Following the proposal in (Braun and Muller. Eur Phys J C55:349, 2008), we study the feasibility to calculate the pion distribution amplitude (DA) from suitably chosen Euclidean correlation functions at large momentum. In our lattice study we employ the novel momentum smearing technique (Bali et al. Phys Rev D93:094515, 2016; Bali et al. Phys Lett B774:91, 2017). This approach is complementary to the calculations of the lowest moments of the DA using the Wilson operator product expansion and avoids mixing with lower dimensional local operators on the lattice. The theoretical status of this method is similar to that of quasi-distributions (Ji. Phys Rev Lett 110:262002, 2013) that have recently been used in (Zhang et al. Phys Rev D95:094514, 2017) to estimate the twist two pion DA. The similarities and differences between these two techniques are highlighted.