Hi Chanida,
> I am looking for books or research papers that compare Pali suttas in
> different versions of the Pali canon, such as the PTS, Siamese, Burmese and
> Sinhalese versions. I myself know only some works that compare the Pali
> canon with the Chinese Agamas or Gandhari texts, but not a comparison among
> versions of the Pali canon. Would very much appreciate your kind
> suggestions. Comparison of Pali canon, either part or whole, is of interest.
> Thank you very much in advance and looking forward to your reply.
I have never seen such work. What you are asking for is a critical edition of
the Pali canon, a much desired item, but one which I do not think exists in any
form (although the Sinhalese version lists some of the variant readings). The
only one that I am aware of is Ernst Waldschmidt's work on the different Indic,
Tibetan and Chinese forms of the Mahaaparinibbaana sutta, which compares the
Paali and Buddhist Sanskrit versions to themselves and the Tibetan and Chinese
versions.
Waldschmidt, Ernst. 1944-1948. Die Überlieferung vom Lebensende des Buddha,
Erster Teil, Vorganagsgruppe I-IV; zweiter Teil, Vorganagsgruppe V-VI.
Abhandlungen der Akademie der Wissenschaften in Göttingen,
Philologisch-Historische Klasse, Nr. 29, 30.
Waldschmidt, Ernst. 1950-1951. Das Mahaaparinirvaa.nasūtra, Text in Sanskrit und
Tibetisch, verlichen mit dem Pāli nebst einer Übersetzung der Chinesischen
Entsprechung im Vinaya der Mūlasarvāstivādins. Abhandlungen der Deutschen
Akademie der Wissenschaften zu Berlin. Teil I, 1950; Teil II & III, 1951.
There's Senart's version of the Mahaavastu, but that is not canonical.
And there's Chandrabahl Tripaa.thii's book comparing 25 Suutras from the
Nidaanasa.myutta of the Sa.myutta Nikaaya in Paali and Buddhist Sanskrit
versions.
Tripāṭhī, Chandrabahl. 1962. Fünfundzwanzig Sūtras des Nidānasaṃyukta,. Berlin:
Akademi-Verlag.
But I am not aware of any works comparing the different Sinhalese, Burmese,
Cambodia and Thai traditions (aside from just listing variants). If anyone knows
of others, please let us know,
Metta,
Bryan
________________________________
From: Lennart Lopin <
novalis78@...>
To:
Pali@yahoogroups.com
Sent: Mon, November 15, 2010 1:51:38 PM
Subject: Re: [Pali] Comparison of Pali suttas in different versions
Hi Chanida,
Below a copy of an email I posted earlier this year to the Pali group (did
not find the link on the list)
It might help you to a certain extant, but is purely statistical and just a
rough approximation - not between suttas individually but on the level of
books.
===
... As you all know the "Tipitaka" consists of various text strata. This is
very obvious of course to anyone reading and comparing the vocabulary, style
and grammatical expressions used in the Vinaya, Sutta and Abhidhamma texts.
Prof. Kingsbury did a statistical analysis on this a couple of years ago (see
here<
http://docs.google.com/viewer?a=v&q=cache:YQUw8L4F9WsJ:www.ling.upenn.edu/~kingsbur/inducing.pdf+paul+kingsbury+pali+university+penn&hl=en&gl=us&pid=bl&srcid=ADGEEShpmHsMa8-J_hM6MWDnj1M4JUtuOKd-jORCS-P_zQv0l2PnbgmXEz3CjSBpgz8gMpnlu5W3bi9H6Gq8tr94h6j4RnjmxjJxy34y3hqmjwecS50s97iUa4TFL2sPGhp_VFx5q7vh&sig=AHIEtbQoWszD1QN49uo-4RNw676XN4Apvg>
).
So, whenever someone uses CST4 or similar tools for searching and comparing
text snippets one can see that certain expressions always seem to surface in
certain books while others would contain not a single entry for that
particular word or phrase (take for instance "sabhāv*" - you won't find it
in the 4 Nikāya (for obvious reasons), but already the Milinda mentions it,
etc.)
So, while Prof. Kingsbury's approach was very straightforward (but complex),
it only covered a small portion of available books and only categorized
those few into three basic categories (early, middle, late text strata).
Taking a much simpler approach I created the following report which you can
download (see link below). What I was interested in was to map out,
automatically, the relationship (in percentages) between all canonical and
post-canonical books based on their similarities.
Based on that idea I wrote a little program which extracted a-declension
nominative forms as indicators of a certain semantic proximity (text-chain)
from all 217 books (VRI Tipitaka edition) and compared them against each
other (> 47089 combinations).
I sorted the resulting table by percentage and uploaded it as well (see
below). Of course the results are crude as we are just comparing one
characteristic (nom. sing. a-decl). However, because this test is applied to
the entire range of texts we can still use the percentages as a simple
indicator of proximity. The closer a percentage between two books the more
vocabulary they share. This is esp. interesting when we compare the
relationship between multiple books. One could play around with this even
more, comparing other grammatical features and then overlaying those
percentages to arrive at an even stronger indicator of the relationship
between the various books.
However, for my purposes, this first run (took 2 hours to complete) was
already more than enough. I guess there is tons of information especially
for those among you who are lexicographers etc. and you are welcome to
re-use etc. the source code which I uploaded as well.
But it is quite interesting to see which books form groups in terms of their
"semantic" (vocabulary) proximity. For instance you will see that the 4
Nikaya share a great percentage in similarity as expected. We can also see
that parts of the AN match the Puggalapannatti or observe the closeness
between Nettipakarana and Petakopadesa. From here we can go through the list
and discover interesting relationships which may have been not that obvious.
So this might help some of you find the "next best book" to read / study.
Download the report here:
http://www.nibbanam.com/pali_language_tools.html#pprox
mettāya,
Lennart
On Fri, Nov 12, 2010 at 3:09 AM, Poe <jchanida@...> wrote:
>
>
> Dear friends,
>
> May I ask for help, please?
>
> I am looking for books or research papers that compare Pali suttas in
> different versions of the Pali canon, such as the PTS, Siamese, Burmese and
> Sinhalese versions. I myself know only some works that compare the Pali
> canon with the Chinese Agamas or Gandhari texts, but not a comparison among
> versions of the Pali canon. Would very much appreciate your kind
> suggestions. Comparison of Pali canon, either part or whole, is of interest.
> Thank you very much in advance and looking forward to your reply.
>
> With metta,
> Chanida
>
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