Continuing the discussion from Expanding the peyyālas: where to start:
So, immediately after dn10:1.12.1-1.27, the text skips over (omits) most of the shorter section on ethics, all of the middle section, and most of the longer section. It seems pretty obvious to me that we’re to understand that all of this is intended to be incorporated into DN 10 Subhasutta as part of the unelided text.
But I got very confused while I was working on DN 10, because while there is a single ellipsis immediately before that segment in Bh Sujato’s translation, in the root Pali text there are no ellipses, no “pe”, nothing to indicate any elision at all other than the unusual hyphenated segment number.
Usually I’ve been looking at the Pali text for a “pe” between ellipses to confirm that text should be supplied at that point, and in this case, it’s just completely not there.
Did some ancient editor decide that this elision is too obvious to even note? Does anyone have any idea what’s going on here? Because I sure don’t.
[Edited to add: another perplexing aspect is that in the later parts of the passage on the Gradual Training, which are mostly spelled out in DN 10, there are four random deleted segments that appear in the corresponding text in DN 2, but are skipped in DN 10. These are:
dn2:86.11
dn2:90.3
dn2:91.2
dn2:92.3
There’s no indication in the root text that these elisions should be filled in, just like what I’m complaining about above, but since these are individual segments, I’m not touching these. For whatever reason, the process of lossy compression was carried out on DN 10 in a rather different way than in the other suttas of the Sīlakhandhavagga that I’ve worked on so far, and I’ve done about half of them.]