For a while I have been wondering if there is a way to access/filter by the difficulty-icon/ 'suitable for beginner/intermediate/advanced" so that one could point to suttas in MN for example, suitable for beginners?
Please excuse me if I’ve overlooked this feature and it already exists.
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I’m not aware of any way. Perhaps Bhante @Sujato this could be added to the new search project? I’m not clear where to add a suggestion for this. The re-search page doesn’t seem like a place for general ideas/comments.
In the mean time, there is the raw data on github:
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Thanks.
Now I will resist the urge to make my own quick’n’dirty sutta filtering thingy.
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This came up again recently.
Can you expand upon your idea? It seems to be about more than reader sophistication.
I am wondering if we can just incorporate it into the new search filter project.
@Snowbird what do you think?
something like in:DN easiness:1
As far as I know that’s feasible, but I can’t be sure.
Can you flesh out a user persona and how they might use something like this?
I’m trying to figure out why someone would both know that they wanted a sutta from the MN, and also knew that they wanted it to be of intermediate significance, say.
One thing to keep in mind is that currently we only have these levels assigned to the DN and MN. Assuming that this was expanded to also include the other texts (all other texts?) I’d be interested to hear ideas of how this would be used.
Can we imagine that someone does a search for meditation and then getting 773 results would hope to narrow it down to the “easy” suttas.
Seeing as how these levels are kind of subjective, I wonder if it would really be of value. To be clear, I’m not saying that it wouldn’t be. I’m just not sure.
I had someone in my discord group ask me how they can pull up all the easy suttas in MN as a starting point for their sutta study.
So it seems that someone would be looking for all suttas within a certain easiness range (probably easy) in a certain text.
Then they might ‘graduate’ to medium etc.
There might be other use cases, such as someone wanting an easy sutta on DO 
Hmmm this isn’t ideal. We’d have to make this clear I guess.
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Yes, currently there’s no interface for this, it’d be easy to add one. What UI would you think is useful?
Personally I think maybe if there was a curated list of suttas for beginners, then this could be added as a “further reading” link.
But TBH it’s not that complicated, just the suttas of DN and Mn are covered, so it’s not like there’s a massive amount of data to deal with.
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Personally, I think that a hard coded list of suggested suttas for beginners would be a better solution to the “someone wants to get started reading the suttas” problem.
I think that it’s certainly possible to say that some suttas are “difficult”, e.g. MN1 and some suttas are “easier”, e.g. MN21. But rating all suttas on this scale isn’t really possible or ultimately useful in my opinion. And it’s such a subjective rating system. Was there anything objective that these ratings were based on?
It also sets up a kind of mindset that I’m not sure is the healthiest one for approaching the suttas.
It just feels like this is the wrong solution to this problem.
I notice that the getting started page has links to external resources, but doesn’t contain an actual list of suttas to start reading immediately. I wonder if the person clicking on the getting started page link would be expecting to see a list of suttas.
Something like this (I didn’t actually filter!)
But maybe Ven Snowbird is right.
As an aside, there seems to be an interface bug with the Voice player in safari showing both the speaker and a play button. This doesn’t happen in Chrome. I will log it.
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The UI you propose makes perfect sense. I’m just not sure if it provides that much benefit to the user. You can see all of the beginner suttas by simply scanning down the page. Then you could just pick one.
Would that filter be present on only the shortcut to all suttas page?
Basically, I can understand how someone might benefit from seeing that a sutta was “advanced” before they decided whether or not to read it, which the interface now gives them. But I’m still not sure why someone would need a list of all the “beginner” suttas that filtered out all others. Because that list of beginner suttas is still undifferentiated. Of that long list, how would they decide which of those to read next? The first one? In that case, they could get to that point simply by looking at the list and stopping on the first easy sutta.
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