SuttaCentral
Today I checked parallels to SN 56.11 and SA 379, and saw that there are a few parallels missing from SA 379. For text SA 379, there are two parallels I know of that are basically exact:
SA 379 and these other two are Sarvāstivāda / Mūlasarvāstivāda. I am not sure exactly how parallels are handled, but at least these three texts are basically the same so there should be no issues.
hi, there’s a dedicated thread for parallels
it’s probably worth making it a sticky if the Discourse so allows
Okay, thanks, will look into it.
Yes, these are marked as “partial parallels” of SN 56.11. We don’t “infer” partial parallels, which is what creates this kind of problem.
The reason for not inferring partial parallels is that there’s no way of knowing whether the “part” that is in common is in fact shared. For example:
Consider three texts, X1, X2, and X3.
X1 has three sections, ABC.
X2 has AB, and X3 has C. So both of these are partial parallels with X1. But they have nothing in common with each other.
However, in the case you’ve described, X2 and X3 both have AB. So they should be full parallels with each other. However our system has no way of inferring this.
To resolve this, we need to explicitly mark such relations on a case by case basis. Obviously in a complex set of related texts like this, this is no easy matter. Our new data format is designed to make specifying such relations easier.Meanwhile, there’s nothing for it but to add things one at a time.
Meanwhile, as a practical measure, it’s helpful to know that our data is unavoidably Pali-centric. The research and scholarship we build on is based on what things relate to Pali. So for any given set of texts, the Pali version is likely to show the most comprehensive set of relations. This is obviously an imperfection in our data which we hope to overcome.