danieLion wrote:What standard or authority can we refer to determine if Pali's better than Chinese, Tibetan, Sanskrit, or other languages of early Buddhist discourse?
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Daniel
This is not such an easy issue to address.
It is true that many Chinese translations are able to have a consistent use of formal, prepositional and syntactic techniques to render the highly inflected Indic very faithfully. Even if transliteration mistakes are made, scholars such as Ven Analayo are able to identify these and point to a different Indic word as the source. Sometimes, the Pali sutta and its Chinese parallel look almost like carbon-copies, eg DN 15 and its Dharmaguptaka parallel in the Taisho's Dirgha, so there's hardly a basis to say which is better than the other.
Yet, it clear that sometimes the Chinese can furnish better readings. Missing passages from the Pali can be found in the Chinese parallels, sometimes fitting in so neatly that it can be made to fit into a putative ola leaf that was lost. Critical editing of Pali variant readings are many times resolved on the basis of Agama parallels. At the same time, we can see that Chinese parallels are translated according to Abhidharmic terminology to which a translator may ascribe to. Some critical work is needed to try to identify the original Indic, and in such cases, the Pali is unfiltered.
However, at this point in time, when scholarship is just beginning to dive into the mass of early Buddhist literatures, it will be sometime before your question can be answered definitively, if at all.