Hello, I registered as a user here just today. I think the feature associating AV/Essays with suttas could be very useful. Ideally when I’m in the mood I would like to add lots of resources in one sitting, although I understand from the point of view of Discourse discussion forum this will look like spam. Is it possible to increase daily post limit on request?
I think it would be nice to split up talk series such as this
sutta by sutta like this
so that they can be easily found in the Discuss and Discover list when viewing a sutta on the main site.
At the moment I think it would be nice to have a thread each for all of Piya Tan’s sutta focused youtube talks, then his dharmafarer.org essays, then Bhikkhu Bodhi’s sutta focused talks (audio and video), then Analayo’s Chinese agama focused essays.
That way one would get quite significant coverage of the whole canon in an easily navigable format.
Thanks so much for your offer of help. Don’t worry about looking like spam, it’s not spam if we want it! I don’t think there is a maximum number of posts/day, but if you run into any limits let me know.
I would love to have links for all Piya’s material, in fact he was one of the people I first thought of! Also Vens Bodhi and Analayo, of course.
You seem to have a good grasp of what is required, but just to repeat: the most important thing is to have the exact SuttaCentral sutta ID in the title or post. In some cases this might differ from the ID as used in the talk, especially for the Anguttara and Samyutta. In such cases, one workaround is to give the original reference as used in the talk/essay in a human-readable form, then specify the machine readable SC ID. For example, “Essay on Samyutta 12, sutta 3 (SC ID: SN 12.4)”. As long as the ID is there somewhere, we’ll link to it.
Is hosting 86 MB mp3s on suttacentral OK, or would it be better to host such files on Google Drive? https://discourse.suttacentral.net/t/ma1-ma2-an7-68-an7-69-analayos-madhyama-agama-lectures-2011-1-11/1904
I have no preference. Hosting the files on discourse.suttacentral looks neater and it means not getting caught up in the identity tracking network of google apps. On the other hand on Google Drive you can upload several files in a queue, and there’s also less stress on suttacentral servers.
Thanks for asking. I think it would be better to have them here. As far as I know, server stress is not an issue, and if it becomes so we can just increase our horsepower.
Dear Sujato, I have a large amount of original audiovisual material, most of which is on my YouTube channel. I would be happy to post the links here. However I am concerned that because I am rather opinionated and independent-minded, some people may be offended.
Basically, my concept is Suttānta: that the Suttas are the prime source of the Buddha’s teaching, and that derivative works like the Commentaries and Abhidhamma should be read critically to avoid being led astray. Further, much of the material in the Commentaries appears to be based on speculative grammatical techniques imported from South Indian Hinduism, specifically the school of Śāṅkarācārya, who used similar techniques in his commentaries on Vedānta. Also, these have the effect of introducing a yogic and religious framework not found in the Suttas that dilutes their remarkable stylistic uniformity, logical consistency and ontological coherence.
Finally, since the Buddha presented his teachings in the context of Vedic thought, some background is needed for contemporary people to appreciate the Suttas properly. Many early translations suffer from lack of this context, so I attempt to provide it. Philosophically I pretty much follow Buddhadāsa Bhikkhu and Bhikkhu Ñāṇananda, my mentor. Would this view be acceptable on SC?
Nice to see you here! We don’t really have any rules as far as user submissions go. If you have any translations of Pali texts, you are welcome to post them here, on our forum, in the translation category.
If you would like to have your translations considered for inclusion on our main site, maybe you could start by letting us know a little bit about yourself, what your experience is, and what translation work you’ve been doing.
It’s a matter of discerning what needs to be translated next. I’ve noticed that the best translations are still in copyright. The ones that can be freely reproduced are often not the best.
Wow! I do approve of your translation goals, namely, plain English and no copyright. We need translations that speak to ordinary people, not fussy/literal ones that show off the translator’s knowledge of Pali. But 18 months??? I think you’d have to work hard to do MN alone in 36 months.
You’re most welcome to post links to any material dealing with Pali here, so long as it does not contravene copyright. Just make a thread, and give it a nice descriptive title. It’d be helpful to make a list of files in the post.
I have gathered a collection of audio talks inspired by the teachings found in the early Buddhist texts—mostly by such respected teachers as Ajahn Brahm, Ajahn Brahmali and of course yourself!—I would like to share here.
All audio talks are encoded in 16kbps-11kHz-Mono mp3 format (without significant loss from the original recording) which enables easy access even on slow mobile connections (at approximately 8 MB per hour). Nonetheless the entire archive is approximately 30 GB in size, so before I start uploading away please let me know if this will cause any storage problems on the server side.
And since Sutta Central is not only such an amazing resource content-wise—for which I extend my deepest gratitude and respect—but also designed with a sense for beauty and ease of access, just posting a bunch of links would not do. So I figured I can put up something like this (in a not-too-burdensome semi-automatic way):
Most data is extracted directly from the mp3 tags, so not much work there, and since Discourse is such a smart platform it references uploaded files with their SHA1 hash, which actually allows for the markdown in the examples to be generated beforehand (so at the time of posting not all download links will resolve yet, but will work once the files are uploaded to D&D). The only laborious part will be uploading the files themselves since I’m on a fairly usable mobile connection with a large enough cap.
I was striving for simplicity so everything in the example is pure markdown, the table layout even looks decent on the mobile device. If you have any other design or content consideration I will appreciate any input.
Thank you for the opportunity to share this resources with all the friends in the dhamma and thank you (and the entire team behind SC and D&D) for all the hard work behind the scenes to make this the greatest access point to the teachings of the Buddha!
Hi Musiko, that is great, thank you so very much. As you say, they look great.
The only thing, I’d suggest putting these on their own threads, each course or whatever on a single thread. It makes it easier for someone to find. You should be able to just copy and paste from your post here.
and respect—but also designed with a sense for beauty and ease of access, just posting a bunch of links would not do. So I figured I can put up something like this (in a not-too-burdensome semi-automatic way):