Just as a note, when referring to editions, better to name it for what it is, the Mahasangiti edition. We just host it.
I suspect the Mahasangiti version is abbreviated metri causa. Yantaṁ sounds more coherent to me.
This arises because Pali doesn’t like two vowels next to each other. If read as separate words, kulesu ananugiddho reads better, but if it is a single compound, kulesvananugiddho is more technically correct. But neither is wrong.
Here the Mahasangiti is preferable, the other is not metrical.
That’s a bad mistake. The Mahasangiti version is wrong. It says the mother “Should not protect her only child with her life”! Note too the commentary here has tañca ekaputtameva āyusā anurakkhe, which decisively rules out the Mahasangiti reading. It really is a puzzling error.
Mahasangiti is correct, the other is unmetrical.
The only difference that really matters here is the odd reading of niyaṁ puttaṁ / āyusā ….
I was feeling that it can easily happen that the “m” just shifts over to the other word, especially when someone doesn’t know the language very well. Note that in the next but one line it also starts with a word beginning with “m”, so this sounds quite parallel, like an alliteration, and may have misled the reading.
Indeed. The word breaks would not have been written in the original, so it would have been something like:
mātā yathā niyaṁputtamāyusā ekaputtamanurakkhe
With the spelling either m or ṁ. These kinds of issues are very frequent in the manuscripts, and Pali scholars handle them as a matter of course. Which is why it is odd to find such a serious error, especially in such a famous text.
In this case, the correct form is sabbalokasmiṁ (locative singular) and the shortened form is used metri causa.