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SuttaCentral Vision Statement
SuttaCentral aims at facilitating the study of Buddhist texts from comparative and historical perspectives. It focuses on the texts that represent "Early Buddhism", texts preserved not only in the Pali Sutta and Vinaya Piṭakas but also in Chinese and Tibetan translations and in fragmentary remains in Sanskrit and other languages.
SuttaCentral offers a gateway to this material by enabling users to quickly identify the Chinese, Tibetan, and/or Sanskrit parallels of any given Pali discourse - or vice versa. Having found that information, one can then click on the relevant links and consult the actual texts, most of which are accessible from other web-sites. Later we also hope to provide direct access to available English translations.
The system focuses initially on providing the correspondence data from the perspective of the Pali suttas; that is, given a particular Pali sutta, one can find the parallels in other textual languages. Finding parallels in the reverse direction will become possible in due course. In building SuttaCentral, we plan to work through the nikāyas, one by one, in the traditional sequence. At present the Dīgha and Majjhima Nikāyas are completed. The Saṃyutta Nikāya is accessible but much checking of the data on parallels remains to be done. The Anguttara Nikāya will become accessible as the relevant data-entry work progresses.
The data supplied here offer substantial improvements and additions over the pioneering work by Akanuma (Comparative Catalogue of Chinese Āgamas & Pāli Nikāyas, 1929), until now the standard reference work in this area. Nevertheless, there is still much room for improvement. We therefore invite other scholars working on this same early Buddhist material to provide input to SuttaCentral (see "Contacts"), so that the material displayed is continually refined for greater accuracy and completeness.
We hope, by providing this service, to advance the study of Early Buddhism. We also hope to promote recognition of the need for such study to take account not only of the Pali texts but also of their counterparts in other languages.