Buddhism: A Guide to Research (Second Edition)

Of course it is also my goal, Venerable. But there is more than one way to skin a cat, and in an online environment that is already fairly poisonous, we cannot be too vigilant with our tone and our choice of words - that is, with the manner in which we express criticism. It goes without saying that all your suggestions, here and in your email, in and of themselves, are important and valuable, and I will implement them or otherwise respond to them in my future replies as I see fit. But I don’t think it violates right speech or rescinds my acceptance of your apology to tell you that you have handled a perfect stranger, who did something he thought could help you (yes, even you), very roughly by not watching your tone and making provisions for the fact that we are complete strangers to one another, and above all that I am a complete stranger to this forum and its practices. Never having met you, not knowing your manners, your attitude, your voice, or your expertise, and you never having met me, not knowing my manners, my attitude, my voice, or my expertise, it is irresponsible of you to assume, for instance, that something about the layout of my guide communicates my ignorance of the fact that Ch’an precedes Zen, not the other way around (I knew this well before you volunteered it), that using Zen as an umbrella term is problematic and reflects a distinctly American frame of reference (I knew this too, and regretted it, but adopted it for strategic reasons I will relate in due course), that Zen is a Mahāyāna tradition and thus rightly belongs in that section of the guide (knew that too, but this gets into design, approachability, and pragmatic issues that I will address in future replies), that Tibetan/Vajrayana Buddhism is rooted in Mahāyāna but depends on Theravāda in important ways (yeah, knew that too), that I mistakenly included some properly Mahāyāna-oriented items in Theravāda areas of the guide (for which I can only say I am terribly sorry I was incapable of reading and digesting 4,000 books this year; perhaps you did, so I congratulate you), and on and on. Your points about divisiveness and sectarianism frankly say more about your concerns and agendas than mine: again, as I say below, I can only represent what is there for me to represent, and if the literature communicates itself in a way that is divisive and sectarian, then my presentation can only follow suit. Anything else is editorializing and tendentiousness, which have no place in bibliography. Above all, by suggesting that your interlocutor, for instance, has made errors that render him or his work “hilarious,” or by making high-handed and patronizing remarks about the ludicrous conclusions one must draw on the basis of various of my choices, you make yourself no friends. Reading your email in the further context offered by the lower depths of this forum thread did not help the case for your alleged innocence, considering the undue merriment to which the shortcomings of my work have given rise, but I have no choice but to read and understand what others write within conditions, once again. There you have it.

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Thank you, sujato. I look forward to your continued engagement here.

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Thank you, Viveka, for your sensitive and well-attuned response. In my own study of Buddhism, possibly unlike many other students and practitioners, I have, mirabile dictu, placed the study of Early Buddhism first - I have spent much of the last year working through the major Nikayas, and now, as I already mentioned, I am learning Pāli. I likewise hope I can make a positive contribution to dialogue here and through my guide, and especially to give Early Buddhism a fuller and richer representation than that to which it has historically been subject.

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Dear mkicey, Just letting you know that the email to which you refer, was a private matter, and is not posted or public knowledge on the forum. As such, readers will not know to what you are referring. If you wish to address this further may I please urge you to use the PM facility :pray:

Now… @mkicey I would like to formally welcome you to the forum :slight_smile: We look forward to your participation. If there is any way that we can be of assistance, or if you have any questions please just ask, tag @moderators, or send us a PM.

Metta :thaibuddha: :dharmawheel: :revolving_hearts:

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Your administrative point is well taken, Viveka, and I will continue off-thread with Ven. if he responds. Thank you for your words of welcome.

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You probably already know them, but what comes to my mind is:

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Here are some more remarks on an issue with the guide raised on this thread: diacritical marks.

In the video interview, I discuss in some detail the web platform I used to create the Buddhism guide, which is called LibGuides and is licensed by a company called SpringShare. It’s a very straightforward web design platform with modular Bootstrap-based features, customized with an eye towards the kinds of information and resources librarians are likely to want to promote on webpages. Because it’s modular and easy-to-use for people who don’t know coding languages, it conceals from the user (read: removes from her control) most of the more complicated and more customizable coding going on in the background. (To be fair to SpringShare, there are ways to do manual coding inside LibGuides, and I did quite a lot of that, but it’s on the fly and you have jailbreak the interface a bit to do it.) LibGuides applies its own stylesheet to what the user creates, and then my organization (University at Buffalo - SUNY, USA) applies its own stylesheet on top of that. The result of all this complexity is that for most purposes and with very little wiggle room otherwise, all LibGuides have to use a standard typeface selected not by me but by our web designer, the University branding specialist, and possibly also people concerned with web accessibility.

All of this goes to say: the sans serif typeface you see on the guide (I don’t even know its miserable name) was not chosen by me, and as soon as I started to use it to represent transliterated names and terms on the guide, I quickly discovered that although in edit view these characters looked perfectly acceptable, they looked like garbage in published view. The default typeface supports hardly any of the more advanced diacritical marks needed for, say, Pāli, Sanskrit, or Japanese, and the browser has to fall back to an alternate typeface to represent those characters. The clean, coherent, and appealing look of the pages immediately turns to a kind of typographical tossed salad - and that is not the way I want to represent my own or other people’s work, correct though it may be.

Representing non-Western languages with the full array of diacritical marks is actually a very important value to me, because doing so not only represents the phonetic values of these languages accurately and communicatively, and in ways that scholars will understand and respect, but also honors the fact that not all languages can be reduced to the phonemes ordinarily represented by the Latin alphabet. In essence, preserving diacritics preserves cultural difference, specificity, and a certain degree of incommensurability. Samsara is simply not the same thing as saṃsāra. By showing that one character set is not entirely adequate for representing the sounds of other languages, we combat the corner-cutting, reductionism, and yes, imperialism that simply approximates what is distinct and genuinely foreign (in the good sense) to what is broad and familiar. This meticulous reproduction of cultural difference can only, in the long run, be of benefit to people who wish to gain a clear-headed, unadulterated, and sophisticated experience of Buddhist traditions, which took definitive shape in contexts far removed in time, space, and temperament from contemporary America or Europe. If I said, in my note on the homepage, that I regret not being able to reproduce diacritical marks, it’s because I meant it: I do regret it, and still regret it, because it’s a real loss.

It’s true that I perhaps could have launched a more concerted campaign to gain more control over my character set, but without adding inordinately to the background coding I would have had to do, this would also mean I negotiate with our more or less intransigent in-house web designer to change the stylesheet for all the guides in our system - and I simply don’t have the tech know-how, the time, or the patience to undertake that. I have experience with HTML, CSS, and a little bit of JavaScript, but my entire training is in classical languages, comparative literature, literary and political theory, and philosophy: I know just enough code to get by in my profession, and produce guides like the one you’ve seen, but not enough to climb into the engine compartment and build a new car from within. So I was left with the choice of possibly spending years producing a guide that in substance would be not much different from the one you’ve seen, or spending six months and getting a still high-quality piece of work into circulation as quickly as possible. You see which option I took.

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Thank you so much, belatedly, for sharing my work and the video and starting this thread, @Robbie. It has driven hundreds of hits to my guide, and that means that people stand a better chance of finding what they need, which is my purpose first and last. Thank you also for your extremely generous praise and in particular your favorable comparison with the Oxford Bibliographies, which is a hard mark to beat.

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Thank you, @karl_lew, for your helpful suggestion of an addition. I have added it to the More Masters, More Teachings gallery on the Zen pages. An alternate translation of the Lin-chi lu also appears there: The Zen Teachings of Master Lin-chi, translated by Burton Watson. Thank you again.

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(Since the Discourse software disallows more than three consecutive replies by the same person, I am posting here to unluck the thread for @mkicey)

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