I agree with the rest you say, but atthi is not a copula. You can’t say “A atthi B” like you can say “A is B”. The latter is what the copula does (hoti/bhavati).
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Yes, you’re right! I was looking for a word to cover these words related to existence which often relate to the copula in IE languages, but unfortunately in this case it’s not apt.
Mettā
That’s the context.
This is the problem though isn’t it? I am asserting (although I realise now I did not make this sufficiently clear), that the SN44.10 context is the same context as the undeclared points at DN1 and MN72, SN44.10 is an epitome, a shortened, and therefore more cryptic exemplar of the same idea that is discussed at greater length and at more depth at MN72 (and DN1).
To claim that there is a second, different context, and then gloss the word with survives instead of exists is precisely to beg the question that is being asked, if in fact there is just one consistent context, the critique of existence/non-existence and all the suttas are in fact talking about this topic, then there is absolutely no reason to use 2 different terms in the two sets of suttas, it is the “survivalists” who interpret the sutta at SN44.10 (and MN90) as being about a different subject to that discussed at DN1 and MN72, but surly the burden of proof lies with those who seek to justify 2 words rather than those who see no problem with one in all cases.
fine, the point is that I AM saying that it never needs to mean survive, and when it is just left as “exists” it is entirely compatible with ALL of SN44.10 MN72 DN1 MN90 and the many, many more suttas that discuss version s of the undeclared points.
I am not sure that this is relevant in this case tho, it’s just the first time the undeclared points are put forward and so a pretty stright forward place to look.
For the record I do not think DN is “superior”, what I think is more along the lines that the silakandhavagga, and especially the sekkha patipada, represent an early articulattion of the buddhist postion relative to what i take to be a somewhat later and more scholastic presentation exemplified in SN.
I appreciate the argument, and I’ll reconsider the case. I don’t think I’ve heard any entirely satisfactory solution, and the fact remains that words meaning “to be” have a different set of connotations than they do in English.
In this I beg to differ. A translator’s job is to convey the meaning of the text as they understand it. It is not to “teach the controversy”, or to render it in an ambiguous way because different people have read it in different ways. That’s what discussion is for, like we’re doing here. The job of a translator is to write in the target language so that people who are not experts or philosophers and who have never considered all of the arguments can read it and get the point. Sometimes that means sacrificing secondary dimensions of meaning for the sake of clarity.
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So you think that in English saying “Do gods exist?” is sufficient for meaning “Do gods continue after death in a state of existence?” ? (MN 90). I’m a native English speaker and I can say that, for me, this meaning is never implied at all in the question with ‘exists.’ You seem to attest this same thing in your other comment with the mention of “Do Unicorns exist?”. Clearly you didn’t think “Do unicorns continue existing” was a valid rendering of this English sentence — but in Pāli it is.
Even if we were to argue that the meaning of atthi in the suttas is the same, we have the tense itself which as I’ve pointed out is primary: atthi can be (and is) used to refer to future events, even outside of cases like these in Pāli. This is not inconsistent, it’s just grammar. What that means is temporality (future existence) is baked into the potential connotations of the word. This is undeniable.
I would also wonder why these attā questions are never put into an ‘undeclared points’ list. You seem to support the primacy of the DN and things for philosophy of EB, and yet you seem to use this one passage in the SN where this view is expressed as an argument for an elaborate deletion of such a fundamental concept from Buddhist doctrine, if I’ve understood your previous comments correctly. I respect your opinion and would like to have a more concrete grasp on your thoughts — but I still disagree with the linguistic argument that you find future tense rendering of atthi unnatural (and secondarily because the ontological discussions of the time period were different from our current ones).
Mettā
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Principle 1
Principle 2
As a reader of texts in translation, these two principles sum up very much what I am looking for.
Principle 1
I want an English translation that conveys the meaning of the passage clearly. If there is controversy, I love having notes that let me know that controversy exists, but I don’t want an ambiguous translation. Ambiguity makes it read like the text itself doesn’t know what it wants to say. But the text is clearly saying what it wants - it is our struggle to choose between the possible meanings.
And please no made-up hyphenated or portmanteau words - as Bhante says, write in the target. And I like that Bhante @sujato avoids just moving Pali words untranslated into the translation. I think that gives the appearance of being closer to the text, but really just means the reader is making the choice what the Pali word means rather than the more experienced translator making that choice.
Principle 2
Principle 2 is - in my mind - a big part of what allows the reader to move into being a student of the text. If I know the translation reflects the underlying structure of words as much as possible, I can make connections. If I start to learn some Pali, I can start to study the underlying words that create that structure.
To me, trying to be as consistent as possible shows respect to the reader. It gives them the opening to understand the texts at a deeper level while reading in translation.
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I am not seeking to delete anything, just to point out that anatta is not to be taken as the positive assertion “a self does not exist” and is never ststed as such in the EBT,.i also think that certain rare phrasings, like sabbe dhamma anatta, came too close for comfort for the early redactors and therefore we see Anandas reassurance of Channa and the Assaji episode etc.
Anatta as a deniel of the premanent Braminical atman, fine.
Anatta as the doctrine that nothing can be uncovered in phenomena, permament or impermanent, that could be an independant, happy identity, fine.
Anatta as the doctrine that a self, or a being, or a world, or a shoe doesnt exist, incompatiple with the undeclared points, incompatible with conditionality, and IMO, not to be found in the EBT’s, exept by “obvious inference” or “motivated translation”.
What can be found is the beginnings of such a positive metaphysical doctrine, almost always in SN, almost never in DN, in such phrases as sabbe… and “not a genuine fact”.
These phrases are in tension with other parts of the canon, for example MN72 where the “not a genuine fact” argument would make the fire in the analogy not a genuine fact and consequently every phenomena not a genuine fact.
Metta.
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(In response to joseph):
Okay, I’m just going to say it. DN is obviously, on average, the latest of the 4 nikayas, and it isn’t close.
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I know your general stance on DN from threads here and your pocture of SN from a swift pair of messengers, but if you could play devils advocate for a moment,
What do you think of the idea that DN has the layers of additions that it does precicely because the core of it (the sekkha patipada) is very old, and consequently has had the most time to be embroidered?
Also the idea that SN might close early precicely because it is a systematic treatment with a structure that gives it some protection against embroiderment due to its doctrinal focus.
Actually i have many questions, so maybe i should ask, anybplans to write any broad treatment of your view of matters chronological as they have evolved sinse a swift pair of messengers and the authenticity? Perhaps addressing DN as well, and lateness moreso than earliness?
lol, actually i shouldnt be suggesting more writing to you when you are supposed to be teaching me Pali!!
Anyway, once again, thank you for giving me the most useful and amazing tool for the study of early buddhism! Your services to the dissemination of Buddhism to the english speaking world must earn you much good kamma if the fruits of actions do survive 
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I’m sorry, but this made me think precisely of this question of ‘atthi.’ From the standard passage on mundane right view:
natthi sukatadukkaṭānaṁ kammānaṁ phalaṁ vipāko
@sujato (and maybe @Sunyo has an opinion on this): Do you think that the ‘survives’ translation should be here as well? After all, when this passage is elaborated, the opposing view (i.e. wrong view) is all about how karmic effects and merit (i.e. from giving and sacrifice) do not survive and have effects after death but merely end in ashes. Or maybe because it references the ‘phala’ you found it unnecessary to use the future rendering? Currently you have the plain ‘there are/is’ rather than the ‘will be/survives’ translation.
This would look something like:
There will be no fruit or result from good and bad deeds [after death].
or
The fruit or result from good and bad deeds will not survive [one’s death].
I imagine @josephzizys might not be a fan of this (or perhaps!). But even your English statement here without any reference to this passage kind of elucidates how that is what is being intended and discussed.
Mettā
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Nope I love it! im a contrary beast, and in the context of the annihilationist passage I do quite like the rendering and agree with a lot of what you and @sunyo say.
In particular it is hard to see how it makes sense to deny that actions have consequences in this life, if I break your window then it comes as no suprise when i am arrested for vandalism, so the annihilationist denial of kamma is much more understandable if we read it as a denial of consequences impacting one after death. Similarly, as @sunyo points out, “there is no mother and father” is a lot more straightforward if we read an implied (after death) at the end of it.
My issue is really not with the temporal question but more wether it is possible to just read a “be” or “is” or “exists” in a conventinal way in most of these passages or wether this runs into some sort of conflict with DO or anatta or whatever else. Most of these questiins remain even if we sometimes read “will be” “is in the future” and “will exist”.
Basically what i am trying to work out for myself is wether anatta is always a special case when it comes to matters of existence and non existence, or if it is simply another, but personally pertinent example of the more general argument about the conditionality, and furthur when and where it is such an argument and when and where it is rather than an explication of condirionality actually a criticism of brhaminical atman.
I guess i have string suspicious that there is a bit of the post hoc in the (extremely common) statment that anatta is a historiccal response to brahminism and atman equals brahman in particular.
Obviously i dont deny the mileu, i just think that its not so simple.
Metta.
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Yeah, and I think this is fair. I feel the same myself to a degree, as does e.g. @Gabriel who has done some comparative research on Early Buddhism and Brahmanism and who I know has posted on this issue (that anattā is not necessarily or even primarily referring to the Brahmanical ātman). I do think that there are plenty of texts that cover it, but it seems that primarily anattā is about just the general sense of self/identification/personal essence that anyone might have. It is much more timeless than a response to particular philosophical trends IMO, many of which would require slightly different approaches to fully critique and refute them than what we mostly see in the suttas. We are getting off topic for this thread though.
Mettā
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and just to elaborate a little bit, it does no good if, like Gombrich, you say:
“all the fuss and misunderstanding can be avoided if one inserts the word “unchanging”, so that the two word english phrase becomes “no unchanging self” … here it suffices to say for the Buddhit audience by definition the word atman referred to something unchanging”
What the Buddha Thought p9
because this is precisely what the Theravada allege the annihilationists are in fact saying and the Buddha is rejecting!
Similarly it does no good to say (as I see again and again, both here and in print from the “scholars”) something like what Gethin gives us;
“Thus Buddhist thought suggests that as an individual i am a complex flow of physical and mental phenomena”
Foundations of Buddhism p 139
Because this is exactly what the Buddha repeats over and over again we can be absolutely certain we are NOT! (incidentally at DN15 this argument is given with Vedana only, and not the other 4 aggregates, presumably because this version of the argument is much later and so they had by that time deleted 4 of the categories, just like in MN2, where of course the argument about not self avoids the aggregates for similar reasons 
)
It’s no good going on to say, as Gethin does, that
“peel away these phenomena and one just does not find a constant self that one can call ones own”
ibid
precisely because because this two step renders the whole statement incoherant. if “as an individual I am a complex flow” then I AM something, and it doesn’t matter if that something is permanent or not, as indeed the annihilation example shows.
So to recap, two of the common strategies, that anatta is a “not (permanent) atman” argument, and that anatta is a "a person IS a collection of processes (or the even worse IMO “a person isn’t anything at all but they think they are a collection of processes”) argument IMO just fail to be coherent.
This is no problem for many secular scholars, they can just say, “sure, Buddhism IS incoherent, just like most religions, suck it up”. But for me, with for want of a better term “faith commitments” it is just not good enough, and I need the whole thing to make sense and hang together, which as I say, many of the glosses of anatta do not.
Metta
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Sure, and I agree. But I hope you see that I have not said either of these things. There was a point where you seemed to think I did, which I then clarified. I also do not think that most people on this forum who have been in dialogue with this discussion are saying this. I (rather than speaking for ‘we’) am saying that there is a process of on-going dukkha which is not permanent (anicca) nor is it who we are (anattā), and thus identifying with it and propelling it forward (taṇhā ponobhavika) is just perpetuating dukkha: it is dukkha that self-produces more dukkha. There is nothing within this process that one could find, were they to investigatingly ‘peel back’ their experience, that would make any sort of clinging, identification, or self-ing worthy—because all of it is impermanent and dukkha. Thus it is all anattā; there is nothing attā to be found. The cessation of this process is the highest sukha. You are correct that ‘we are not it.’ Rather, ‘we’ are within this process in the sense that our sense of ‘I’ is a resultant (and insitigator) of it; it too is a coreless, empty process. This does not require any Upaniṣadic ātman theory to understand.
The problem is that people can then try and get around this by speculating about what they really are apart from what seem to be transitory processes. Maybe they are formless perception. Maybe a mind-made body. Maybe they are the body (form) and will be annihilated. Maybe they are X or Y or Z. And so texts elaborate that all of this too is just conditioned speculation and it consists purely of conditioned, impermanent dukkha (and is thus anattā).
I don’t find it inconsistent or incoherent.
Mettā
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I think ypu explain it really well up to the above (with the caveat that I am wary of “all” and am letting it by as applying only to “it”) The problem is taking the sense of I to be both resultant and instigator, which doesnt seem to make sense, if there is a pre-existant “sense of I” that instigates the process then the process cannot be the instigator, if on the other hand the process is the instigator then it is hard to see how “we” can put a stop to something that creates “us”.
We cant be anything in our experience and we can’t coherently speak, wether in the positive or the negative, about anything outside experience, so certain things are undeclared.
I agree that this is a problem, but I think you fall into to the opposite problem, by saying “we are within this process in the sense that our sense of i is a resultant” is to make the error of identifying something within experience as totally accounting for a “self” i.e you “are” your (false) sense of “I”. But this doesnt work, because the buddha says we are not that either (its a conditional phenomena), and because there are Buddhas and Arhants, who keep living and speaking and answering to thier names and so on even after they have completely uprooted the sense of “I” things go on much as before, and that “such a one would not hold the views “I exist” I dont exist” “niether” “both”. ti.
So to recap I agree that many in the past have tried to use the undeclared points to “sneak” a capital S self into buddhism, and I reject this move, since “I exist” is literallt the first point undeclared, however i merely insist that the second undeclared point is “I don’t exist” and that many Theravada try to sneak this wrong view in, presumably for symetrical but ultimatley similar reasons to the first lot, by bending anatta into a positive metaphysical assertion about what is (actually what is not) outside experience, whicch on my reading of the EBT’s is not sething one can do.
Both ignorance and craving have (a) no discernable beginning in general, and (b) no discernible beginning or first between the two. There is no point where the sense of self was made a resultant and not an instigator in continuing the production of the sense of self. Because of the sense of self we crave, and yet our craving causes the continuation and fortification of the sense of self, etc. This is what I mean. It is a self-creating cycle of ignorance and craving. It may not actually be self-creating, but the beginning of it cannot be discerned so it acts and behaves as if it were one as far as we are concerned.
But I did not say this. I did not say that “I am this process of creating an I which is impermanent.” If so, it would be annihilationist. I am saying that the feeling ‘I am’ as a solid substantial identity exists, and this is itself just the process which creates itself and propels itself forward.
But this doesnt work, because the buddha says we are not that either
This is what I am saying. Not that we actually are it, hence my use of quotation marks. I don’t think this is worth continuing to specify and engage with though for the time being.
Be well and practice well
Mettā
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Happy to leave it at that, but if you’ll indulge me just a little bit longer, as I think I have once again failed to convey my meaning, I am not suggesting that you are an annihilationist, when I say that you are
I mean that you are in effect saying that there is no self, that is that all that there is, is this false sense of self.
But I am saying that this is too far, to say "there is nothing more than this false sense of self is to say
“a self doesn’t exist”
but I claim qua the undeclared points, that the Buddha does not make such a claim.
I completely agree that the buddha taught that any idea of a self that is predicated on conditional phenomena like form, feeling, intentions, consciousness etc cannot be true (for much more profound reasons than just being “impermanent”) but what this cannot mean, because of the undeclared points, is that an inference is permitted to a conclusion that “a self does not exist”.
And the whole of the Buddhist canon is a testament to the fact that this is not in fact what the Buddha taught, as it would have been open, in dozens if not hundreds of suttas, to make the claim, at the end of going through the aggregates and demonstrating that none could be a self and that nothing else in experience could be a self, that therefore there is no self, but this claim is never made! instead we get, in 2 of the 4 principle nikyas, a total of six times, the weaker statement “all phenomena are without self”, and the argument, in relation to the status of the buddha after death, in one nikaya, that they are “not a genuine fact”. In contrast we have dozens and dozens of suttas, across all 4 nikayas, that consistently problematize the idea of existence and non existence and of identity and difference, per se, not just about “selves” but about “worlds” and about basically any other things we care to mention, and the buddha saying that they have no view of the form A, notA, AandnotA, nietherAnornotA.
anatta can simply mean that phenomena don’t belong to us, just as dukkha means that phenomena aren’t unproblematically satisfying and annica means we can’t have them forever and ugliness means they are not perfectly attractive and so on and so forth, and in pretty much all of DN and a lot of MN we see anatta presented in this way, as one of many salient features of phenomenal reality that make that reality something that we need to free ourselves from.
But taken as an argument about permanent existing real selves or about illusory unreal selves it does not line up with the undeclared points, and I just haven’t seen any convincing presentations of it as a metapysical principle that is compatible with the undeclared points without breaking up said points and making some of them about one thing and others about other things etc.
Anyway, really just wanted to say that I did not mean to paint you as an annihilationist, and I agree we are well off topic at this point, and this is my own hobby horse rather than anything that you or others here are really talking about except in response to me, so I should really go away and try and write up what I actually think and why and start a new thread.
Much Metta
I mean the sekkha patipada is obviously old, but since it’s found basically everywhere it doesn’t really help the case. All it shows is that the old layers of DN are as archaic as anywhere else, which sure.
All the nikayas have plenty of old material, I don’t think we can say that the basis of any of them is older than any other: they all go back to the Buddha.
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Just to let know, I’ve been @-ed a couple times in this discussion, but I’m not really following it nor do I intend to soon. I also don’t want to misrepresent the ideas by reading them out of context, so I’m not replying to specifics.
I will say again, though, that grammar is almost always the easiest step. Interpretation comes next, which is much more difficult often. And only then comes translation, which is even harder. Generally in my discussions and replies I tend to bridge the gap between the grammar and interpretation without suggestion the “best” way to translate it, since the best way doesn’t exist.
Sometimes translations are based on bad grammar, in which case it’s easy to argue against them. But in many other cases it’s often a matter of seeing different perspectives and understanding (and respecting) the choices certain translators have made.
You can’t really appreciate these matters without having a lot of experience with Pali and without having done quite a bit of translation for yourselves.
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