Browse suttas by audience, individual, and location

Three new ways to explore the suttas:

• By audience — the Buddha adapted his teachings to whoever was in front of him, and a discourse given to monks reads very differently from one given to a grieving householder or a skeptical brahmin. This groups suttas by who a teaching was addressed to: monks, nuns, householders, brahmins, kings, wandering ascetics, deities, and etc.
• By individual — browse by the people who appear in the discourses. Want every sutta featuring Ānanda? Sāriputta? The conversations with King Pasenadi, or Māra's attempts to interfere? They're all grouped now — around 190 named individuals so far.
• By location — browse by where a teaching was given. Sāvatthī alone accounts for over 400 of the classified suttas, but you can also explore what was taught at Rājagaha, Vesālī, Kosambī, and about 50 other places across the Ganges plain.

Where this data comes from

Most suttas open with a short formula that names the setting and the people present ("Thus have I heard. On one occasion the Blessed One was staying at Sāvatthī in Jeta's Grove..."). This information is extracted from the sutta openings and the Sutta Central blurbs, then normalized so that spelling variants like Sāvatthī/Savatthi or Ānanda/Ananda end up grouped together instead of scattered across separate entries.

About 1,000 suttas are classified so far, with more coming as coverage expands.

A note on accuracy

The LLM extraction is just a first pass. Classifications are being human-reviewed over time, and cleanup rules already catch the common issues. Still, there will be occasional mistakes until review is complete: a sutta filed under the wrong audience, or a name that should be merged with another. Generic entries like "a certain bhikkhu" are deliberately left out of the individual listings since they don't refer to anyone identifiable. If you spot something wrong, reports are welcome at the email below.

To be clear about what this is not: no sutta text is generated or summarized by AI. The classification only decides which lists a sutta appears in — what you read is always the original translation.

If you have any feedback or suggestions, please let me know at contact@abuddhistview.com.