Dear Dharma friends,

If we carefully read Bhikkhu Bodhi's translations with notes on the
Commentaries (esp the Samyutta), you will notice he often enough clearly
states that Buddhaghosa errs and disagrees with the Commentaries.

My concern again is that we should treat the Buddhist texts like the Bible
and Buddhaghosa as St Paul. This is the impression I am getting thus far. If
we can open up a bit more, I think this website will attract more beyond
this nuclear family of back slappers.

We are becoming so text-bound, so stuck in vya~njana, we are forgetting the
spirit. It is almost like we cannot think for ourselves, surrounded by
forests and jungles of Pali words. I think a lot of new people are turned
off my this.

Sukhi.

Piya

----- Original Message -----
From: "nina van gorkom" <nilo@...>
To: <Pali@yahoogroups.com>
Sent: Thursday, September 11, 2003 1:01 AM
Subject: Re: [Pali]commentaries


Dear Yong Peng,
Crossreferences to other suttas and commentaries are both excellent. The one
does not exclude the other. And as you said, the Co reminds us to go to
other suttas.
Ven. Bodhi has translated the Samyutta Nikaya and other parts and added many
explanations of the Commentaries to these suttas. He must have had good
reasons. Often we think we understand a sutta, but when reading the
commentary we see that we did not really get the message. The Commentaries
are most important for the understanding of the suttas. Apart from
historical arguments about the authenticity of the commentaries, I thought
it more convincing to pay attention to their contents. People can see for
themselves what they are like. My purpose of trying to translate the
commentary to Rahulovada Sutta here in this list was actually to help people
to have more confidence in the benefit of the commentaries.
We all have accumulated different inclinations and tendencies, and thus,
some people may not like commentaries. They are free to ignore my
translations.
The late Ms Horner, a former president of the PTS (Piya met her), wrote
about the commentaries, and this is a quote from Sarah Abbot, Dhamma Study
Group:
<Horner writes in her preface to the above comy [N: the Buddhava.msa]
translation:

"Always there were detractors, always there were and still are improvers'
ready with their own notions. Through enemies and friends alike
deleterious change and deterioration in the word of the Buddha might
intervene for an indefinite length of time. The commentaries are the armour
and
protection against such an eventuality. As they hold a unique position as
preservers and interpreters of true dhamma, it is essential not only to
understand them but to follow them carefully and adopt the meaning they
ascribe to a word or phrase each time they comment on it. They are as
"closed" now as is the Pali canon. No additions to their corpus or
subtractions from it are to be contemplated, and no cty written in later
days could be included in it.>
To conclude, another quote from Sarah about Buddhaghosa's work of
translating the old Comys he found (in the Great Monastery) that were in
Sinhala into Pali [N: we see that they were rehearsed together with the
Tipitaka at the Great Councils]:
<From Nanamoli's introduction to the Visuddhimagga, we read his translation
of Buddhaghosa's prologue to the 4 Nikaya commentaries in which
Buddhaghosa says:

"(I shall now take) the commentary, whose object is to clarify the meaning
of the subtle and most excellent Long Collection (Digha Nikaya)...set
forth in detail by the Buddha and by his like (i.e the Elder Sariputta and
other expounders of discourses in the Sutta Pitaka) - the commentary that
in the beginning was chanted (at the First Council) and later rechanted
(at the Second and Third), and was brought to the Sihala Island by the
Arahant Mahinda the Great and rendered into the Sihala tongue for the
benefit of the islanders, and from that commentary I shall remove the
Sihala tongue, replacing it by the graceful language which conforms with
Scripture and is purified and free from flaws. Not diverging from the
standpoint of the elders residing in the Great Monastery (in
Anuradhapura), who illuminate the elders' heritage and are all well versed
in exposition, and rejecting subject matter necessarily repeated, I shall
make the meaning clear for the purpose of bringing contentment to good
people and contributing to the long endurance of the Dhamma.>
May we all, each in our own way, support the preserving of the teachings,
Nina.
op 10-09-2003 00:17 schreef Ong Yong Peng op ypong001@...:

> Dear Piya, Nina and friends,
>
> :-) I support Piya's proposition in a way that I believe the right
> understanding of Buddha's teaching is better achieved by cross-
> studying the suttas, then understanding the suttas from the
> commentaries. However, we have also seen that the commentaries
> provide good references too. For example, as Nina pointed out
> before, the commentary to Rahulovada Sutta reference the
> Mahahatthipadopama Sutta. However, I believe we should not stop here
> but go beyond what the commentaries provided.



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