The word of the Buddha has remained pristine over the centuries because it has been encoded in pāli, a language created exclusively for this purpose, under a very complex system of redundancy. Like any artificial language that was not subjected to evolution, each concept has a word and each word has a single concept, like Morse. The complete code has 1,453,000 words that are distributed in 167,800 lines and these in 64,800 paragraphs. Redundancy is constant, so that each word will have a large number of occurrences in very different contexts. Decoding the texts requires having for each word all the available meanings, not only those derived from the compilation of its previous partial translations, but also those derived from its corresponding equivalent Sanskrit word, with its usages, and supported by the ancient Chinese in the parallel agamas, when it exists. One proceeds by substituting each word for each and every one of these meanings until one is found that fits all occurrences. And it is always found. Moreover, once it is done, it is verified that there is no meaning that uses more than one word. The secret of the pāli is that it is biunivocal, as is to be expected of any artificial language. Therefore, it is only possible to translate if all computer-aided texts are decoded synoptically. This is the first time this has been done, pouring its content into Spanish, which is one of the most richly nuanced languages in the world. And the other secret it has kept during these millennia is that its more than 7.2 million characters encode a unique message, which never contradicts itself, and which points to a single direction: enlightenment.
The first book of the Dīgha Nikāya, the Collection of the Long Discourses of the Buddha, collects 17 suttas that do not fit into the typical format of discourses, but are groupings created centuries later managing to be classified as another canonical collection.
This book seems to be composed to be given to Buddhist missionaries to be used as a manual for debate against other religions in order to gain followers. This is the tone of most of the first thirteen discourses. For this purpose, neither mythomania nor milacrery, which the Indian public has always liked so much, is disdained.
If we study their structure, we immediately see that they are completely foreign to the canonical ones and their content, in general, is composed of a libel against a religious group, followed by a series of short-paste of canonical suttas selected without much criterion.
DN 9. With Poṭṭhapāda, its unknown author goes into a series of dialectical traps until he reaches a point where he finds himself unable to get out and resolves it by complicating everything even more so that nothing is clear. In DN 13. The Three Knowledges, the Brahmins are blamed for the same vices and defects as the Buddhist monks. The rest of the false discourses do not try to imitate the regular structure of the suttas and neither the wording nor the content, which shows a short knowledge on the part of their authors of the rest of the Nikayas. They are marked with a double asterisk (**).
Three of the four great discourses are also collected: the Mahapadana, the Mahanidana, and the Mahaparinibbana.
But the stain of falsehood also extends through two of the great discourses: the Mahapadana, or The Great Chronicle of the Buddhas, which is a pamphlet of an exaggerated baroque excessive even for oriental taste, and the extensive Mahaparinibbana, which is not free from falsehoods spread throughout its extensive writing. On the contrary, the Mahanidana, or Great Discourse of the Causes, is an exhaustive compilation of the theory of Dependent Origination in a single text, and the Mahasatipatthana, or Great Discourse of the Instructions of Practice, does the same with different practices. Not all of them, but the ones he deals with are dealt with in depth. These two discourses alone make this book worthwhile.
