I’ve uploaded the Nāgasena Bhikṣu Sūtra in Chinese from CBETA to SuttaCentral. With much gratitude to Volker Köpcke for the wealth of information he sent me for this. Volker is currently in the process of developing a website dedicated to the Taishō Tripiṭaka: http://buddha-kanon.de/
I have a few more questions/remarks to Bhante @Sujato about this:
You mentioned that there are many parallels to this sutta (and I can see the clear similarity with the Milindapañha), but we do not have anything in our parallels-list. Is the data available somewhere or shall I just mark the whole of the Milindapañha as parallel to this?
I also have a french translation of this text and will upload that as well.
There is also a second version of this sutta - T1670A. Do we want this as well on SC? As far as I can tell, version B is more complete, but technically, version A is also a parallel.
Then I noticed that there are various Chinese texts that look like we have them in the list, but are actually just links to CBETA. Do we want all those texts on SuttaCentral too at some stage?
We don’t really do text-level parallels, do we? We probably should, though. And if so, the yes, they should be parallels. At a detailed level, there are two kinds of parallels associated with this text. One is the chapter by chapter parallels with the Milinda (and related texts.) The other is the embedded sutta quotations. As to whether the data is available, I can’t recall but will have a look.
Très bien!
Sure, why not? In each case, they should be divided up on a question by question basis, as with the Milinda.
In theory, it would be good. But in many cases these are very long and complex (Abhidhamma, for example) or else long later texts that happen to have a sutta fragment buried somewhere. So there are definitely diminishing returns. But we can take it on a case by case basis.
It is worth flagging that there is an English translation of this very interesting text and it is a reasonably good one.
Both the Milinda Pañha and the Nagasena Bhiksu Sutras are very entertaining materials - good stuff for a weekend or evening read! One can spend hours going through it and luckily gain some inspiration and insight from the interesting dialogue it records.
I was actually talking about suttas here: SuttaCentral or SuttaCentral for which there are parallels listed but for which we do not have the original text (so not Abhidhamma or so).
But I guess this falls under "longer later texts that happen to have a sutta fragment buried somewhere".
If you don’t have a list, I think it should be doable for somebody to read through the English translations of both and see which ones match up i.e. which question of the king is handled in which chapter of each.
We might be able to find out embedded sutta quotation (i.e. "mentions") by inference.
For instance, if mil5.5.3 is parallel to say nag8 on a chapter level, and mil5.5.3#8 mentions an4.34, while an4.34 is parallel to ea21.1, then most likely nag8 mentions ea21.1.
But it might be good to have a Chinese speaking person to go over such inferred parallels.
I think the first step would be to make a list of texts that we are missing, then go through them, preparing all that are feasible.
These texts have been fairly well studied, and I am pretty sure there will be a list somewhere.
Inferred parallels here will be problematic. I would rather stick with explicitly identified ones. The texts differ quite a bit, and that fact that a quote is in one place should be taken as no more than a suggestion that it might be in the other. However, given that the text is not that long, it would not be such a big job to identify these.
I know the URL is confusing. It did not talk about T150b itself but what is under the section of Other Texts T 152–1548. If you go with the mouse over the IDs, you will see that many of them are CBETA. I don’t know why the URL mentions T150B because the texts have nothing to do with that number. Maybe I will change it sometime.
Here is a list of external links of texts that we do not have on the site but that have parallels and we might potentially want (commentaries and Mahayana texts filtered out as per your previous instructions):
I’ve uploaded the parallels for this to staging but I could not restart the staging server so they will not show yet. But there are about 80 parallels added to the list between the Nāgasena Bhikṣu Sūtra and the Milindapañha.
Volker is currently in the process of developing a website dedicated to the Taishō Tripiṭaka: http://buddha-kanon.de/