The translation of the Kātyāyanasūtra from Sanskrit into Estonian forms the central axis of his article. This is one of the most influential early Buddhist texts. Its content is Siddhārtha Gautama’s (Buddha) lecture to his disciple Kātyāyana on what causality is and how to avoid extremes. This brief text succeeds in pointing out a large portion of the general prin­ciples of Buddhism. The text is accompanied by commentary in Estonian. The circumstances of finding and publishing the Nidānasaṃyukta collection that contains this sutra are described at the start of the article. A partial manuscript of the Nidānasaṃyukta, 19 pages in total, was found in the ruins of the Xorqu Buddhist temple in the Turfan Oasis located on the northern Silk Road in the course of the third German expedition to East Turkestan (1905–1907). Individual pages were dispersed throughout Germany during the Second World War. Since two German states at loggerheads with each other emerged after the war, the restoration of these texts required cross-border cooperation between scholars. The restoration of the Kātyāyanasūtra was completed just before the erection of the Berlin Wall and the freezing of cooperation. The text was published in 1962.