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[ Give Ear ]
The T.W. Rhys Davids translations of Digha Nikaya, Volume I which is in the Public Domain has been added to BuddhaDust (Also with permission from the Pali Text Society).
This is considered by many to be the beginning of the Buddhist Cannon.[1]
If one holds in mind as one reads the suttas the statement made by the Beggars at the beginning of the Brahmagala Sutta:
'How wonderful a thing is it, brethren, and how strange that the Blessed One, he who knows and sees, the Arahat, the Buddha Supreme, should so clearly have perceived how various are the inclinations of men! For see how while Suppiya the mendicant speaks in many ways in dispraise of the Buddha, the Doctrine, and the Order, his own disciple young Brahmadatta, speaks, in as many ways, in praise of them. So do these two, teacher and pupil, follow step by step after the Blessed One and the company of the brethren, giving utterance to views in direct contradiction one to the other.'
...it paints a panorama which is a very thrilling way of binding together the whole in that what follows in the rest of the canon is the story of Gotama as he wanders the Indus Valley and encounters a huge variety of wisemen and fools, madmen and ordinary people and in every case we see how he deals with the situation with 'perception of the various inclinations' of their hearts and minds.
Whether or not this is the beginning of the suttas, it is a good way to begin the study of the Suttas, as most of the important ideas in the system are covered at one point or another in this volume.
Another benefit of this work is that the footnotes often disucss the meanings of the Pali terms used and thus provide a way for the reader to introduce himself to the terminology of the Pali -- something the serious student is going to need to deal with at one point or another in his progress...might as well start early.
Altogether this is a volume that anyone who is studying Pali Buddhism would do well to have read.
#1: The Perfect Net
#2: The Fruits of the Life of a Recluse
#6: The Mahali Sutta
#7: Jaliya Sutta
#10: Subha Sutta
#11: Kevaddha Sutta
#12: Lohikka Sutta
The individual suttas are also listed in the Sutta Index which has links to Access to Insight versions and page references to printed versions from the Pali Text Society and Wisdom Publications.
The presentation on BuddhaDust is virtually identical to the hardcopy book (footnotes and all), and includes the very informative Rhys David's Preface to this Volume.
Some people find the language used by the early translators to be out of date; some prefer Walshe's[2] more recent version (which does have the advantage of being more readily available). The differences between Walshe and Rhys Davids are hardly noticeable.
This issue is about the manner of rendering the way people spoke some 2500 years ago (if the only concern was setting down the system in modern terms the suttas would not be needed). The position being suggested on BuddhaDust is that on the one hand the British scholars use abstract words where modern American slang actually comes closer to the words found in the Pali, but that the manner of presenting those words is likely closer to the Pali the farther back in time we go in our own language.
In any case another issue is more important: it is vital in the case of translation, that the reader get numerous perspectives on this work.[3] There is tremendous value here also, in the introductions and footnotes of this work...we can see that in nearly every case that Rhys Davids has raised an issue, it has become necessary, in subsequent translations, to deal with that same issue.
Here in the Preface, the reader also gets a look into the picture at a time when the Pali was only first being discovered by Western Scholars...the very beginning of the story in English. The fact is, that until such time as a definitive, (consistant in terminology throughout) edition of the Pali Canon appears, it will remain accurate to say that this is still the beginning of that story.
[1]For a well-argued alternate opinion as to the original organization and start of the Pali Canon, see: The Buddhist Society of Western Austrialia The Hidden Structure of the Buddhist Scriptures An audio discussion concerning the origin and authenticity of the suttas.
See also: Dialogues of the Buddha, Volume I, Translated from the Pali by T.W. Rhys Davids, Preface to Volume 1: Note on the Probable Age of the Dialogues
and
Chronology Of The Pali Canon
[2]Wisdom Publications, Walshe, The Long Discourses of the Buddha
[3]Just an aside on the idea of numerous perspectives: A phenomena I have noticed over the years reading various translations and doing various translations of my own is that when an earnest effort is made to do an accurate translation, no matter how inaccurate specific terms may end up proving to be, the whole is almost always some kind of statement or advice that is worth listening to...a related phenomena, I believe, to that where, when the Buddha spoke, everyone in his audience believed he was speaking directly to them...had tailored his words specifically for their ears.
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