How Every Sutra Opens
By the end of this session you will have read the first sentence of the Diamond Sutra in Chinese — not a translation of it, the sentence itself. The same sentence opens the Amitabha Sutra almost character for character.
如是我聞：一時，佛在舍衛國祇樹給孤獨園，
與大比丘眾千二百五十人俱。
Thus have I heard. At one time, the Buddha was in the land of Śrāvastī, in Jeta's Grove, the Park of the Giver to the Orphaned and Solitary, together with a great assembly of bhikṣus, one thousand two hundred fifty in all.
Read the frame, then the filling
Scripture is built from formulas — fixed blocks that recur across hundreds of texts with a few variable slots. Learn one formula and you have the opening of half the canon. Tap a sutra below to drop its own details into the slots.
…was in the land of Śrāvastī, in Jeta's Grove, the Park of the Giver to the Orphaned and Solitary, together with a great assembly of bhikṣus, 1,250 in all.
Notice what did not move. 如是我聞, 一時，佛, and 與大比丘眾…俱 hold still in all four. Only the verb, the place, and the headcount change.
Eight characters, 6.55% of the canon
These eight open the sentence. Together they occur 1,731,644 times across the sutras — one character in every fifteen you will ever meet. None ranks lower than 104th. Tap any of them.
Tap a character above.
如是我聞 is Ānanda speaking. At the first council he recited what he had heard, and every recitation opens by saying so: thus — 如是, like-this — have I heard. It stands at the head of 596 of the 1,482 sutras.
一時 is doing something careful. It does not mean "once upon a time" and it does not give a date. It means on one occasion — a single stretch of time the sutra declines to locate. The tradition is precise about what it does not claim to know.
The place is one word, not nine
Here is where beginners waste months. 舍衛國祇樹給孤獨園 looks like nine characters to memorize, and four of them are genuinely rare — 孤 ranks 836th, 給 686th, 衛 672nd. You would meet them almost nowhere else.
So do not learn them as characters. Learn the whole string as one proper noun, the way you learned Massachusetts. It appears 2,100 times across 245 sutras, always meaning the same garden outside the same city.
Tap a character above.
One detail worth carrying with you, because it shows how Kumārajīva worked. The name has two halves and he treated them oppositely. 舍衛 is sound: Śrāvastī pushed through Chinese phonetics, meaning nothing in Chinese at all. 給孤獨 is sense: the donor's name was Anāthapiṇḍika, "he who gives to the destitute," and rather than transliterate it he translated it — give, orphaned, solitary. Same name, same line, two strategies.
Once you can see that switch happening, a great deal of Buddhist Chinese stops being arbitrary.
Who was there
The assembly clause closes the opening. 與大比丘眾…俱 — together with a great assembly of bhikṣus… all present — wraps a number in the middle. The clause appears in 264 sutras; the number inside it is what changes.
Tap a character above.
比丘 is sound again (bhikṣu), and 俱 is the quiet hinge at the end — all of them, together. Chinese has no plural ending, so 俱 does that work by sitting at the close of the clause.
You have just read two sutras
These are the opening lines of two of the most recited texts in East Asian Buddhism, as Kumārajīva left them. Read them against each other.
Diamond Sutra · T0235 · 金剛般若波羅蜜經
如是我聞：一時，佛在舍衛國祇樹給孤獨園，與大比丘眾千二百五十人俱。
Amitabha Sutra · T0366 · 佛說阿彌陀經
如是我聞：一時，佛在舍衛國祇樹給孤獨園，與大比丘僧千二百五十人俱，皆是大阿羅漢，眾所知識。
Twenty-two characters, and they differ in exactly one: 眾 against 僧. Both name the monastic community; the second is the word that gave English Sangha. One sentence learned, two sutras opened.
Check yourselfWork each line out before you reveal it
如是我聞：一時佛住王舍城耆闍崛山。
"Thus have I heard. At one time the Buddha dwelt on Mount Gṛdhrakūṭa at Rājagṛha."
Ratnakūṭa Sutra 大寶積經, T0310. The verb shifted from 在 to 住 — was at becoming dwelt at — and the assembly clause is simply dropped. 王舍城 is sense-for-sense: king–house–city, Rājagṛha.
爾時，世尊食時，著衣持鉢，入舍衛大城乞食。
"At that time, when it was time to eat, the World-Honored One put on his robe, took up his bowl, and entered the great city of Śrāvastī to beg for food."
The Diamond Sutra's next sentence. Two new formulas arrive here: 爾時 (at that time) occurs 42,743 times across 1,020 sutras, and 世尊 (World-Honored One) 67,271 times across 1,009. Session 2 is built on them.
如是我聞：一時佛在王舍城耆闍崛山中，與大比丘眾及菩薩眾俱。
"Thus have I heard. At one time the Buddha was on Mount Gṛdhrakūṭa at Rājagṛha, together with a great assembly of bhikṣus and an assembly of bodhisattvas."
The Heart Sutra, T0253 — the long recension, which has an opening. The short version most people recite drops the frame entirely and starts at 觀自在菩薩. Here the headcount slot holds no number at all: 及菩薩眾, and an assembly of bodhisattvas.
Session 2 — At That Time, the World-Honored One
The opening formula gets you into the room. The next one moves the scene along, and it is the most common structure in the canon: 爾時，世尊告……言. Once you have it you can follow who is speaking to whom through any sutra on the shelf, which is most of what reading scripture consists of.
Running total after Session 1: 29 characters, 2 formulas, and the opening of the Diamond Sutra read in the original.
Where the numbers come from
Every frequency on this page was counted, not estimated. The corpus is the 1,482 texts tagged
三藏/經 in the Taishō canon — 26,422,454 Chinese characters after stripping front
matter, headings, and the CBETA apparatus. Ranks are positions in the frequency list built from
that corpus; formula counts are string occurrences, given with the number of separate sutras they
appear in, because a formula used 10,000 times in one text is a quirk while one used in 700 texts
is a convention.
Counting scripture separately from commentary matters. Run the same analysis over a corpus that includes the śāstras and the vocabulary tilts hard toward Abhidharma technical terms, and the character list ends up teaching you to read treatises rather than sutras. This course teaches sutras first. On how Ru-Yi translates and why, see Translation Method.