How to find suttas by common name

I am new to Buddhism and just discovered SuutCentral from an article in Tricycle.

How does one find the text for familiar suttas such as “Heart Sutta” or “Diamond Sutta”? The Table of Contents show the Pali or Sanscrit name which does not help a beginner too much. I’ve done searches such as “Diamond Sutta” and nothing comes up. I’m sure the answer is somewhere on the website, but I have not found it.

Thank you for helping out a beginner. :pray:

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Greetings @Sonoran49 and welcome to the forum of Sutta Central :slight_smile:

Firstly, there are a number of issues your question touches upon :slight_smile:

Sutta Central hosts Early Buddhist texts. It is very confusing when new to Buddhism to even know what the Early Buddhists texts are :slight_smile: Here are 2 links to help explain this.

https://suttacentral.net/introduction

Because of the scale and complexity of the body of works presented here, together with multiple languages and parallels etc, the search functions are a bit complicated. They are being worked on by the SC team in order to make it easier for people to use. One way that I find help is to use the search function of the forum (using the large Q icon on the top right hand side) to type in the terms. Usually the exact reference of the sutta can be found by looking at the discussions about it. Others have suggested using google search, typing the title of the sutta plus Sutta Central, apparently that yields good results too :slight_smile:

Finally, it just so happens that my own very first post here, was asking about the diamond cutter sutta :smiley: Ajahn Sujato gave a brilliant answer to it. Have a look at the below link to see the answer :smiley:

We look forward to seeing you on the boards and if you have any other questions please just ask :slight_smile: :pray:

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Thank you very much for your prompt reply. I will read through your response in the morning.

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This would probably be a good topic for a FAQ, namely “How do I find such and such Mahayana sutta on SuttaCentral?”

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the suttas for Mahayana are here 84000 Reading Room | Translated Texts

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