This discourse, without known parallels, is a reminder that, however important the development of wholesome mental states and the elimination of unwholesome mental states, it is equally important to also develop those states conducive to Nirvāṇa if you want to escape Saṃsāra.

There is one dharma that you ought to cultivate: mindfulness focussed on the body.

A Tibetan (and Sanskrit) parallel to the first section of DN 34 / DA 10.

Thanks to the discovery and ongoing publication of the incomplete Sanskrit Dīrgha-āgama manuscript from Gilgit, three different versions of the Collection of Long Discourses are now available for comparative study: the Pali Dīgha-nikāya transmitted within the Theravāda tradition, the just-mentioned Dīrgha-āgama in Sanskrit, identified as Sarvāstivāda or Mūlasarvāstivāda, and the Chinese translation of an Indic Dīrgha-āgama (長阿含經), generally considered to be affiliated with the Dharmaguptakas.

The seminar, “The Chinese Translation of the Dīrgha-āgama (長阿含經, Taishō 1)”, took place on 18 and 19 October, 2013. It was organised in collaboration with the Chung-Hwa Institute of Buddhist Studies at Dharma Drum Mountain and the Numata Center for Buddhist Studies at Hamburg University. The event was generously funded by the Chiang Ching-kuo Foundation for International Scholarly Exchange. In this volume, we publish most of the papers that were presented and discussed at the seminar, with the chapters – six in total – arranged according to the authors’ names in alphabetical order.

… in what follows I briefly survey the four main Chinese Āgamas. In the first of the chapters that follow this introduction, I try to place the early discourses in historical perspective. An assessment of their value as testimonies for early Buddhist thought serves as a foundation for the comparative studies found in this and the other three volumes.

Although some parts of the manuscript are still unavailable, and others are most probably lost forever, it is now possible to reconstruct the original structure of the collection with such a high degree of probability as to come close to certainty. In the following pages first a survey of all the sūtras contained in the Dirghāgama will be given, and then, second, a specimen edition of a section of one of those sūtras.