འཕགས་པ་སྒྲ་ཆན་པ་ཞས་བྱ་བ་ཐག་པ་ཆན་པའ་མད intro.3

intro.3

In his reply, the Buddha proposes scenarios in which greater and greater gifts to the saṅgha can be made, yet the answer remains the same—enshrining relics in stūpas or creating statues of the buddhas will always be more meritorious. The repetitiveness here is characteristic of the sūtra literature which has its origins in the oral tradition. When the sūtras were committed to writing, the South Asian scribes deliberately omitted repetitive material and marked elided sections with the phrase iti yāvad … iti peyālam, a scribal insertion indicating passages that have already been given in full previously in the text, and which are understood to be repeated in full each time the iti peyālam was inserted. This technique served as a means for conserving scribal resources such as palm leaves, ink, and other media. In the Tibetan translation, the elided section is marked with the first and last words of the passage, framed with the phrases ces/zhes bya nas … ces/zhes bya ba’i bar du, “from (phrase X) up to (phrase Y).” That convention has been followed in this English translation, where such passages have been marked with ellipses.