Stratification of the Suttas

[sabbamitta]

@silence

There’s still a lot to be achieved in comparative studies too, including to assess the earliness or lateness of a sutta or passage.

Venerable @Vimala also tried an analysis on the age of texts, via the length of words:

Average Word Length as indicator of Pali text age

The Pali language, as every other language, has evolved over time. One of the changes that the language has undergone through the centuries is that words have become increasingly complex and words have merged together to form longer words. We would therefore expect that a statistical analysis of average word-length could be an indication of relative ”age” of the texts in question. In this research I analyse the average word-length of each text and each book in the Pali canon to find trends in t…

All these are just initial steps to check out the terrain, before definitive conclusions can be drawn. But we have to start somewhere!