Help Me Find A Sutta: The Buddha Firmly Dealt With "Nobility" Rubbishing His Clan

Q & A
1

Help me find a sutta, please.

I think it was in the Middle Length discourses.

My memory is that a brahmin was rubbishing the clan the Buddha came from and the Buddha was quite harsh in dealing with him, pointing out the shortcomings of the brahmin’s own clan.

Thanks either way.

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2

It’s DN3 Ambaṭṭhasutta.

The Buddha was quite harsh but that brahmin’s teacher was even harsher.

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3

I’m impressed.

Before I asked, I ran a search on my notes and still couldn’t find it.

I think if I ever started reading the Tipitaka over again ( not in this life! ) I would make a bullet point in my notes for each sutta for a line keywords to facilitate searching.

Thank you very much for the fast answer!

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4

What keyword would you have expected to use?

BTW, it’s in the CIPS under Sakyans: https://index.readingfaithfully.org/#Sakyans

5

There isn’t a particular one. About half a dozen times now someone said something on the Internet that reminded me of a sutta I took notes on in Google Docs. I ended up asking around to get the sutta number, and sure enough it was in my notes, just not on the words I thought to search on.

6

No, I meant what keyword did you search for to find this sutta in your notes. I’m always trying to back engineer the index to see if it would have been helpful for finding what the person was looking for.

For example, did you search your notes for Sakyans? If so the index would have worked. But if you searched for “rubbishing” then it wouldn’t. Although I probably wouldn’t index under that term :joy:

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7

I didn’t think of searching on “Sakyans” and I know I wouldn’t have used “rubbishing” in my notes. I did have the thought “good ___, what could I search on to possibly find that sutta?”.

I categorize all of my notes by subject, but many suttas can fall under many subjects and in each category I have a mountain of notes now.

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8

I know the feeling!

I recommend periodically going through the largest categories and organizing them into logical sub-categories. This kind of taxonomic revision of your notes is very helpful for consolidating what you’ve been learning and coming to some clarity on big, complex topics. And as a side benefit your notes will be easier to navigate too :blush:

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9

Kind of hard to do when many suttas can easily fall into multiple categories. Often the indecision of where to paste the notes is more difficult than reading and taking notes on the sutta. :slight_smile:

11

Yes, any system that relies on putting each sutta into a single category isn’t going to work. That’s why tagging with keywords is a better option.

But even then it’s very difficult to assign tags and remember exactly what all the tags are. The way I’m dealing with it in the index is that after the initial pass I will need to go through all the headwords and consolidate them into one main key and build cross references to alternate keys.

Even still, indexing/note taking will never be a perfect solution, especially for the “What is that sutta that talks about…” type searches. Asking a learned human (or group of humans!) will always be the fallback.

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