SN 38.9A Question About Ignorance
Pāli / Sanskrit:Avijjāpañhāsutta
The wanderer Jambukhādaka asks Sāriputta what is ignorance.
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– Chapter 38: Connected Discourses with Jambukhàdaka
38.9. Ignorance.
Vi-n 1-2.…
Vi-n 3: “Ignorance, ignorance,” reverend Sāriputta, is said. Reverend, what is ignorance?
—Reverend, not truly understanding suffering, the origin of suffering, the ending of suffering, and the path leading to the ending of suffering is called ignorance.
Vi-n 4—Reverend, is there a path and a practice for giving up that ignorance?
—Reverend, is there a path and a practice for giving up that ignorance?
Vi-n 5-6.(As in the preceding discourse, numbers 5 and 6, with the necessary changes).
This collection was translated into Vietnamese by the Most Venerable Thích Minh Châu and published by Vạn Hạnh Monastery in the early 1980s . Later, as part of the translation and publication program for the Vietnamese Buddhist Canon, the collection was republished in 1993 and numbered from 12 to 16.
Prepared for SuttaCentral by Blake Walsh .
The “…” is an abbreviation carried over from the Pāli original itself, called peyyāla. The early canon was memorized and recited, so passages repeated verbatim from a preceding discourse were commonly contracted to an elision mark rather than written out in full. Venerable Thích Minh Châu's translation preserves this convention. Some texts therefore look short — but that is the canonical form, not missing content or a truncated translation. The elided passages can be read in full in the preceding discourses of the same chapter.
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