is the smallest of all the Suttas I prepared, there's a lot of teachings behind it, the whole eight worldly dhammas are behind this Sutta. So when a person's able to pick out those few words and can expand it with their own understanding, the Sutta takes on more meaning. That was my reason for making the 20 Suttas and putting in comments, to show people how to open them up.
Now, as to the question, why did I choose those 20 when there happens to be a few thousand in the scriptures? OK, there's 5 main sections of the scriptures, and they're divided according to certain principles, and one of the sections is called the middle-length Suttas. It's about 150 or so Suttas. In general these are all approximately 2 or 3 pages long although some are a bit longer than that. They're all fairly deep, decent-sized Suttas and give a nice story. It's felt that within those 150 Suttas we have some of the best explanations of the Dhamma, like the Satipattana Sutta is from there. As well, what I mentioned last night, the Sabbasava Sutta, that's from the 150 also. So the middle-length Suttas are one section.
The long-length section has about 30 or so, and these are really long ones. They don't have quite as much detailed instruction however, even though they're longer, they're set up in a different way. Still, those two, out of the five sections of the scriptures, are considered to be the best for finding instruction. Now the Kalama Sutta is in one of the others, one of the minor books. The one that I just mentioned to you, about terrible followers is attachment to gain, honor and fame, is also in a smaller one. So what I had done for myself, years and years ago, was study through the middle-length sayings and the long ones just for myself and I made notes on the different ones. Then over the course of teaching, we were seeing that a lot of people wanted to read scriptures but couldn't understand how to read scriptures and so on.
So I decided I'll prepare something to help our students be able to read them easier. Then from my notes, which had stuff from almost two hundred Suttas, I started looking over these, thinking, well which ones of these would be pretty good for beginning to understand the scriptural Dhamma, which ones are fairly good, and which ones show a kind of breadth, a scope, has variety in it, etc. As I went over these, I also added the Kalama Sutta, and two other Suttas, the one short one I just mentioned and another one from the other collection, I found these 20 were very appropriate and showed a broad range of teachings. It also has different types of teaching and different people giving the teachings. Most of them are the Buddha teaching, one is Sariputta, the wisest of all his students, one is Mogallana, who was the one gifted with the most psychic powers, and one is a combination of him and a woman, a Queen teaching. Something else interesting in it is that three of them are the Buddha teaching his son. I chose them especially to show his son at age 7, at age 18 and then at 20-years old when he got fully enlightened. Those three show something special, if a person actually examines them in particular. So that's why I chose those 20, and for those of you who've got it or may have it in the future, I hope you learn a lot from them.