Dear friends,

Without wishing to prolong too much what has already been a very long (though 
highly informative!) thread (so to speak), I thought that this might be of some 
interest:
In the early 9th century Tibetan work, the “Two-Volume Lexicon” (sgra sbyor bam 
po gnyis pa), which was compiled by a team of Tibetan translators working under 
the guidance of a group of monastic scholars from Aparāntaka 
(Kashmir/Gandhāra/Bactria) and provides nirukta-style explanations of several 
hundred key terms in Sanskrit with Tibetan commentary, sūtra is glossed 
arthasūcanād sūtra [read, of course, arthasūcanāt sūtram].
Once more, SŪC, and nothing to do with thread, was prominent in the Buddhist 
understanding of the term.
Matthew

Matthew Kapstein
Directeur d'études, émérite
Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes, Paris

Numata Visiting Professor of Buddhist Studies,
The University of Chicago
________________________________
From: INDOLOGY <[email protected]> on behalf of Jim Ryan via 
INDOLOGY <[email protected]>
Sent: Wednesday, May 12, 2021 12:42 PM
To: [email protected] <[email protected]>
Subject: [INDOLOGY] Buddhist "sutta"

Dear all,

Thanks to all of you who contributed to this robust and quite informative 
“thread” (sūtra!) on the proper derivation of the Buddhist term sutta from the 
Sanskrit. I tossed a pebble in the pond, I thought, which made
ripples beyond expectations. A thorough treatment of the issue that leaves 
open, perhaps, a fillip of sorts (this said without having yet read Nathan 
McGovern’s article.) Of course, the philological question rather quickly
leads to deeper issues regarding the conceptualization of types of text among 
traditions. I hadn’t even considered Jain notions of sutta/sūtra, comments on 
which emerged along the way.

Best wishes,

Jim Ryan
California Institute of Integral Studies
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