I am new to this forum and its ways, so apologies if this is an inappropriate question.
I have started the online Pāli course with Richard Gombrich, and I am excited to be diving into the Pāli world. However, I have noticed that the Majjhima Nikāya seems to get more philological attention than other texts. For example, Bhikkhu Anālayo has spent over a thousand pages on the Majjhima Nikāya and over another thousand pages on 中阿含經 or The Madhyama Āgama, not to mention parallels in Sanskrit and Tibetan.
Is there a reason why this collection gets more scrutiny?
Also, if I were to purchase a collection of Pāli texts, would this be the one to start with, or can anyone recommend something else?
It’s a great one to start with, no question. It has a very broad range of teachings that are gone into in great depth. Also lots of teachings on meditation mixed with everyday useful teachings.
Thank you! I am getting the Suttanipāta (English) for Xmas, but I also want to order a few more volumes in English as well as Pāli. Would you recommend that I tackle the Pāli Majjhima Nikāya before the Suttanipāta?
If I had to make a recommendation, I’d say to do the MN as a sutta-per-day practice and use the Snp as a backup text.
BTW, if you are getting Bhante Bodhi’s translation of the Snp, be aware that only a small part of it is the actual Snp. Most of it is the ancient commentary plus his own notes.
Pali texts are more widely known for over a century in the English speaking world, and is thought to be more original being in an Indic language and belonging to evidently a single tradition/sect, and thought to contain ideas and expressions relatively early in the Buddhist timeline and directly comparable to the Vedic and Classical Sanskrit literature. The chinese texts are a translation from several traditions, those translations are from centuries younger than the pali, and although faithfully preserving the contents of the originals they were translated from, are still themselves an interpretation (as all translations are). The fact that early Chinese culture was very different from early Indic culture makes people think one cannot be sure whether retranslating from the chinese to English can be as authentic as studying from a pali source.
That said, the Chinese texts are our only extensive record of the literature of the other early Buddhist schools (apart from the Gilgit Dirgha Agama in Sanskrit obtained in India recently) and the Tibetan translations from the Sanskrit which are from a later period but still relatively faithful to their originals.
Besides Sanskrit has been studied extensively and academically for centuries in Europe now. Pali texts were translated first by European Sanskrit scholars and the margin of error in understanding the Pali texts is much less as they have a 1:1 verbatim correspondence with Sanskrit so their meanings are very closely understood and comparable to Sanskrit texts.
If I understood you right, you asked why the Pali MN get’s more philological attention than the Chinese MA.
Philology as a discipline arose from the European discovery of the existence of Sanskrit and its relations with most other European languages including Latin and Greek. Pali literature is studied side by side with Sanskrit and therefore the lion’s share of early-Buddhist philological attention is on Pali. Besides Analayo’s translation is still very young, and although it translates the chinese, it shows no philological antecedents to any Pali or Sanskrit expressions in the Indic EBTs, i.e. it does not guess or state any possible cognates, so how can it be used in philology?
I think there are a few reasons. The discourses are lively and fairly self-contained, with a ric teaching that is reasonably graspable within a single session (or two).
In the DN, the suttas are longer, and in most cases are obviously the product of a longer period of development. So you have to put more investment into understanding them, but with a few exceptions, they are not really more interesting than the MN suttas. Also probably the DN is more concerned with historical/cultural context, whereas MN is less narratively embedded.
In SN and AN, we have basically texts that are quite short and at least apparently less substantive in themselves, but which reward more contextual understanding, i.e. reading networks of suttas as a “suttasystem”. But that’s not easy.
Probably the main reason is that it is proportionately the largest collection of actual prose in the pali canon.
What I mean is that the Long Discources as a whole are only 30 suttas, and collectively by wordcount a fraction of the size of the middle length collections.
The Connected and Numerical collections are vastly longer than the Long or Middle length, but if you deleted the poetry, the reptations, and boilerplate “at savathhi…'s” they would both contain much less actual narrative prose than the Middle Length collection.
So probably the main reason is that the scholarship is proportionate to the actual volume of unique narrative prose content in the collections.
I was curious about this so I built a copy of Bhante Sujato’s AN and MN and removed all of the verses, headings (which are sutta titles, not chapter titles) and from the AN about 130 sentences that put the sutta in Sāvatthi. The AN has 416k words and the MN has 305k. I’m not sure how you could define let alone automate the removal of repetitions, but Bhante’s translations tend to be on the abbreviated side anyway. And I can hardly imagine that 1/4 of the AN could be considered to be repetition. So I don’t think that the argument can be made that the MN is the largest collection of prose. If you defined it as the largest amount of contiguous prose not spanning different suttas, then yes for sure. But not by word count.
(If anyone is curious enough to play around with it, you can buildd your own copy of the complete html using my book builder tool.)
I just did the SN and it’s coming in around 324k which is much closer to the MN number.
That said, I think reasonably we can say that there is more repetition in the SN than the other three. Not counting the big chunks in the first third of the DN, but those don’t appear in the translation or in the Pali.
