First Sentence of the commentary about ninth chapter

Here's the first sentence of the Khedrup Je commentary about the opening lines of Master Shantideva's Bodhisattva Way of Life, Wisdom (ninth) chapter. We have gone through the words in previous blog entries, so now here's an attempt to make a cohesive sentence from this.

First a rough block-by-block sentence breakdown that usually does not make sense.

yan lag 'di di dag was these branches. ces pa means like that. le'u brgyad pa is chapter eight. nas is from, binding all this on the left with something to the right. bshad pa'i zhi gnas is single-pointed meditation teachings. tsam is merely. la is a particle, like a pointer, connecting things on the right with the left side. 'chad pa is explanation.

The end is dang, so it means there's more, but for this case we could just ignore the follow-up and use a whole sentence in English.

So, to really understand this is to make boxes around the two particles, nas and la, and connect things together, nothing that the verb is at the end.

Another rough translation pass is: These branches taught only to the practice of single-pointed meditation from the eight chapter like that.

To do a better pass on this. "These branches" are sometimes explained referring to the single-pointed meditation practice taught in the eight chapter.

This sentence could be reworked even more, but let's stop here and continue with the next sentence. I think this gave us a flavor of how there's a need to redo and rework on sentences while we translate them.