Warm greetings,
I enjoyed reading through the bibliography at Sutta-Central, found many promising titles for potential further study. I would like to suggest as a potential improvement that categorized bibliographies are perhaps also created. For example including bibliographies about topics such as the dating of the Buddha and others, so one would have not have to search all over but would have a condensed list of relevant references at ones disposal. I am creating a bibliography at present for personal use, about the topic mentioned in the example, and would be happy to contribute. How does this sound to you? Have you thought about this before, but dismissed it for some reason?
Our bibliography is actually an old one, which was mostly supplied as part of the original research done by Rod. It hasn’t been maintained, and probably could do with a substantial update. If you’re developing your own bibliography, we’d be happy to take suggestions.
We hadn’t thought about categorized bibliography, and have no opinions about it one way of the other.
Should I post the biblio or send it, so somebody could have a look at it? Or how did you think? I thought it being perhaps generally useful for individual studies to have access to specific, categorized bibliographies online (at s-c?), which one could, in due course of ones own research, again maybe enlarge. Other people here have surely some good knowledge as to wide ranging resource materials, so in this way one would give them a chance to share and give others directions more effectively. That was my thinking …
Dear Ven @Thanuttamo
I think posting it here or creating another discussion would be very helpful. I seem to recall there are some other biblioagraphies in various discussions, not sure where.
I didn’t even know there was one on SC; where is it?
Well, I would suggest posting it here as a post, or maybe a series of posts, if they are to be different categories. But it depends on how it’s formatted. If we can get it into a nice structured format it’ll be easy to post it here or adapt it for the main site if we so decide.
Like I said, it’s way out of date; for example, it only lists one essay by Analayo! But as it stands it is mainly a bibliography of the field prior to the early noughts (plus a few later publications), especially things that were useful for establishing the parallels. Note that it doesn’t include the texts I used for the Vinaya parallels, or those used by Ayya Vimala for the Dhammapada parallels.
Okay I will do that. I am afraid that single posts, however, might easily disappear and also that others, and I myself, cannot add sources, but you have the data now at least, still not much though (altogether just some 24 papers and miscellanea) … It suits probably best in the meta category!? I put it there for now.
I think there are two kinds of bibliography, and we need to decide what kind this is.
A limited bibliography that applies to a particular work at a particular point in time, eg. an essay.
A general bibliography for a field or topic, eg. “studies in early Buddhist texts”.
The first, of which the current biibliography on SC is an example, is easier to do and should probably not be a wiki, but be presented by one person.
The second would benefit from being a wiki, but it is hard to do well, and the indefinite scope makes it less likely to succeed.
One way of balancing this would be to have a central post which is a list of bibiographies, and multiple limited bibliographies there. The problem would be to avoid duplication.
Speaking of which, has anyone checked what else is out there? Is someone maintaining a list of references that we could use, or maybe even just refer to?
Dear Linda,
I created a wiki-page now. I actually would be happy to see it all in one place somehow, not just piecemeal here and there, that’s what I am afraid of would be continued, when creating it in ‘discussion’.
Just to let you know, the category “wiki” does not make something automatically a wiki. Confusing, I know! To make a post a wiki, i.e. so that anyone may edit it, enable that from the toolbar at the bottom of the post. I have done this for your post already.
