How many times is the phrase 'Four Noble Truths' used in the first four Nikayas

Dear Dhamma friends,

Does anyone know how many times the phrase ‘Four Noble Truths’ is used in the Nikayas or at least have a resource that can direct me to this info? This is my specific question but the reason I am asking is because I am interested in how many times technical pali concepts are used in the Nikayas. I think this is important not only for scholarly purposes, but also for personal practice. Is there any resource or study on ranking the occurrences of Pali words in the Nikayas? I have the index’s of the first four Nikayas, but to go through each technical Buddhist word or phrase and write out how many times it is used and how many suttas it is used within would require a lot of work, and I was wondering if someone had already done this kind of research :slight_smile:

Does anyone else see the value in this?

Peace and metta

You can use search engine in Digital Pāli Reader for Firefox for this kind of search.

It gave me 141 hits for “cat+ariyasacc”. It’s not perfect since it includes other phrases, but at least it can give you some idea how (in)frequent this phrase is.

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