I don’t know if this has been raised or not yet - but regarding navigating the Pāli Dhammapada. It seems it is given just as one long page, the whole text. If there were numbers, next to each verse, it would be a lot easier to navigate. For example I’m looking for verse 160. I would usually use the search function to search ‘160’. But as they are now, I would have to go to another website or book, find the verse, then either find the name of it, or a line of its Pāli text (which if I have already I might not need to be looking here anyway), in order to copy that and use the search function back on this site - quite longwinded.
Hi Senryu,
Not sure if this is what you want… but if you activate the textual information:
Then you will have the numbering on the right, like here for verse 160:
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Ah, thanks that does make it a bit easier! Though, if you do that and are searching for verse 5 for example, searcing ‘5’ gives you 293 instances of 5 on the page. Searching '5 ’ (a space after the 5) narrows it down to 15.
Also you have to be a bit of a geek (or have read your reply) to know that that is the way to find things. But I think a lot of users will be overlooked, because that will not occur to them (as it did not to me) and it’s still not straightforward.
With the other collections, we can find the individual suttas fairly easily (and will be more easy when the search function is fixed). Since the dhammapada is so popular, I really think it would be worthwhile making it similarly accessible, if possible. But I am no computer expert so I don’t know if it is feasable to do so.
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Maybe making a clickable table of contents would be a good solution? From this page for example:
https://suttacentral.net/dhp
Or maybe that is the plan? Currently it’s set into Vaggas on that page, such as:
Yamaka Vagga
Dhp 1-20
But whilst you can see parallels from there, you can’t actually go to the Pāli of that section. I can see only one button for the Pāli and that’s for the whole dhammapada in one long page.
The Theragāthā for example is easily navigable and you can see the numbered sections, and go straight tothe Pāli verse you want, from the main Theragāthā page:
https://suttacentral.net/thag
I have no idea sorry, you would have to ask the developers regarding the choice of layout for the Dhammapada vs Theragatha etc.
Please note we are still working on improving the Dhammapada and other socalled “division-length” texts (i.e. texts that appear on one page but where we would like to be able to jump to a specific section).
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