How to search for suttas with similar topic?

How can I for example look for suttas about greed, hate or delusion. And find many suttas which are msinly about that topic?
(I mean maybe there is a site which groups many suttas together by content, which would be better than using the search function on suttacentral)

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Voice has a function for finding Suttas with similar topics.

If you want a surprise, just click the “inspire me” button and … let yourself surprise!

But if what you want is more specific, type for example “greed hate delusion” into the search box. Note: no commas, no anything, just the bare words with spaces in-between. This is a keyword search (as opposed to a phrase search).

This will give you many results. (It’s 149 to be precise, but you can select up to 50 results at max in the Voice settings—and this is already enough to be a bit overwhelmed.) You will be shown Suttas where all three keywords occur in the same segment, and they are ordered according to how often your search term is in that Sutta. Suttas with much greed, hate, and delusion have a higher priority than those with less of it.

Now if you just type “greed” into the search box, you will see search phrase suggestions, which we call “examples”. You will see a few that have “greed”, another few that have “hate”, and with “delusion”, I think, there’s only one. (Note that “whatever” also has “hate” in it … :upside_down_face:)

The “examples” function in Voice is designed to connect Suttas that speak about similar things, sometimes from different angles. This function is under constant development, and the latest version with many new examples is not yet online. Occasionally you may find some outdated examples that have no results; this is due to changes in translation that have not yet been adapted in the examples. (This currently happens rarely for English, more often for German.) If you find outdated examples, @karl_lew and I would be happy to be notified.

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Building clusters of suttas is the recommended method (MN 95). ATI (Access to Insight) sometimes lists connected suttas after the main one.

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Thank you Venerable.

I believe (but am not 100% sure) that this is only true for Ajahn Thanissaro’s translations. In that case, it is better to go directly to his translations on dhammatalks.org.

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Indeed!

And if you come across a phrase that connects with your heart, let us know to include it in the examples. The best examples are the ones that are associated with a handful of suttas. Bhante Sujato’s meticulous and exacting care in translation has given us all this gift of flying through the Dhamma phrase by phrase. And Ayya Sabbamitta’s very own meticulous and exacting care is bringing those examples to German.

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