Dhammaregen, a German website that had originally been developed as a companion website for Voice.suttacentral.net in German language, has now been released in a new shape. @karl_lew has been working hard together with me to create a site that presents both the suttas—with audio function—and some surrounding content.
Dhammaregen is the first prototype of our new developments, and we will soon present more details of this work.
Dhammaregen is sending newsletters about new translations and other things concerning EBTs every now and again, so if you are interested and understand German you may subscribe to our newsletter by sending an email to dhammaregen@gmail.com.
Read the first newsletter here. It includes an announcement of the Therigatha Festival to spread the news among German readers.
Thank you, Anagarika Sabbamitta. Your German translations have been quite inspiring. And your photographs bring a welcoming warmth to the new Dhammaregen site.
Thank you Venerable @Vimala and Anagarika @Sabbamitta for a wonderful presentation. My understanding of spoken German is quite limited, but I can tell that the audience was quite intrigued about contemporary German translations based on Bhante Sujato’s own English translations all presented on an accessible web page. People even noticed the example links in each sutta–these example links bind all the suttas in a memorable web of coherent meaning that lay a foundation for deeper understanding of the Dhamma. Bhante Sujato’s vision of “least interpretative translation” shines through in translation.
There was some question about existing German translations, many available only in print or in SuttaCentral, but I think that many in the audience understood that presenting the Pali alongside any translation provides a clear and certain basis for study. Indeed, Dhammaregen shows something the printed texts never could. Dhammaregen shows the connections between the suttas. With just one click Dhammaregen users can see connected suttas and freely wander through the Dhamma. With cookies enabled, Dhammaregen can also provide users with a historical list of over 100 suttas recently viewed and maintains bookmarks in each viewed sutta.
Anagarika Sabbamitta, thank you for your endless patience and diligence in translating the suttas into modern German! And thank you Bhante Sujato and the SuttaCentral iSangha for all your hard work bringing the Dhamma to the modern web.
I just want to add how absolutely beautiful the name of the site is - Dhammaregen ‘the rain of dhamma’. which is referring to the sutta AN10.61 where the Buddha gives the simile of the rain falling on the mountain tops, and how this makes it’s way down through the streams and lakes and rivers to fill the great ocean…
When I chose this name and this motto for the website I had no idea that this would be literally how the website is working, on a technical level:
The mountain top where the rain of Dhamma is falling is Bilara, where new translations are made. Translators then publish them, and SC admins accept their publish requests. This copies the new Sutta to another branch of the repository, the “published” branch.
From there we have various GitHub actions—these are scripts that run in defined intervals to do what they have been programmed for—, and these actions take the new Dhamma content and update step by step various other repositories that are involved in displaying the text correctly on the website.
So from the mountain top, the waters flow down step by step with the GitHub actions, until they arrive at the ocean of the Dhammaregen website, about 24 hours after they have been published.
No human intervention required, the water flows all by itself … just as in the simile. At some point I have called our GitHub actions beavers, who are building dams and open and close them in order to control the flow of the water in the right way … (too bad we have no beaver emoji!)
I am extremely impressed how smoothly this is working! This, to me, is one of the biggest wonders @karl_lew performed with his programmer’s magic wand …
Thank you, Viveka. SN12.67 is one of the suttas that clarifies how name/form and consciousness are mutually conditioned. The EBT-Site examples now include “bundles of reeds” as the unique mnemonic for SN12.67. We do indeed all support each other.
SN12.67:7.5: In the same way, name and form are conditions for consciousness. SN12.67:7.6: Consciousness is a condition for name and form.
