Yes, thanks for the question and explanations!
I am constantly revising things, and making changes and corrections, small or large.
- Sometimes they are simply corrections of mistakes.
- Other times, I change my mind on a matter of interpretation.
- Sometimes it’s for consistency.
- Other times for style.
I’m working my way through the canon, now about to start on SN 6. And as I go I find things in all sorts of places that can be tweaked. Only rarely are there major shifts in meaning; I think most of the big things are sorted out.
As one example, yesterday I changed the names in Thag 1.42 from masculine to feminine (it will show up on the site soon!) It’s a curious detail, because the group of three mentioned here are elsewhere known as bhikkhunis, yet the commentary says they were in fact the sons of those bhikkhunis, despite the fact that no such sons appear elsewhere. And then there’s the small problem that the names have a feminine gender. It seems obvious that these are, in fact, those nuns, yet Western translators (Rhys Davids, Norman) have followed the commentary in using the masculine. (Norman argues that it could be a Magadhan masculine vocative in -e).
And I used the masculine form until just now, too! It’s one of the small ways that the presence of the bhikkhunis is erased by the commentaries.
Another change I just made, Māra disparages the bhikkhuni Somā in SN 5.2, saying women can’t attain Dhamma with their “two-fingered wisdom”, which I changed to “two-inch wisdom”. And here’s the note why:
“Two-inch wisdom” (dvaṅgulapaññā) is literally “two finger(-breadth’s) wisdom”. It is explained by the commentary as limited wisdom; or because women hold thread between two fingers. The subcommentary and the commentary to the Therīgāthā say it is because women test whether rice is cooked by pressing a grain between two fingers. Normally, aṅgula with a number is a unit of length equal to the width of the middle finger. For example, the time past noon is measured when the sun’s shadow moves two inches (pli-tv-kd22:1.10.16), which is the same distance the shadow moves each month (Arthaśāstra 2.20.42). Thus the first commentarial explanation is the most plausible: “two-inch wisdom” means “limited wisdom”.
And I did a bit of research on the idiom, in another note:
It is Māra, not the Buddha, who doubts women’s capacity. It is interesting to see who adopts Māra’s view. In Mahāvastu 3.391, a brahmin ascetic urges a female competitor to throw a debating match with him, lest people say that he was beaten by “a mere woman’s two-inch wisdom”. In vv18:8.4, a former serving woman celebrates how she as a woman attained the Dhamma, but the commentary says this was “despite her two-inch thick intelligence”. In the late literary text Bṛhatkathāślokasaṁgraha the idiom is employed by a woman to dismiss women’s wit (22.35)—as so often, a woman makes the best misogynist—or by a man who muses that perhaps men like him are the real fools since they allow women to entice them (22.302–3).
