Expanding the peyyālas: question about DN10 root Pali text

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.]

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I can’t offer any help on this, but when you are all done it would be marvelous if you could write up a post explaining how difficult this work is with specific passages. So many people ask for something like this and no one seems to believe that it’s not as straightforward as it looks.

Keep the faith!

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Sorry this is off topic for this post, but it relates to your general project.

I just noticed that in DN13 the segment numbers actually seem to account for the peyyālas by having range numbers:


https://suttacentral.net/dn13/en/sujato#40-75.2

Are you encountering this in other places? I also find it in DN12, but I don’t think it is in the earlier suttas.

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I’m keeping some notes, and now with this in mind, but such a post wouldn’t belong in Q & A. Any idea which category I should post it under when it’s ready? I guess I can just post it in The Watercooler.

Yes, I’ve encountered it, and remarked on it in 51 and 53 in the other thread.

I’m not sure it’s as helpful as it first seemed. In DN 10, I tried making up virtual segment numbers that fit inside the designated range, but not enough “group numbers” are allocated, so to do it this way I’d have to assign two four-segment groups that originally had different group numbers to a single group of eight segments. And if anything, that’s even more confusing?

In the second pass, I’ll try this trick on the other suttas that have hyphenated segment numbers in them, and see if any of them lines up neatly.

An aside: the “insertion document” that @Paliaudio.com sent me has been extremely helpful, and I wish I had studied it more closely beforehand and made more use of it. The notes in it about DN 10, for example, were difficult for me to understand, so I just plunged ahead without trying to decipher them. But now in hindsight, they’re crystal clear and would have saved me a lot of trouble.

Anyway, it’s all excellent for confirmation purposes. And there is at least one foresight benefit I’m getting: I left DN 6, 7, & 9 for last, and before I start them it’s now clear to me, thanks to paliaudio’s notes, that they use the same truncated subset of the gradual-training passage that DN 13 Tevijjasutta does: before this morning I thought DN 13 was the only one that did this.

It’s easy to change categories, so when in doubt I just use The Watercooler

Ug.

Sounds like a crochet pattern, lol.

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It turns out that this isn’t so. The restoration in DN 13 stops just after the giving up of the hindrances and before the 4 jhānas (which are replaced by the brahmaviharas there), but if you look at

DN 6:17.3
DN 6:18.1
DN 6:19.1

it’s clear that DN 6 actually incorporates the whole gradual-training passage, as I originally thought.

But same as with DN 10, the situation is complicated by the insertion of new text, more than just refrain-replacements, at intervals within the passage.

[Edited: okay, now I’ve persuaded myself that the refrain-replacement in DN 6 is just longer than usual, an actual snippet of dialog rather than a single segment. So it’s not like DN 10, but has a whole new way of being a little different.]

[Edited again: haha, joke’s on me. DN 6 quotes DN 7 in its entirety, and the peyyāla of the gradual training is entirely contained in the quote, so it would have been much less confusing to do DN 7 first. I have no idea why the ancient editors chose to put DN 6 before DN 7: maybe the principle of longer suttas before shorter ones?]

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