The Majjhima-Nikaya is a collection of 152 discourses of moderate (majjhima) length.  Taken as a whole it is perhaps the most profound and impassioned of all the Nikayas and also the oldest.  The sermons which it contains, if not verbatim reports of Gotama’s eloquence, have caught the spirit of one who urged with insistent earnestness the importance of certain difficult truths and the tremendous issues dependent on right conduct and right knowledge.  The remaining collections, the Samyutta and Anguttara, classify the Buddha’s utterances under various headings and presuppose older documents which they sometimes quote[606].  The Samyutta consists of a great number of suttas, mostly short, combined in groups treating of a single subject which may be either a person or a topic.  The Anguttara, which is a still longer collection, is arranged in numerical groups, a method of classification dear to the Hindus who delight in such computations as the four meditations, the eightfold path, the ten fetters.  It takes such religious topics as can be counted in this way and arranges them under the numbers from one to eleven.  Thus under three, it treats of thought, word and deed and the applications of this division to morality; of the three messengers of the gods, old-age, sickness and death; of the three great evils, lust, ill-will and stupidity and so on.

The fifth or Khuddaka-Nikaya is perhaps the portion of the Pali scriptures which has found most favour with Europeans, for the treatises composing it are short and some of them of remarkable beauty.  They are in great part composed of verses, sometimes disconnected couplets, sometimes short poems.  The stanzas are only imperfectly intelligible without an explanation of the occasion to which they refer.  This is generally forthcoming, but is sometimes a part of the accepted text and sometimes regarded as merely a commentary.  To this division of the Pitaka belong the Dhammapada, a justly celebrated anthology of devotional verses, and the Sutta-Nipata, a very ancient collection of suttas chiefly in metre.  Other important works included in it are the Thera and Theri-gatha or poems written by monks and nuns respectively, and the Jataka or stories about the Buddha’s previous births[607].  Some of the rather miscellaneous contents of this Nikaya are late and do not belong to the same epoch of thought as the discourses attributed to Gotama.  Such are the Buddha-vamsa, or lives of Gotama and his twenty-four predecessors, the Cariya-Pitaka, a selection of Jataka stories about Gotama’s previous births and the Vimana and Peta-vatthus, accounts of celestial mansions and of the distressful existence led by those who are condemned to be ghosts[608].

Though some works comprised in this Nikaya (e.g. the Suttanipata) are very ancient, the collection, as it stands, is late and probably known only to the southern Church.  The contents of it are not quite the same in Ceylon, Burma and Siam, and only a small portion of them has been identified in the Chinese Tripitaka.  Nevertheless the word pancanekayika, one who knows the five Nikayas, is found in the inscriptions of Sanchi and five Nikayas are mentioned in the last books of the Cullavagga.  Thus a fifth Nikaya of some kind must have been known fairly early.