you are surely pulling my leg here no? If you are refering to SN53 then the 5 “whole chapters” amount to about one printed page of text, it just gives the jhana formula and then literally says, “do it like SN45” and that’s the whole samyutta!
but again, this is exactly what SN does do it repeats the formulas mechanically, in permutation with other formulas, over, and over, again.
Here we will have to disagree. jhānas are to my mind the buddhist doctrine that is indesputibly common to all the 4 principle NIkaya/Agamas, and the (relative) lack of the formula in SN is something that absolutely cries out for explanation.
people keep telling me that word counts are meaningless, I have yet to hear one single reason why they are meaningless, with your efforts probably coming closest to actually articulating a position around the “leveling” and “audience” arguments. I do not in the end find even your picture of this convincing, and I am growing somewhat tired of people repeating the phrase, so I will try to be as clear and succinct here as possible: if a string of text occurs 10 times as often as another string, it is never, ever, ever, ever, ever meaningless it is always meaningful. Numbers matter. It matters if the first jhana is mentioned in DN more than twice as often as the four foundations, because it begs the question why is the culmination of the eightfold path mentioned twices as often as the preceding step in DN, but the preceding step mentioned more than twice as often as the final one in SN? btw if you control for the wings it is more like 4 times as often that DN mentions the first jhana than the four foundations, again, if the numbers are meaningless why is there this difference between the occurrences in DN MN and AN with the occurrences in SN, why is SN the odd one out? ALL the other Nikayas mention first jhana more than twice as often as the four foundations, ONLY SN reverses this pattern, what is the “leveling” argument that makes sense of that?
When you decide to look deeper because these numbers strike you as being definitely not meaningless and actually very hard to explain you look deeper and find that the four foundations in the other three Nikayas practically evaporate before your eyes with just about any constraint you care to put on them: insist on parallels, you lose instances, insist on parallels form the same collection (the debate is about this after all), you lose more, insist on the Buddha as the speaker, more still, it just goes on and on. (exclude the 37 wings for example, as being most likely an insertion of the earliest matrika, and you lose well over half of them in a single stroke, including their entire presence in the Vinaya, you don’t, strangely enough, lose a single instance from SN, I wonder why that would be?)
As I showed above, this simply does not occur with the jhanas, which you can easily find in all 4 principle collections, spoken by the Buddha, with parallels that sit in the same collection in both traditions.
This point is well made, however I think it really only shows that DN is open later than SN, MN, and does not really speak to beginnings of it as a collectoin, where I think one has to look to the sekkha patipada as the nucleus or “ur text” that really stands at the heart of the entire narrative sutta collection (i.e DN and MN combined.)
Likewise @Vaddha !! you are a breath of fresh air here, I am very much enjoying having someone with whom I can get stuck into these issues in a robust but still respectful way!
Metta.