The Word of the Buddha - 1

The first book of the Dīgha Nikāya, the Collection of the Long Discourses of the Buddha, collects 17 suttas that do not fit into the typical format of discourses, but are groupings created centuries later managing to be classified as another canonical collection. While the suttas of the canonical collections: Saṁyutta, Majjhima and Anguttara Nikayas, aim at explaining the word, doctrine and teaching of the Buddha as well as providing some circumstantial data, this book, on the other hand, is a heterogeneous compilation of diatribes against the different beliefs that clashed with the incipient Buddhism. Diatribe, or debate, is the name given to a short ethical discourse, specifically of the type composed by the Cynic and Stoic philosophers. These popular moral readings often had a polemical tone directed against individuals or social groups. In this case, they leave no community, belief, faith or religion of the time unattacked. This book seems to be composed to be given to Buddhist missionaries to be used as a manual for debate against other religions in order to gain followers. This is the tone of most of the first thirteen discourses. Neither mythomania nor millagery, which the Indian public has always been so fond of, is disdained. If we study their structure, we immediately see that they are completely foreign to the canonical ones and their content, in general, is composed of a libel against a religious group, followed by a series of short-paste of canonical suttas selected without much criterion...