SuttaCentral
I found the following at Leigh Brasington’s site and I would like to hear what our Pali scholars think.
If this is so, I take it that the following would also be closer to the original in intent? I have modified Bhante @sujato 's translation of Snp 4.2.
Another question is could “Having completely understood perception…” be read “Having completely understood perceiving…”?
Do our Pali scholars agree with the following footnotes to Ud 1.10?
no. “the seen” is perfectly fine.
If this is so, I take it that the following would also be closer to the original in intent?
no
Another question is could “Having completely understood perception…” be read “Having completely understood perceiving…”?
No, unless you’re just using “perceiving” as a synonym for “perception”.
Let me put my question another way, could seeing, hearing, and perceiving have been validly used? I did not express myself well.
Lol, took the words out of my mouth.
This is nothing more than a naive theory of language, typical of people who don’t actually know the language they’re using. It is 100% normal that in any translation, no matter how trivial, the mode of expression in the source language does not completely match the mode of expression in the target.
The problem is what programmers call a “leaky abstraction”. Languages have no such things as “past participles”, “articles”, or “gerunds”. These are abstractions invented by grammarians to help make sense of how people use language. So when linguists say this is a “past participle” in English and that is a “past participle” in Pali, what they assume is that, “these two linguistic forms have enough in common that linguists have decided to label them both with the term ‘past participle’, although their forms and usage do not correspond completely.” It’s as if you see tribes-people on the Amazon in a canoe, and then people in China on a maglev train, and you call them both “transport”, and then assume that they are the same thing because they have the same word.
Brasington, implicitly assuming these categories are real properties of language, asserts that, since Pali lacks articles, using one “cannot be correct”. In doing so, he strikes a bold stance against literally every translator of Pali and Sanskrit, who all use articles all the time. There’s nothing interesting or unusual about this case.
Of course, if we have decided that articles cannot be used, then we cannot make a translation, because English relies on articles. So he then goes on to “convert it to better flowing English”, by which he means, “turns the past participles into present participles”. He then confusingly refers to these as “gerunds”, a term that has a completely different meaning in Pali grammar, which just illustrates my point.
In all of this, he also misconstrues the meaning of the words he is referring to. In this context, the “seen, heard, thought, and cognized” do not refer to the simple objects of the senses. Rather, as Jayatillecke showed long ago, they are terms of epistemology, referring to means by which (spiritual) truths are known. This might be via the “sight” of a holy person, what is “heard” in the oral tradition, by what one “thinks out”, or by what one “cognizes” in meditation.
Also, “sensed” is wrong, muta means “thought”, although good translators also make that mistake.
Dhamma teachers really should do some Pali courses before speculating about Pali. It’s irresponsible.
Per above, no.
To add to that:
You mean ‘valid’ in what way? 
I mean, it can be pragmatically valid, in the sense of it being a more useful way of thinking about it. The problem is, as Ven Sujato pointed out, trying to argue for this based on invalid grammar. The footnote would have been perfectly fine if it said something like: “this translation uses ‘the seen’, but I think it also implies the seeing”, and then left it at that. But for some reason (perhaps to sound more authoritative or something) people often feel a need to support their points with grammar, even if they don’t know what they’re talking about.
Rant aside, here’s a general way to decide whether someone’s grammatical ideas are correct or not in case you don’t know the language: Compare it with other translations. If you find that all other translators use one thing, but one person suggests something else (as in this case), you can be pretty sure the suggestion is incorrect. And that’s especially the case if it supports some doctrinal or pragmatic point of the author rather than some minor detail.
In my experience also, the more minute the details they focus on to make a point (e.g. mere etymology or single words rather than context), the more likely it is incorrect.
These are not a surefire methods, of course, but it does sort out most of the chaff.
Oh, my. I’ve been mistranslating Chinese all this time. I will have to ditch verbal tenses, plurality, articles, and most of the prepositions. And half of the understood subjects and objects. Yikes!
BTW, it’s “the seen” because the verb is being used as a noun. It’s called a “past participle.” How does he think “in seen” makes sense in English?! I could see maybe turning it into an appositive, “In seeing, there’s only seeing.” Maybe it’s just my American English sensibilities.