Mahayana Sutras and the Modern Reader

If we approach books as a consumer, regarding texts as goods to be devoured one after the other from cover to cover, then all too often we find the Mahayana sutras boring . . . .

It is likely that Buddhist texts were intended as no more than mnemonic devices, scaffolding, the framework for textual exposition by a teacher in terms of his own experience and also tradition, the transmission from his teachers, traced back to the Buddha himself, or to a Buddha, or to some other form of authorized spiritual revelation.

---Mahayana Buddhism: The Doctrinal Foundations, by Paul Williams---