Thanks, Nina. I hope that someday someone will do a new translation of the Vimaanavatthu, separate from the commentaries. But for the time being, I'll just read the verses as Suttas.

The problem with the Jatakas is similar, but at least the Jatakas are canonical. I'll deal with that issue when I get to them.

I don't have much respect for the Commentaries at all. Not that there's not some dhamma in them, but overall, they're not a whole lot better than popular Buddhist books.

Reading the Suttas (or even the Agamas) and the Vinaya (whether Sthiravadin or Sarvastavadin) is kind of like eating cleaned rice. You might occasionally come across a piece of matter in them that's not rice, but overall it's just rice. Reading the Commentaries is like eating rice mixed with compost and gravel. There is rice in it, which you can pick out and eat, but if you just put on a blindfold and get a big spoon and dig in, you're as likely to get a mouthful of non-rice as you are rice.

Tharpa

--- In Pali@yahoogroups.com, Nina van Gorkom <vangorko@...> wrote:
>
> Dear Tharpa,
> I have this in hard cover and also 'Vimaana Stories, the commentary
> translated by Peter Masefield. When I compare the first Vimaana in
> Horner's translation with this commentary, the text is the same at
> the beginning, also the verses, but then there is much more
> elaboration in the Commentary translated by Masefield.
> It seems that the verses are the sutta text, because in the separate
> co. the words of the verses are elaborated on.
> Actually there is the same problem with the Jaatakas: the stories and
> the verses, and some say that the verses are the oldest. But I am
> just concerned with the contents and what I can learn from these
> texts for my daily life.
> Nina.
> Op 6-mrt-2011, om 20:49 heeft Tharpa het volgende geschreven:
>
> > PTS is generally pretty good about distinguishing translations of the
> > suttas from the commentaries. However, I have recently started reading
> > Vimaanavatthu: Stories of the Mansions, translated by I.B. Horner, and
> > it seems like maybe it mixes translations of the suttas and
> > commentaries
> > together.
>
>
>
> [Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
>