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Which of the 5 nikayas is your favorite? What order should I read them?


Re: Favourite Nikaya

Post by frank k » Fri Feb 28, 2020 12:38 am
IMO,
You really want to read as many of the suttas in all the nikayas (with some exceptions in KN) and decide for yourself. EBT (early buddhist teaching) can be found in all of them. Development and lateness of ideas (relative to EBT) happens in strata. But in general, here is the sorted order in terms of highest density of EBT of the 4 major nikayas:

1.  SN‍ 
2.  AN‍      
3.  MN‍
4. DN‍

The most EBT among the  KN‍    I have here:  KN‍   

Any serious practitioner, you should keep good notes while reading all the suttas and figure out for yourself which suttas are most important and keep a list of them, summaries, and memorize the key ideas from them. For the short important suttas, best to  memorize the entire sutta and recite them everyday, frequently. It has a similar effect to installing antivirus and anti-malware on your computing devices, and installing a pure clean operating system that works properly.

IMO, these are the most important suttas, in this anthology I've collected called, 'the raft'. (The Raft)🚣‍

Everything else in the sutta collection would extraneous information, or just slight variations of theme from those core suttas in the raft.
(HOL 🍂: Handful Of Leaves Principle.)

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