The Discourse for Reciting Together Saṃ gīti Sutta (DN 33) · 莲华归心开放中文佛学资料库

- suttas - - evening talks - short morning talks - lectures - guided meditations - talk collections - other themes - chants - - - - à¹à¸à¸¢ - Franā§ais - Espaā±ol - - Portuguāªs - Ð ÑÑÑÐºÐ¸Ð¹ - - - Ð£ÐºÑÐ°ÑÐ½ÑÑÐºÐ° Submit Search - Home - Suttas - DN - DN 33 The Discourse for Reciting Together ## Browse Suttas Go to Dīgha Nikṅya index DN index ## The Discourse for Reciting Together Saṃgīti SuttaÂ Â (DNÂ 33) ## Introduction The Buddhaâs disciples, when listening to the Dhamma, were presented with a challenge: how to best memorize it. The Buddha repeatedly made it clear that memorization was an important part of listening for the sake of their own training. He also made it clear that he wanted to establish the Dhamma and Vinaya for a long time, so his monastic disciples had the added responsibility of memorizing the Dhamma to pass on to others. The Buddha helped by formulating and presenting the Dhamma in a way that made it easy to memorize, such as arranging talks with numerical lists, providing striking similes, and composing verses whose rhythm and word-play made them memorable. But it was up to the disciples to choose the formats in which they would organize their memories of what the Buddha taught. They ended up using a wide variety of formats. In some cases, they memorized whole talks. In others, they memorized dialogues, drawing portraits of the Buddhaâs interlocutors. In others, they provided numerically arranged catechisms of the Buddhaâs basic concepts. The different formats had different strengths and weaknesses. The dialogues, for instance, provided context, showing which questions and problems a particular Dhamma teaching was designed to answer. Their character sketches and narratives, sometimes quite vivid, provided human interest that mere lists of dhammas would lack. However, the dialogues were unwieldy in that a great deal of effort had to be put into memorizing details of character, location, and narrative sequence. Catechisms avoided this problem by focusing totally on the words of the Dhamma, without the context of a dialog or similes. For this reason, they were a more efficient form than dialogues for passing along material. This, however, was material stripped of context, so that it was harder to see what role individual teachings might play in the larger context of the path or in the personal context of solving particular problems faced in the practice. It was perhaps because of their complementary strengths and weaknesses that all these formats for shaping the memory of the Buddhaâs teachings were used and preserved. This seems especially likely in the case of the last two suttas of the Dīgha Nikṅya: the present one, DN 33, and the one following it. Most of the other suttas included in the Dīgha are of a literary nature, with some extreme cases consisting almost entirely of descriptive passages with very little Dhamma. Modern scholars have speculated that these suttas were composed with the primary aim of appealing to the populace at large: Their literary style and sophistication made them attractive tools for converting outsiders. In this context, the catechisms in DN 33 and 34 provided compensation: all Dhamma with only a minimum of description. As a result, monastics who memorized the Dīgha would have a large fund of basic Dhamma lists to draw on when giving sermons or seeking guidance for their own practice. There is the question of when DN 33 was composed. Some people have suggested that all the numerically arranged catechisms—these suttas plus suttas like Khp 4, AN 10:27, and AN 10:28—postdated the Buddha. Itâs obvious that the idea of arranging teachings in this way would occur to his disciples only when there was a large body of material to memorize. Even though people of his time were capable of prodigious feats of memory, not everyone had developed that ability, and it would have made sense to organize lists of teachings in a more streamlined format for their sake. However, the need for this format could easily have made itself felt during the latter part of the Buddhaâs lifetime. In fact, these catechisms could have been what other suttas were referring to when they mentioned Abhidhamma (Higher Dhamma) or Mṅtikṅ (Lists). However, DN 33 raises some special questions in this area. Although the majority of its contents can be traced to other parts of the Canon, it also contains lists that appear nowhere else in the suttas, and some of these lists—such as the threefold classification of form and the three faculties—contain vocabulary found elsewhere in the Canon only in the Abhidhamma Piṭaka. This suggests that, at least in its current incarnation, DN 33 was a later composition. But as to whether it was composed entirely after the Buddha passed away, or if parts were composed earlier, with other parts added later, thereâs no way of telling. The sutta could have easily grown over the generations because its organization is so open-ended. The lists included in DN 34 are restricted