Starting at dawn on Vesak (May 15th) you can receive a sutta each day in your email inbox. You can sign up today here:
In celebration of the Supreme Buddha’s birth, enlightenment, and passing away, the first month of suttas will relate directly to him and his life.
Selections will come from the first four nikayas and the first nine books of the Khuddaka Nikaya. Passages will range from a single verse to a 5–10 minute reading. They will all be hand curated and will often follow a theme.
Please pass this on to anyone you think may be interested.
Every single day?
Yep. Why not? If you don’t have time to read one day (or two, or three) you can always just delete them. But honestly if you don’t have 5 minutes each day to read a great sutta, then you may want to think about that.
Personally I think that a daily sutta reading practice independent of email and computers is probably best. But not everyone can do that all the time.
Special thanks to @animitto for starting this recent thread that got me thinking about it again.
But most of all I have so much gratitude for all the translators who have made their work available for sharing like this, especially Bhante @Sujato for making a complete translation free and open for reuse.
I also wanted to add that I’m happy to hear suggestions for improvements on the website, the email, or other ways you would like to get the daily suttas. You can post them here or just reply to any of the emails.
That’s great. It has come up on D&D now and again. Reaction has been mixed. But from a technical standpoint it’s not hard to automate. The only real work, and it’s quite enjoyable, is picking the suttas.
It’s been about 18 hrs since I anounced the site and there are already 43 people signed up. So maybe there is more of an interest than I thought.
In case folks were curious, the list now stands at around 230 signups, far more than I ever expected.
One thing that of course I have in mind is how to help people not feel frustrated or overwhelmed by the daily stream of emails. My current thinking is that folks should just delete emails if they don’t have time to read since all the emails are “archived” on the website, rather than have them build up and be a burden.
Hmm. It looks like you left this message around 2:15pm in Bodhgaya. The emails start getting mailed out at 5:30am BGT(Bodh Gaya Time; I just made that up) but because of server limitations, the final email doesn’t get sent until around 9:30am BGT.
You should for sure have gotten it by now. Check your spam. Did you get yesterday’s email warning that they were starting today?
Oh, sorry for any confusion… The emails go out starting at dawn BGT. I have no idea when each subscriber’s dawn is. So no matter where you are, the first email should have gotten to you. Plz check spam. Or the different social/update tabs if you use google.
Sorry about the insomnia. Maybe like Anathapindaka.
Right. I was trying to keep things simple. Wonder where it should go. I probably need a real footer for those kinds of things.
So, if you subscribed after 8 pm Saturday, then the first day’s emails will have already gone out. You should see the second day’s email sometime after 8 pm Sunday, possibly as late as midnight.
Yes, that is, sadly, to be expected. I’m afraid that the number of links (that people seem to really like) could be triggering it.
Yes, I include those mostly because I can. And because I recognize that people have preferences. If you ever want to check for SC, SF, DT or ABT (all websites) then you can use
So, the list has just passed 400 subscribers. Getting a few unsubscribes, but not many.
There was a screw up on my end that caused a bunch of emails not to be delivered. I hope to have it working tomorrow.
For anyone curious about what went wrong, most budget hosting providers put a limit on the number of emails that you can send per hour. I set the number of emails to be sent to be lower than that. But I didn’t factor in the fact that people would also be subscribing during the mailing process. So when they did, they were sent subscription confirmation emails and those emails bumped it over the limit.
For about two weeks there was a problem with sending to certain email addresses. So if you were in that group you may have noticed that you are suddenly getting the emails again.
I’ve exhausted my ideas for doing promotion, so I’d appreciate any ideas that folks had. The list is at 545 subscribers now. And there are usually around 100 views on social.
