I’m starting this thread to discuss the new “Discuss & Discover” feature that we are rolling out soon on Suttacentral. Essentially what this does is that when you open the sidebar for any text, it shows you the relevant posts for that text here on Discourse. So if I write, say, MN56, in this thread, as soon as I save this post it will appear in the sidebar at http://staging.suttacentral.net/pi/mn56, and at any translations. I just checked, and yep, it’s there!
Let me give some background as to what I want from this feature, and then discuss the implementation.
One of the main features of SuttaCentral is that it has only the canonical texts. We’ve gone to a lot of trouble to remove footnotes, introductions, and so on. This was essential, firstly from a technical point of view, supporting them would be so difficult as to be impossible. More importantly, from a philosophical point of view, we are about what the Buddha said, not what someone said about the Buddha.
Now, from the first days people have liked to discuss the Buddha’s teaching, and there are plenty of instances of this in the Suttas themselves. This tradition evolved into what we know as the “Commentaries”. In Pali, these are called aṭṭhakathā. The commentaries are of overwhelming importance in traditional Theravada, so much so that in practice Theravada is often the teaching of the commentators.
In modern times the commentaries have come under a lot of criticism. But the main problem, I think, is not with the commentaries themselves, but in the fact that they have become virtually canonical. When we have a major respected Buddhist teacher like Pa Auk Sayadaw saying things like, “As the Buddha said in the Aṭṭhasālinī”, which is an Abhidhamma commentary written nearly a thousand years after the Buddha’s death, we have a serious problem with historical perspective.
In modern times, the commentarial tradition has been largely supplanted or adapted as footnotes, introductions, and so on. In some cases, like say Ven Bodhi’s Majjhima translation, many of the footnotes are simply summaries of what the commentary says. In other cases footnotes are independent of the commentaries, but they still play a similar role.
Footnotes and the rest of the textual apparatus involve two quite separate kinds of things, which we need to carefully distinguish. The first is the need—universal and human—to talk about things of importance. The second is the specific manner in which this discussion has been carried out.
The latter is bound and determined by technology. A footnote, or indeed an introduction, is a book thing. You read an introduction at the start, before going on to the main thing, a concept that doesn’t really apply on the web. A footnote is at the “foot” of the page, another book-derived notion. This shows up in all kinds of ways in how these things are handled. Just one specific example. Lets say we have a Buddhist technical term, say “aggregates”, which is difficult to convey in translation. So we have a note. In a book, the note appears at the first occurrence of the term, or in a prominent context. But no-one reads the suttas one after the other on the web, so where do you put the note? You can, if you want, put it every time the word occurs, something that is technically impossible in a book.
In addition to these issues of form, there is also the problem of content. I’ve seen lots of footnotes by lots of authors, and, well, maybe this is just me getting old and cranky, lots of them seem of limited use, or dubious, or highly technical, or just plain wrong. Yet when they are included in a book, they assume a quasi-canonical status. They are there, right with the text, and they worm their way into your mind as the “right” way of reading a text, even if you consciously know this is not the case.
On the other hand, it is obvious that the Suttas do have lots of things that need some explanation, things that are deep or with context lacking and so on. So we need something, but something that goes beyond the static possibilities of books.
I’d like to get back to the original idea, found in the Suttas, and the origin of the commentarial tradition, of a “discussion of the meaning”. Rather than a single, authoritative voice telling us what the Sutta “means”, we can learn from, and contribute to, a culture of progressively informed opinion, experience, and knowledge. And that is what this Discourse platform is for.
So, we can create a rich environment for learning the suttas, but we need to connect that with the texts themselves. The connection shouldn’t be too close, so that the text and the comment is confused, but neither should it be too distant, so that someone reading the sutta doesn’t know where to find help.
This concept of distance is one of the features of Discourse. It is built so as to host comments, but especially comments on a separate site, rather than at the foot of the page (although it is possible to do that as well.)
So what we do is we pull Topics where suttas are discussed, via the Discourse API, into the sidebar. If @blake gets a moment, maybe he’ll share the technical details of how this is done. Currently we are an initial implementation, and I’m sure much improvement will happen. But the basic function is working fine already.
I’ll leave this discussion here as the main topic, and below I’ll raise some questions of details.