The family is conventionally catalogued by length, and the lengths are startling: recensions of a hundred thousand lines, of twenty five thousand, of eighteen thousand, of ten thousand and of eight thousand, alongside texts short enough to memorise in an afternoon. The tradition explains the range by saying the shorter texts distil the longer, so that nothing is lost in the compression.
Modern textual scholarship generally reverses the order. The eight thousand line version shows signs of being the earliest, with the vast recensions produced by expansion, repetition and elaboration of its material rather than the short texts being extracted from them. On that reading the literature grew and then contracted again, and the very short sutras belong to a late stage rather than to a primitive one. The contraction goes further than is usually noticed.
Beyond the short and famous texts there are versions running to a few lines, and the tradition includes a perfection of wisdom in a single letter, on the principle that if what is being taught is that nothing has inherent existence, then one syllable is as adequate to it as a hundred thousand lines. That is a doctrinal joke and an entirely serious statement at the same time, and the fact that the tradition preserved it as a text rather than as an anecdote says something about how it understood its own literature.