So I had this idea. It’s pretty simple one to implement, but I think, maybe could be really nice.
I got the idea indirectly from a talk at the Digital Buddhism conference by Christian Wittern. Just an amazing man! He’s built this system that allows user input for a taxonomy for texts. That’s great, but (a) it’s hard and (b) its, well, a taxonomy 
But the thing that he said that I cottoned on to was the idea that it was not about creating a systematic and perfect taxonomical system. It was about giving people a chance to work on something they are interested in.
So that really made me see it in a different light. Normally in Buddhist texts we’re obsessed with being systematic, with pinning everything down in the same way every where. And sometimes that’s but not everything has to be like that.
Then I thought, what could we do that would encourage people to add their own work in a way that was creative and uplifting, without being too determined by what we do on our side?
And I thought, well, what about images? There’s a long history of books with illustrations. Most web pages have some kind of image. Could we give users a way to upload images at specific points in suttas?
They could be anything. that’s the beauty of an image!
- An illustration of a scene
- a simple decorative element
- calligraphy
- a diagram or infographic
- let your imagination soar!
We’d need to set up the system on our back end, but that would be pretty simple.
Then there would have to be a vetting process with some standards. We want good quality work! Some someone, or a team of someones, would have to vet images before uploading, and we’d have to create some metadata with each image.
Obviously you’d be able to toggle them off if you just wanted text. I think for looking things up and so on just text is good, but if you’re settling down for a nice long read, a few images would make it nice! Wouldn’t it be great to read through the Mahaparinibbanasutta and see nice drawings of the Buddha and Ananda in all those places?
And so the idea would be to spark some creativity in our community, to get people creating and making, and finding ways to make the suttas more beautiful.
What do you think?
