I am frequently curious about the relative age of suttas. It seems that certain suttas are older or younger than others.
I’m also curious about the relative age of certain portions of some suttas, as it seems suttas have had portions added to them over time.
When trying to clarify this for myself, I don’t have a great way of doing it other than asking around and searching, sutta by sutta.
Any suggestions for a more efficient way of researching relative age/revision history of suttas? Thanks!
This topic has been discussed endlessly on the forum. Have you tried doing a search to see what has already been discussed? If you are not satisfied with the answers you find, then perhaps you could state what sort of different conversation you want to have.
No doubt lots of people will love to give their opinions. But frankly, they have already given them many times in other threads. @moderators, do we need one more thread on this topic?
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Thanks for your question SuttaDhammaMax. As Snowbird mentions this has been discussed here a number of times already. However, if you use the native search function here you also get a lot of irrelevant threads and the ones Snowbird is thinking of aren’t that easy to find. Unfortunately an external search engine does a better job, when I search “relative age suttas suttacentral” these were all top hits:
https://discourse.suttacentral.net/t/stratification-of-the-suttas/25382/13
https://discourse.suttacentral.net/t/statistical-analysis-of-early-buddhist-texts/16691/1
https://discourse.suttacentral.net/t/suttas-organized-by-date/19576/1
and there may be more.
As Snowbird points out there is a third option, doing a thorough search! If you have any further questions after you’ve had a look around, you can post them in the relevant existing threads.
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Thank you for the input everyone! Much appreciated. And good tip about the external search.