A friend wrote in about the mountain-lake simile for the second jhāna at MN 39. In Bh.
Thanissaro’s rendering the skies do supply abundant showers time
and again — where the other translators have the sky not raining down.
The Pāli has the negation.
It matters for more than tidiness: no inflow from any of the
four directions and none from above is what makes the lake a picture of ekodi,
the mind unified with nothing coming in from the sides or the top.
Checking it took under a minute on s.4nt.org — click the asterisk on that line to open Bh.
Thanissaro’s own footnote, then add a Thai Pāli column to read against the Burmese:
The footnote says it outright: Reading,
Devo ca kālena kālaṁ sammādhāraṁ anuppaveccheyya,
with the Thai edition.
And there in the Thai column sits the negation.
The full exchange — my friend’s reading of ekodi,
and my own take on what the simile feels like from the inside — is on the 4nt.org blog:
Friend asked: did Bh.Thanissaro translate jhāna simile wrong?
Better yet, share your thoughts on the Notes on the Dhamma forum — comments to the blog here often get spammed and ignored.