a-nipata, a collection
of short discourses or conversations with the Buddha mostly in verse.
The rugged and popular language of these stanzas which reject
speculation as much as luxury, takes us back to the life of the
wanderers who followed the Buddha on his tours and we may imagine that
poems like the Dhaniya sutta would be recited when they met together in
a rest-house or grove set apart for their use on the outskirts of a
village.

The Buddhist suttas, are interesting as being a special result of
Gotama's activity; they are not analogous to the Brahmanic works called
sutras, and they have no close parallel in later Indian literature.
There is little personal background in the Upanishads, none at all in
the Sankhya and Vedanta sutras. But the Sutta Pitaka is an attempt to
delineate a personality as well as to record a doctrine. Though the idea
of writing biography has not yet been clearly conceived, yet almost
every discourse brings before us the figure of the Lord: though the
doctrine can be detached from the preacher, yet one feels that the
hearers of the Pitaka hungered not merely for a knowledge of the four
truths but for the very words of the great voice: did he really say
this, and if so when, where and why? Most suttas begin by answering
these questions. They describe a scene and report a discourse and in so
doing they create a type of literature with an interest and
individuality of its own. It is no exaggeration to say that the Buddha
is the most living figure in Hindu literature. He stands before us more
distinctly not only than Yajnavalkya and Sankara, but than modern
teachers like Nanak and Ramanuja and the reason of this distinctness can
I think be nothing but the personal impression which he made on his age.
The later Buddhists compose nothing in the style of the Nikayas: they
write about Gotama in new and fanciful ways, but no Acts of the Apostles
succeed the Gospels.

Though the Buddhist suttas are _sui generis_ and mark a new epoch in
Indian literature, yet in style they are a natural development of the
Upanishads. The Upanishads are less dogmatic and show much less interest
in the personality of their sages, but they contain dialogues closely
analogous to suttas. Thus about half of the Brihad-Aranyaka is a
philosophic treatise unconnected with any particular name, but in this
are set five dialogues in which Yajnavalkya appears and two others in
which Ajatasatru and Pravahana Jaivali are the protag