Hi Piya

I agree with Rod that just four lines would suffice, otherwise it
becomes too cumbersome.

Another thing to bear in mind is the medium. If it's in print, then
the quadrilinear version would be good. But if it's on the screen,
it would be possible to have just the Chinese and the modern
translation. Using software such as Babylon or Dr Eye, we can just
click on the characters and it'll tell us the pin yin and the
dictionary meaning. Comparing with the translation will help us
determine the contextual meaning. This method would be much quicker
to write, and might be more helpful in learning, since there would
be a motivation to not 'click' unnecessarily, so the student might
learn to recognize characters faster.

Another technique that would be good to evolve is a way of directly
comparing the Pali with the Chinese, which of course are rarely
exactly identical. How could we do this?

By the way, a bit of good news: we just got permission from Bhikkhu
Pasadika to use his Ekottara Agama translations on sutta-central.

Dhammena

Bhante Sujato

> In the case of the Chinese Agama translation, we might have five

lines:

> Buddhist Textual Chinese (classical), modern Chinese, pinyin,

English word for word translation, modern translation.

>
> Rod Bucknell suggests that we may omit the modern Chinese line, as

there is little need for it in Buddhist Studies.

>
> Of course, such a process is very tedious. I took about months to

finish the Maha Satipatthana Sutta trilinear.

>