The second book of the Digha Nikāya, the Collection of the Long Discourses of the Buddha. Because of their length they are not discourses as such, but long texts written for an audience outside the Teaching, indicating that they were created as support for 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 false suttas, not even falsified. They relate uninteresting stories of unlikely characters who end up, in the end, being ancient rebirths of the Buddha, and thus justify their existence. They are stories to entertain, in contrast to the debating stories of the first book. 

They do not attempt to imitate the regular structure of the suttas and their wording and, 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 encounter a novel element: how one must renounce femininity in order to become reborn as a man: "I lost my clinging to femininity and developed masculinity." 

But look how I have transformed! 

I was a woman and lived a mundane 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 a pamphlet of an exaggerated baroque excessive even for oriental taste, and the extensive Mahaparinibbana, which is not free from falsehoods spread throughout its extensive writing. 

On the contrary, the Mahanidana, or Great Discourse of the Causes, is an exhaustive compilation of the theory of Dependent Origination in a single text, and the Mahasatipatthana, or Great Discourse of the Instructions of Practice, does the same with different practices. It is not all of them, but those that it deals with it does so in depth. 

These two suttas and part of the Mahaparinibbana alone make this book worthwhile.