suture/sutra

 

I have been reading the book The Faraway Nearby by Rebecca Solnit. Stories within stories. In the book she talks about "Strands a few inches long twine together into a thread or yarn that can go forever, like words become stories." p. 131 From there to fairly tale heroines who spin, then to spinsters, then to needle, to suture: "The English and Latin word for suture has the same root as Sanskrit sutra or Pali sutta. They both have to do with sewing. The sutras, the most sacred texts of Buddhism, were named for the fact that they were originally sewn. The flat blades of palm leaves were strung together by two lines of thread that tied together the stiff, narrow pages like accordion blinds. The books were copied by hand over and over again in that climate of decay. Thus leaf become book, and knowledge was held together and transmitted in a thread, a line, a lineage.",  
p 132