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The Great Sutra Treasury - Southern Transmission 26
The nine divisions of the teachings, that is, the nine forms of textual presentation of the Dharma:
- Sutra (Sutta) – prose discourse
- Geyya – repeated verses
- Veyyākarana – explanations in response to questions
- Gāthā – verses and poems
- Udāna – utterances spoken spontaneously
- Itivuttaka – “thus it was said” statements
- Jātaka – stories of previous lives
- Vaipulya – extensive discourses, broad explanations
- Adbhuta-dharma – accounts of wondrous, rare Dharma events
The twelve divisions of the teachings are these nine, plus three more genres: causes and conditions, parables, and treatises.
The Khuddaka (Minor Collection) contains eleven main works:
• Khuddakapāṭha (Short Passages) – short verses
• Ratana Sutta (The Jewel Discourse) – prayers to the Three Jewels
• Dhammapada (The Path of Dharma) – 423 verses divided into 26 chapters
• Udāna – 80 discourses in 8 sections
• Itivuttaka – 112 suttas in 4 sections
• Sutta Nipāta – 5 sections: Uraga (12), Cūla (14), Mahā (12), Aṭṭhaka (16), Pārāyana (16 suttas)
• Vimanavatthu (Stories of Heavenly Mansions) & Petavatthu (Stories of Hungry Ghosts) – 85 + 51 stories of cause and effect in the heavenly and hungry ghost realms
• Theragāthā & Therīgāthā – Verses of Elder Monks (1,279 verses, 264 authors) and Verses of Elder Nuns (522 verses, 73 authors)
• Jātaka (Birth Stories) – 547 stories divided into 22 sections, classified by the number of verses in each story.