The second book of the Digha Nikāya, the Collection of the Long Discourses of the Buddha. Due to their length, they are not discourses as such, but extensive texts written for a public outside the Teaching, which indicates that they were created in support of Buddhist missionaries. The Book of the Greats collects 10 suttas in which the four great discourses are included: the Mahapadana, the Mahanidana, the Mahaparinibbana and the Mahasatipatthana. The rest are bogus suttas, not even falsified. They tell uninteresting stories of unlikely characters who end up, in the end, being ancient rebirths of the Buddha, thus justifying their existence. They are stories to entertain, in contrast to the debate stories of the first book. They do not try to imitate the regular structure of the suttas and their wording and, what is worse, their content, which shows a poor knowledge on the part of their authors of the rest of the Nikayas. They are marked with a double asterisk (**). Although misogyny is a fairly common motivation in false suttas, here we find a novel element: how to give up femininity in order to be reborn as a man: "I lost my grasp on femininity and developed masculinity."
 
But look how I've transformed!
I was a woman and lived a worldly life.
But now I am born again as a man
and I live in heavenly glory among the devas!
 
But the stain of falsehood also extends through two of the great discourses: the Mahapadana, or The Great Chronicle of the Buddhas, which is an exaggerated baroque pamphlet excessive even for Eastern tastes, and the lengthy Mahaparinibbana which is not spared. of falsehoods distributed among its extensive writing. On the contrary, the Mahanidana or Great Discourse on Causes is an exhaustive compilation of the theory of Dependent Origination in a single text, and the Mahasatipatthana or Great Discourse on Practice Instructions does the same with different practices. They are not all, but the ones he deals with do so in depth. These two suttas and part of the Mahaparinibbana alone make this book worthwhile.