Adding the Sujato version to the Dhammapada Google Drive now 
as another flower in the garden 
May it inspire practice and the heart’s of the readers be freeded.
3 Likes
Sinhalese loan word for ‘mind’. Just saying…
I think it’s useful to have several versions, to make comparisons, infer deeper meanings and generally take the load off. Non-native English language speakers might understand nuances of some words differently.
Anybody can translate however because someone is qualified to read and write recipes doesn’t make one qualified to cook. There are only so many ways to bake a cake, and the instructions in the recipe has to be correct. These sutta are like a mechanical diagrams on how to make a plane (mind) take flight! 
With metta
Interesting! Maybe death is not mention in purpose,
Maybe death is just a fiction where on fall into most unconscious state and the tendency would find the next body
Maybe death is not really dead but just a transition from the birth to birth, yet we thought we are this body and mind.
Maybe death is just another sleep state, that so deep and when it wake up again, already a new body, new mind, new drama, we thought new life but it is not so, only body and mind is new.
Maybe death is only for people who thought they are thIs mind and this body, before they know it, it again drops body and mind hardly and then next birth
Maybe death is just a play, a play of suffering, it makes you thought individually , it never there the way people imagine
Maybe there is never such a thing called death at all
Thats why those who know called as the deathless also because they have seen the truth and they cut off these nonsense of going from one body to another body, the fictional death has stopped , instead the real death happened and suffering is ended.
“Why isn’t death put together with birth?” It is Lord Buddha’s words, so only he could explain, alas we could no longer ask him for it. Therefore we can only speculate now. In my opinion, “decay” straddles all disagreeable life events and changes of state including sickness, old age, diabilities, gradual loss of faculties and ultimately to death. Therefore, as demonstrated in almost all of Lord Buddha teachings that we read in text written down by scholars in the first century BC or later, what he had to say he said it very briefly and succinctly, yet encompassing a vast and in depth treasure of information. For example, just see how succinct his first sermon is “Dhamma Chakka Pavattana Sutta”. Subsequently he assigned Ven Arhat Sariputta to provide a wider analysis with explanation in “Sachcha Vibhanga Sutta” as Ven Sariputta had done.
Yes, in the Law of Dependent Origination, “Jaraamaranam” has been combined, given that there “maranam - death” positively contributes to understanding the recyclic concept, i.e. in this case the Law, where death is an unavoidable element in the repeated cycles of rebirth. Verse 348 is an application of the Law, to which one could refer to understand the detail includng connections.
Another explanation may lie in the style of composing verses. Before it was written, Dhamma was transmitted orally through poetic verses, because it was easy to memorise and repeat them in verse form. In my Buddhist poojas (services) I often recite “gathas” (i.e. poetic compositions) and “sutras” (i.e. discourses written in certain easily repeatable manner). When we recite them, the words just flow out of our memory and into our tongues like water flowing in a river. That is the art of ancient Pali composition and how words are selected and placed in a sentence to give this effect. Just like a mason has to modify a brick to suit the construction of a custom designed wall, words could also be massaged for the purpose of composing a verse, to obtain either rhyming or the right length of the sentence without drastically changing the meaning and information it is trying to convey. This could be another explanation, or both explanations could be combined in this instance.
Regarding differing translations “past, present, future”, or alternative “front, middle, back”, I think these are down simply to semantics, words that different translators and commentators have chosen. I have looked up the original Pali text: so my understanding is, “pure’ what comes first , i.e. past if related to a chronology”; "pachchatho, what comes after, i.e. future; “majje’, what is at the middle, i.e. the present”. In the context, one uses the appropriate word during translation to get the right meaning.
1 Like