We finally launched the site in cooperation with the Numata Centre of Buddhist Studies at the University of Hamburg and the Khyentse Center for Tibetan Buddhist Textual Scholarship!
So now you can use it to find parallels within Pali, Sanskrit, Tibetan and Chinese.
We are working on multi-lingual matches, especially between Sanskrit and Tibetan first and later between Pali and Sanskrit. But this will take a while before we upload this. It is rather complicated to calculate these with the limited resources we have. You can however use the known parallels on SuttaCentral to find a starting point within another language.
Because the site is rather complicated, I created some unofficial videos to show you how you can use this and how it links to texts in SuttaCentral. I thought it would be easier to do this than to try and type it all out.
Now I am far from a professional video creator but I hope it gives a bit of an idea of how you can use the site. Note that the screencapture software I used seems to sometimes miss pop-ups and dropdowns, especially in the second video. Some of the features on the site changed a bit since I made the video. F.i. sutta/PTS-number search is now available on all texts in all views except Graph view. There is also a copy button to allow you to copy text names to clipboard and the possibility in Numbers View to choose between opening the full text in SuttaCentral or BuddhaNexus.
If you want to know more about how the Neural Network works and the algorithms used, you can find that information in the static pages of the site.
Some examples on how BuddhaNexus.net can be used for finding parallels:
The overall design looks great. I’d certainly like to explore the site a bit more in detail when I find the time, which at the moment is rather not the case …
Sadhu!
Ven, @vimala, please let me know if you / the project team plans to have some of the contents translated into Portuguese.
I am willing to help and know of a couple of other volunteers would be as well honored to contribute!
Sorry to hear that @sabbamitta. I recal you had difficulty before joining Zoom sessions too. Could it be your internet connection? I’m on 4G and it seems to be working well and reasonably fast considering the huge amount of data.
We have a total of over 220 million matches so that is a lot of data and we have been struggling with speed on larger files but those issues seem to have been sorted since. So some slowness is to be expected for people in regions where internet is not that great but I would not think Germany is one of those.
The site is best viewed on larger screens. On mobile phones or tablets it will be a bit hopeless!
Well, my internet is not the fastest, nor is my computer. Probably the combination of both is what makes the effect. I can use the site, but it’s really pretty slow. Without having a video call, it’s about as slow as for other sites while having a video call. They take rather long to load.
It differs in different regions. There’s not everywhere fast internet. Mine is somewhat “middle fast”—or “middle slow” …
I am also having difficulties with Voice sometimes for downloading a Sutta.
I tested out the Chinese part of the site. It looks good. Being able to select a Taisho text and then a fascicle makes navigate the large Agama collections much quicker. Even given the variation in Chinese translations, this should be a great way to track down parallels that are hiding in places we wouldn’t expect to look for them. Thanks for all the work that went into this!
New article on BuddhaNexus just came out on the Digital Orientalist.
SuttaCentral is also mentioned (as well as on the BN site) so if anybody ever wants to attempt to write another Wikipedia page, here are some references to mention.
