well in case anyone's interested in following up on this further using the la trobe university on line search engine a search for the term mah purisalakkha truncated to allow for various inflections leads to bjt record hits at least of which are in the pali canon here's the first page of the search results with links to the subsequent pages as well of course this is by no means a straightforward indicator of how many discourses actually reference this term nor what this term means in the context of various suttas since multiple records can be part of a single sutta similarly this is not a clear reflection of the total number of times that this term appears in the pali literature as a single record could have multiple instances of the term and their might be other ways of formulating this phrase not addressed by the above truncated compound term etc fwiw a quick review of these results potentially suggestive of the distribution of this term in the various nikayas shows hits in the digha nikaya in the majjhima nikaya none in the samyutta nikaya in the anguttara nikaya and in the canonical khuddaka nikaya mostly in the suttanipata in the paracanonical kn words e g netti peta one in the abhidhamma's kathavatthu once in the visuddhimagga and times in the pali histories if nothing else this distribution perhaps suggests that suttas identified by peter and myself might possibly be among the core texts with metta talk