that we catch an
echo of Gotama's own words, but in others the legendary character is
very marked. Thus the Mahasamaya and Atanatiya suttas are epitomes of
popular mythology tacked on to the history of the Buddha. But for all
that they are interesting and ancient.

Many of the suttas, especially the first thirteen, are rearrangements of
old materials put together by a considerable literary artist who lived
many generations after the Buddha. The account of the Buddha's last days
is an example of such a compilation which attains the proportions of a
Gospel and shows some dramatic power though it is marred by the
juxtaposition of passages composed in very different styles.

The Majjhima-Nikaya is a collection of 152 discourses of moderate
(majjhima) length. Taken as a whole it is perhaps the most profound and
impassioned of all the Nikayas and also the oldest. The sermons which it
contains, if not verbatim reports of Gotama's eloquence, have caught the
spirit of one who urged with insistent earnestness the importance of
certain difficult truths and the tremendous issues dependent on right
conduct and right knowledge. The remaining collections, the Samyutta and
Anguttara, classify the Buddha's utterances under various headings and
presuppose older documents which they sometimes quote[606]. The Samyutta
consists of a great number of suttas, mostly short, combined in groups
treating of a single subject which may be either a person or a topic.
The Anguttara, which is a still longer collection, is arranged in
numerical groups, a method of classification dear to the Hindus who
delight in such computations as the four meditations, the eightfold
path, the ten fetters. It takes such religious topics as can be counted
in this way and arranges them under the numbers from one to eleven. Thus
under three, it treats of thought, word and deed and the applications of
this division to morality; of the three messengers of the gods, old-age,
sickness and death; of the three great evils, lust, ill-will and
stupidity and so on.

The fifth or Khuddaka-Nikaya is perhaps the portion of the Pali
scriptures which has found most favour with Europeans, for the treatises
composing it are short and some of them of remarkable beauty. They are
in great part composed of verses, sometimes disconnected couplets,
sometimes short poems. The stanzas are only imperfectly intelligible
without an explanation of the occasion to which they refer. This is
genera