Dear Bhante,

Excellent work ! I'm glad to see you have made some sense and use of my BTC
lesson. Your essay translation seems spot on -- any differences I would
produce would mostly be down to personal stylistic preferences.

There is just one little thing, in the last sentence, for which you have:

"Then all the monks listened to what the Buddha said. They delighted
in it, and respectfully practiced. "

This should probably be read as a compond sequential sentence -- implicit
only from the context and sense. It would be better perhaps to render this
as "Then, having listened to what the Buddha said, all the monks delighted
[in it]." (the "guanxi fengshing" should be understood as an idiomatic
compound, althoug your translation is not wrong per se).

> The cognate given by Hodge is SN 22.12. [snip] I would suggest
> SN 22.51 as the cognate.

Yes, there are problems with Akanuma, as you mention. Somebody really needs
to go through each agama and re-evaluat his identifications. I have found
several misattributions myself in the course of doing my own YBS translation
work.

> The Pali appears to be in error

I hop that a few people will be inspired enough to do such detailed work,
identifying such textual problems -- no doubt they also help throw light on
the transmission process in some cases. But, as you say, "Bahum karaniyam!"

> Shou is used both for vedanaa (khandha) and itthattaaya (!)

Yes, you will find that some words are worked hard in Chinese translations,
but usually the context makes clear what the correct sense should be.

> The text uses er shi, where the Pali (and Skt) has tatra; but er shi
> would seem to render tena samayena.

In most cases, er shi should equate to tatra and I am not convinced that
such is not the case here.

Also thanks for notice of the small errors -- the sample lesson was done
rather on the fly so I am not surprised to see some.

I am rather busy trying to meet a deadline for my next chunk of the YBS but
I have already got some material together for a second and third lesson. I
am also preparing reference guides to Chinese function words (inc special
BTC idiomatic ones), pronouns, modal verbs etc. I'll send these to people
shortly when they are ready.

Best wishes,
Stephen Hodge