The Buddhist suttas, are interesting as being a special result of Gotama’s activity; they are not analogous to the Brahmanic works called sutras, and they have no close parallel in later Indian literature.  There is little personal background in the Upanishads, none at all in the Sankhya and Vedanta sutras.  But the Sutta Pitaka is an attempt to delineate a personality as well as to record a doctrine.  Though the idea of writing biography has not yet been clearly conceived, yet almost every discourse brings before us the figure of the Lord:  though the doctrine can be detached from the preacher, yet one feels that the hearers of the Pitaka hungered not merely for a knowledge of the four truths but for the very words of the great voice:  did he really say this, and if so when, where and why?  Most suttas begin by answering these questions.  They describe a scene and report a discourse and in so doing they create a type of literature with an interest and individuality of its own.  It is no exaggeration to say that the Buddha is the most living figure in Hindu literature.  He stands before us more distinctly not only than Yajnavalkya and Sankara, but than modern teachers like Nanak and Ramanuja and the reason of this distinctness can I think be nothing but the personal impression which he made on his age.  The later Buddhists compose nothing in the style of the Nikayas:  they write about Gotama in new and fanciful ways, but no Acts of the Apostles succeed the Gospels.

Though the Buddhist suttas are sui generis and mark a new epoch in Indian literature, yet in style they are a natural development of the Upanishads.  The Upanishads are less dogmatic and show much less interest in the personality of their sages, but they contain dialogues closely analogous to suttas.  Thus about half of the Brihad-Aranyaka is a philosophic treatise unconnected with any particular name, but in this are set five dialogues in which Yajnavalkya appears and two others in which Ajatasatru and Pravahana Jaivali are the protagonists.

Though many suttas are little more than an exposition of some doctrine arranged in mnemonic form, others show eloquence and dramatic skill.  Thus the Samannaphala-sutta opens with a vivid description of the visit paid one night by Ajatasattu to the Buddha[646].  We see the royal procession of elephants and share the alarm of the suspicious king at the unearthly stillness of the monastery park, until he saw the Buddha sitting in a lighted pavilion surrounded by an assembly of twelve hundred and fifty brethren, calm and silent as a clear lake.  The king’s long account of his fruitless quest for truth would be tiresome if it were not of such great historic interest and the same may be said of the Buddha’s enumeration of superstitious and reprehensible practices, but from this point onwards his discourse is a magnificent crescendo of thought and language, never halting and illustrated by metaphors of great effect and beauty.  Equally forcible and surely resting on some tradition of the Buddha’s own words is the solemn fervour which often marks the suttas of the Majjhima such as the descriptions of his struggle for truth, the admonitions to Rahula and the reproof administered to Sati.