Theravada Text >> Sutta

Reading the Suttas
By Patrick Kearney

During this course we have looked at how different interpretative communities read the Nikayas. Among these are contemporary communities formed by the experience of modernity, practitioners who are attempting to apply the teachings found in the Nikayas to their daily lives in the contemporary world. Locating ourselves within such a community, we can see that our reading is a form of practitioner criticism. We have sought to make sense of this alien literature firstly by acknowledging that it is not a literature at all, but a collection of oral performances. We have examined how these performances are both made up of and linked by patterns of repetition – lists of lists within lists. The lists function like tables in individual databases, and the teaching as a whole - the dhamma - functions as a relational database which exists, not within any given sutta, but as a network of relationships which underlies and unites all the suttas.

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