The present work is a revised version of my habilitation research, conducted unde
Professor Michael Hahn at the University of Marburg, which had as its point of depar
ture my wish to come to a better understanding of the discourses found in the Majjhi
ma-nikāya. I had earlier undertaken a study of the Satipa hāna-sutta found in the Maj
jhima-nikāya for my PhD, during the course of which the significance of the parallel
to this discourse preserved in Chinese had become increasingly evident to me. Th
successful conclusion of my PhD in 2000 afforded me the time to learn Chinese (an
eventually Tibetan), equipped with which it was only natural to embark on a compara
tive study of the Satipa hāna-sutta, followed by extending this research and examin
ing to the other discourses found in the same collection in the light of their parallel
preserved by other reciter traditions, extant mainly in Chinese, Sanskrit, and Tibetan
In what follows, I present the results of these studies in the sequence in which the re
spective discourses occur in the Majjhima-nikāya, thereby providing a kind of moder
commentary to each of the Pāli discourses.4