Re: what does sutta denote?

Ole and Bhikkhu Nyanatusita,

Some further thoughts on sutta:

1. If suttanta is a compound of sutta plus anta, it is difficult to
believe that sutta here can have been the Pātimokkha. But that assumes
that -anta- is pleonastic. You may perhaps have a different
interpretation. Comparing to Veda & Vedānta ?

2. The current Mss and editions of the Nikāyas very frequently have
sutta as part of the title of discourses. While there is reason to say
that this may often be the result of later editing, it is clear that
many discourses are referred to with names ending in sutta- in the
commentaries of Buddhaghosa. That being so, we cannot be sure that these
names are not original - especially in the case of the Saṃyutta and
Aṅguttara.

3. Sutta in the general sense that covers virtually all of the contents
of the Suttantapiṭaka is extremely frequent in the Peṭakopadesa and
Nettipakaraṇa. The recent discovery that a chapter of Peṭ was translated
into Chinese in the second century A.D. means that it is possible that
this usage was already current in the first century A.D. or before.
Given that even the threefold list of kinds of dhamma is not found in
some of our earliest sources, it is not certain that it is necessarily
earlier than the kind of usage we have in the paracanonical literature.

4. There seem then to be various possibilities:

a) Sutta < sūtra gives rise to suttanta and also to sutta in the lists
of kinds of dhamma;

b) Whatever the original usage is that creates suttanta, it may be that
sutta has been extracted from suttanta for inclusion in the four
mahāpadesa passage and (later?) in the threefold (eventually ninefold
and twelvefold) list of kinds of dhamma. In that case it does not refer
to the Pātimokkha in these contexts;

c) Sūtra and sūkta have become homonymous in Middle Indian. In the
non-Vinaya contexts we are dealing with the latter. So suttanta will be
a later formulation after confusion of the two forms.

I am not sure we have enough data to reach a firm conclusion.

Lance