I am working on Gair & Karunatillake chapter III. On page 30 there is an extract that begins Yasmā ca kho, bhikkhave, sakkā akusalaṃ pajahituṃ tasmâhaṃ evaṃ vadāmi… After some digging about I found it at:
https://suttacentral.net/an2.11-20
So my question is this: the extract turns out to be 19, which is of course within 11-20. But is there some way to link to https://suttacentral.net/an2.19 directly (that link doesn’t actually work)? Or how would I navigate to the text, given the reference A.N. 2.2.19 Adhikaraṇavaggo?
If I start at:
https://suttacentral.net/an2
Then I might be able to work out that _ Adhikaraṇa Vagga_ is the same as the reference’s Adhikaraṇavaggo, but on that page, which I presume is the “table of contents” of AN2, the reference to the page I want is given as AN 2.11–20.
I guess I am to infer that because it is book 2, then a reference to AN 2.11-20on that index page actually means 2.2.11-20?
No, you are certainly not off the rails. What is off the rails is rather the fact that there are so many different systems around for numbering the Suttas.
About SuttaCentral’s policy regarding Sutta numbering you can read here.
With regards to the Sutta you’re after, AN 2.2.19, the second “2” refers to the Vagga—usually an entity that groups about 10 Suttas together. SuttaCentral’s numbering doesn’t include Vagga numbers, so AN 2.19 is the correct reference here.
But then you come to the next complication, namely that for these very short Suttas in the AN-Ones and Twos, one Sutta page on SuttaCentral contains not one Sutta, but a range of Suttas. Unfortunately, the current search on SuttaCentral can’t find these range pages if you don’t type in the exact range, like AN 2.11-20 in order to find AN 2.19. The problem is, most of the time the user doesn’t know these ranges.
On the Voice site you can type any Sutta of a range, and you will be shown the range page. So if you type AN 2.19 in Voice, you get AN 2.11-20, and you are able to see your Sutta 19.
I am not sure how exactly search on the new SuttaCentral site will be like—SC is currently working on a major update. It’s possible that there too it will be easier to find Suttas on a range page.
Thank you kindly for this helpful response. Not sure how I missed the helpful discussion on sutta numbering, thanks for the pointer.
In that document there is a specific section on the AN, may as well copy it here:
Two levels, not three, for AN 1 and AN 2
In the first two nipātas of AN the PTS numbering recognises three levels of grouping (for nipāta, vagga, sutta). In such cases we follow the widely accepted practice of dispensing with the second level.
Hey, I’m finally starting to get a notion of what a nipāta is!
But this next bit…
This involves applying a simple mechanical principle, illustrated in the following examples:
AN 1.1.6 becomes AN 1.6
AN 1.8.1 becomes AN 1.71
AN 2.2.9 becomes AN 2.19
I confess that this simple mechanical principle remains esoteric to me. Case #1 looks like just like my case; the principle seems to be “ignore the middle number”. But that doesn’t work for #2 or #3.
As I mentioned before, there are obviously several numbering systems. This one is exactly the Sutta you had been looking for, but again in a different numbering. Instead of AN 2.2.19 it is called AN 2.2.9.
The reason probably is the following:
One Vagga usually has 10 Suttas.
In the case of the first two Vaggas of the AN-Twos, this is indeed the case (in the case of the third Vagga of AN 2 this is for example not the case: this Vagga has 11 Suttas).
The Sutta you are looking for is the ninth Sutta in the second Vagga of AN 2, which comes after a Vagga that has 10 Suttas.
Now you have two possibilities:
Count only from the beginning of the current Vagga ==> your Sutta is the 9th Sutta.
Count all Suttas from the beginning of AN 2 ==> your Sutta is the 19th Sutta.
Thus the levels of possible confusion are many! Not only do you have to do some maths, you also have to know how many Suttas are in each Vagga …
