I was looking at the Pāli of DN 5 on suttacentral and I cannot find the description of the jhānas given in the English, and the text does not even contain the word ‘kāyena’ which I find in other versions of the text. Is there a problem here or am I missing something?
Is it implied in the “… pe …” parts?
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As noted in the metadata:
The translation is unaltered, but certain conventions such as use of punctuation and diacritical marks have been modernized. In addition, elided portions of the text have been supplied from the corresponding portions of Bhikkhu Bodhi’s translation of DN 2 Sāmaññaphala. These portions are indicated in the text, and may be shown using the “Textual Information” button in the sidebar. No attempt has been made to unify the two translations, however you can at least read the entire sutta in one place.
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Ah thanks guys.
May I make a suggestion? I accept that it is my fault for not searching the metadata and the ‘textual information’. But I expect that there might be a fair number of people similar to me in that they would not think to search for those things. Perhaps among the Pāli reading community there are a good number of older people who are not so tech savy, for example - or people not so old also!
So, for me for example, the paragraph which you @sujato posted here, if that were actually in a box or something, at the top of the page i.e. directly above the actual Pāli, then it would be really easy for me to see it and therefore know what is going on.
Or, could put the missing Pāli in square brackets in the actual text! That would be even more awesome, though the box explaining things in English would also be great to have in addition.
Out of interest, if the Pāli is just as it appears on the page, how have Pāli readers/chanters throughout the ages know what is missing? How do they know to find the missing material from DN 2? Is it that the chanters of this sutta would have memorised the whole of the Dīgha Nikāya, so they would automatically recognise the missing passage from the context, having already memorised MN 2?
Thanks!
Oh and also a vast benefit of having the missing Pāli actually included on the same page (for example in square brackets, or a different colour if you prefer), would be that when we search for the occurence of certain words or phrases for any particular analysis we are doing for research, we would get all the places such phrases occur. As it is, our analyses will be missing out any suttas where our search term occurs in abbreviated material! This gives us false results, believing terms, phrases and passages to be less common than they are.
I know that that must be affecting me, and so probably everyone else who would use suttacentral to do such searches! And it would probably be the same also with the Pāli Reader! And as a side note, have you noticed that the Pāli Reader plugin is no longer working? At least on the latest version of Firefox on the Mac. That is really sad. And I think makes suttacentral even more important for scholars now - those were the only two methods I had of searching the pitakas.
Also I don’t know if we might have taled about this before, but a more advanced way of searching the pitakas would be a great benefit to research also. The Pāli Reader had a great way that you could limit your searches to only specific parts of the pitakas, and also exact term searches would be great. Suttacentral seems to use google which does not do that, for example a search for kāyena also gives results for kāyassa. That’s nice, but it would be so very much better if you could have that as an option, and have exact match as another option, and exact phrases also (conventionally done by putting the terms in “quotation marks”. And another option being parts of words, conventionally sometimes done by * after the letters, such as kāy* gives hits for kāya, kāyena, kāyassa and so on.
Such functionality could make Suttacentral the place to go for Pāli researchers!
Oh and by the way, the metadata on the Pāli page of this sutta only says:
Pali text from the Mahāsaṅgīti Tipiṭaka Buddhavasse 2500: World Tipiṭaka Edition in Roman Script. Edited and published by The M.L. Maniratana Bunnag Dhamma Society Fund, 2005. Based on the digital edition of the Chaṭṭha Saṅgāyana published by the Vipassana Research Institute, with corrections and proofreading by the Dhamma Society.
Prepared for SuttaCentral by Blake Walshe and Bhikkhu Sujato.
While I really feel that the suggestions I made above are the most valuable by far (to include all the missing material on this page), even if that were not wanted, perhaps it could be kind to at least mention on the metadata of this page that there is missing material, and where to get that from? (If it does not tell us in the Pāli. Sorry my Pāli is not fluent so I can only read extremely slowly, with the aid of a dictionary).