Dharma Pearls

I’m happy to report that we’ve recovered from the illness that visited us last month, and I’ve released translations of EĀ 12.10, 13.1-7, and 14.1-10. With these three chapters, we’ve reached the end of the Book of Ones. I wrote a lengthy summary of the chapters added last month at SuttaCentral’s Discuss & Discover forum (see this post here), and I’ll also add summaries for each chapter on the blog later today.

My plan for this month are to split it into two halves: The first half of August, I will be working on inputting CBETA’s Saṃyukta Āgama Chinese into a format that can be added to SuttaCentral’s Bilara translation app. As I go through this, I’ll also be revising my existing translations of SĀ sūtras (some of which really need a rewrite!). But getting the Chinese root texts into Bilara is needed because of the number of people who want to translate SĀ to different languages on SC’s platform. So, that will be my main task for the next week and a half. We’ll see how far I get. I’m thinking that it will go fairly quickly (a couple months?), and once SĀ is complete, I can continue with the other Chinese texts that SC hosts but aren’t in Bilara yet.

The second half of August, I will be returning to work on EĀ. I should be able to release Chapters 15 and 16 and part of Chapter 17 by the end of the month (about 8 pages of source text). Probably the most well known sūtra in this group will be EĀ 17.1 Rāhula, which is parallel with MN 62 and contains the full version of EĀ’s mindfulness of breathing practice.

The task of editing DĀ is currently on DĀ 2 The Final Journey (i.e. Parinirvāṇa), which is a big project. I’ve been assessing the various parallels to this large text, which are many (one in Pali, one in Sanskrit, and four others in Chinese). This month, I’ll begin the editing of the current DĀ 2 translation, and hopefully I’ll have a final version ready to submit to SuttaCentral around the end of August or beginning of September. After I get past that, the editing of DĀ will move along faster, as the sūtras aren’t nearly as large.

So, that’s where things stand for August. Progress continues, slow and steady.