Like the historical value of the Pitakas, their literary value can be justly estimated only if we remember that they are not books in our sense but treatises handed down by memory and that their form is determined primarily by the convenience of the memory.  We must not compare them with Plato and find them wanting, for often, especially in the Abhidhamma, there is no intention of producing a work of art, but merely of subdividing a subject and supplying explanations.  Frequently the exposition is thrown into the form of a catechism with questions and answers arranged so as to correspond to numbered categories.  Thus a topic may be divided into twenty heads and six propositions may be applied to each with positive or negative results.  The strong point of these Abhidhamma works—–­and of Buddhist philosophy generally—­lies in careful division and acute analysis but the power of definition is weak.  Rarely is a definition more than a collection of synonyms and very often the word to be defined is repeated in the definition.  Thus in the Dhamma-sangani the questions, what are good or bad states of mind? receive answers cast in the form:  when a good or bad thought has arisen with certain accompaniments enumerated at length, then these are the states that are good or bad.  No definition of good is given.

This mnemonic literature attains its highest excellence in poetry.  The art of composing short poems in which a thought, emotion or spiritual experience is expressed with a few simple but pregnant words in the compass of a single couplet or short hymn, was carried by the early Buddhists to a perfection which has never been excelled.  The Dhammapada[645] is the best known specimen of this literature.  Being an anthology it is naturally more suited for quotation or recitation in sections than for continuous reading.  But its twenty-five chapters are consecrated each to some special topic which receives fairly consecutive treatment, though each chapter is a mosaic of short poems consisting of one or more verses supposed to have been uttered by the Buddha or by arhats on various occasions.  The whole work combines literary beauty, depth of thought and human feeling in a rare degree.  Not only is it irradiated with the calm light of peace, faith and happiness but it glows with sympathy, with the desire to do good and help those who are struggling in the mire of passion and delusion.  For this reason it has found more favour with European readers than the detached and philosophic texts which simply preach self-conquest and aloofness.  Inferior in beauty but probably older is the Sutta-nipata, a collection of short discourses or conversations with the Buddha mostly in verse.  The rugged and popular language of these stanzas which reject speculation as much as luxury, takes us back to the life of the wanderers who followed the Buddha on his tours and we may imagine that poems like the Dhaniya sutta would be recited when they met together in a rest-house or grove set apart for their use on the outskirts of a village.