Hi Ludo,

Actually the text is correct. In the Nikayas the list of body parts usually has 31 items, and the brain is not included. Only in the later texts, starting, perhaps, with the Khuddakapatha, is matthalunga added to make the now-standard list of 32 parts.

Just a general remark on the Pali text we use. It's the edition of the 6th Council, based on the VRI tipitaka text, with extensive corrections by the Dhamma Society; the formal name of the edition is the Mahasangiti. It was hosted for several years online as the "World Tripitaka", but that site has since vanished. It is, I believe, the most consistent and accurate Pali text ever produced. Stylistically, it uses various Burmese-style readings, while I personally prefer the Sinhalese readings, which seem to me to be more colloquially Pali. But this is just a detail. On the whole it is highly accurate and it is very hard to find typos. We are currently working on an updated text, which will include a large range of variant readings.

Hi Qianxi,

Thanks once more, this is all terrific and as always I will pass this on to our team.

The situation with Ud 6.4 and DA 30 is a fairly common one. We call this a kind of "partial parallel". However this blanket term in fact represents several different kinds of relationships. This specific sort is what we call an "embedded parallel": one sutta is "embedded" in another. A recent innovation we made was to represent these embedded passages explicitly in the target text. See, for example, SF177. This is found on this page: http://suttacentral.net/sf/ If you click on the text, it takes you to this page, with the actual parallel text highlighted: http://suttacentral.net/sf177/skt/#1 Neat, huh? This feature has not yet been rolled out for all our texts, as we need to mark the divisions in the actual files.

Hi Qianxi,

I've been on retreat for a couple of weeks, hence the slow reply.

The DA21 text is really just a test case I threw together so we can see how the dictionary works. We are working on getting all the Chinese texts on SC, and you will see some progress on this in the next few months. I have prepared editions of the Chinese Vinaya texts based on the CBETA edition, but reorganizing everything so that it is based on logical divisions rather than juan breaks. In addition, these texts include detailed correspondences. We have another team member working on the Sutta texts, and hopefully we will see them online soon as well.

Thanks for this, you are quite right. We will correct it. Please let us know any other mistakes!

Hi Qianxi,

Thanks so much, this is very useful. I will pass it on to our team.

Our coverage of the Khuddaka, and the verses in general, is very incomplete. Originally SC started as a set of parallels for the 4 nikayas/agamas. Recently I have been developing full parallels for the Vinaya; this and the Abhidhamma will be added before the end of the year. But the Khuddaka remains largely incomplete. Not for want of interest, just for lack of someone to do the work. Ideally we would develop a full database of verse parallels. This would be a huge job, but no bigger than, say the Vinaya: so far I have identified over 6000 specific instances of rules in the Bhikkhu Patimokkha alone.

As with so many other areas, much of the work has been done, but in bits and pieces, and what is needed is to pull all the data together and put it to work.

Thanks for the info. We'd definitely like to include it in SC, but it may take a little time to get to it. Meanwhile, if you know of any other modern translations of the Pali canon into Chinese, or, for that matter, translations of any early Buddhist texts into Chinese, we'd love to hear of them.

Thanks so much, William.

We are in the final testing phases of the next upgrade. The entire code base has been rewritten, including a dedicated search engine, and many new texts, mainly Sanskrit and English translations of Chinese Agama texts. You'll see these on the live site starting in a week or two.

Hi Sybil,

Thanks for the feedback. Using the whole name of the language would take up quite a bit of space, though. I'll bear it in mind, but unless we get more feedback I don't think this is something we need to address. (Incidentally, the syllable chosen has it's own symbolic importance, which comes across better in the non-Latin scripts. "Ka" is the first aksara (or "element", i.e syallable) in Indic scripts.)

Thanks, Ludo, I'll have a look at that. Colors can appear very differently on different screens, and to different eyes! We're a bit tight for time right now, but I'll see if I can tweak the contrast.

Thanks so much! We aim to please...