The Anguttara Nikaya, the Collection of Numbered Discourses, is organized on a principle unlike any other nikaya: rather than grouping suttas by length, theme or interlocutor, it sorts them purely by how many items each teaching enumerates, beginning with the Ones, single-factor teachings such as "one thing, if developed and cultivated, leads to complete disenchantment," and proceeding steadily upward through the Twos, Threes and onward to the Elevens, a structure scholars read as a deliberate mnemonic device suited to a teaching tradition that relied on disciplined oral memorization for its survival across the centuries before it was written down. This numerical organization produces an unusually wide-ranging miscellany even by the standards of the Pali Canon's other large collections, covering ethical instruction, meditation practice, the qualities of a good friend or a good ruler, and observations on human psychology and social conduct, all filed not by subject matter but strictly by the count of factors under discussion, so that teachings on entirely different topics can sit side by side purely because both happen to list, say, three qualities of a wise person. Individual suttas within the collection remain highly regarded on their own terms regardless of this somewhat arbitrary organizing scheme, and several of its ethical teachings addressed to lay Buddhists rank among the most frequently quoted passages in popular Theravada teaching today.