Relaunch of my buddhavacana web site - apologies for broken links

The Watercooler
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Hi everyone

In 2022, I created my buddhavacana web site when I first started studying the Buddha’s teachings in earnest. My original intention was to provide a summary of what I have learnt and document my progress. After an initial flurry, the site lapsed as I realised the major impediment to my progress was not knowing Pali.

I studied Pali with sujato and johnk here in this forum in 2023. The site became a dumping ground for my Pali study notes. After that, I was engrossed in translating Kaccayana to English, and then a myriad of other projects, such as resurrecting the World Tipitaka Edition website, restoring the semi functional sakyadhita web site, and then commencing a Tipiṭaka translation project. Most recently I have created a second brain framework which I have cheekily called Khandhaja.

As the result, the website hasn’t received much love or attention, to the point I was becoming embarrassed by it. I also created it when I barely knew how to create websites (this was a skill I had acquired recently, I am not by profession a web developer). The website was created as a static site in Hugo using the Docsy theme, mainly because I wanted to be able to use Mermaid diagrams and other advanced features to create the content.

Now that I’ve learnt Typescript, all my newer websites are created in Astro.

So I’ve finally ported the website from Hugo to Astro with the Starlight documentation plugin. In the process, I have completely revised the content, incorporating material from my second brain framework, my translation project, and my increasing knowledge of Pali.

So almost all the content of the website is new, and it represents my current view about what the Buddha may have meant.

I have removed all references to the Pali Tipiṭaka from Suttacentral links to the World Tipitaka Edition, and have replaced all translations with my own translations.

I wish to apologise - due to the rewrite, all of the old links to the website will no longer work. It is not possible to maintain these links as the content has changed substantially. I have also removed all the Pali study notes and answers to Warder exercices - apologies if anyone had found them useful. The notes are still on the Github repository, they have just been unpublished from the production website.

The website is now feature complete and I am winding down my translation activities. I think I have translated all the major texts that I am interested in, and for various reasons I prefer to leave the rest untranslated. I am also moving on from studying the Pali canon to studying Sanskrit texts from other schools. The website features my translations of the Diamond and Heart Sutras from the Sanskrit editions, and in the future I may do more. My Sanskrit is not as good as my Pali, so I apologise in advance for errors and inaccuracies. I intend to resume my Kaccayana translation and still hope to finish that one day.

Anyway, here is the link to my buddhavacana website (the URL hasn’t changed, the content has):

Please note as I am wrapping up my studies as I feel I’ve reached the end of the journey and there is not much more for me to do, so I am not active on this forum or in any Buddhist oriented community. If you have any questions of comments, please message me and I will try and respond to you if I can.

I hope the information on the revamped website is useful to other people as it has been useful to me. However, as per the caveat on the website:

This is not a website intended to guide or teach others. In reading this website, you acknowledge that you are interested in understanding my current perspective, and it is not a recommendation or an exhortation for you.

Thank you for reading this, and once again apologies for any inconveniences if you have been relying on old links.

Finally I would like to thank anyone who has sponsored my journey in the last few years on Github - I know I’ve had a few sponsors - I hope the new site is some recompense for your support.

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Glad to see you branch out, Christie! :smiley:

Thanks for the update. I’ll get back to you once I’ve had some time to go through your updates. :slight_smile:

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Thanks @Dogen

Please note my translation of the Diamond Sutra is not from an edited edition but from transcriptions of the Schøyen and Gilgit manuscripts - which contain spelling errors etc - so it is possible I may have misinterpreted some of the content. I have cross checked my translation against Schopen and Harrison, and I assume their Sanskrit are a lot better than mine, so hopefully I’ve caught most of the errors. I don’t completely agree with their translations though, which is why I created mine.

Also both Shøyen and Gilgit are incomplete, what I am translating is a “Frankenstein” combination of the two. The Gilgit in particular is poorly scribed onto birch bark, there are some repeated passages in the text that seem out of place.

I have just commenced translating Aṣṭasāhasrikā Prajñāpāramitā Sūtra from the Digital Sanskrit Buddhist Canon website, but I didn’t realise what a long text this is - not sure I will complete it. Anyway, the Diamond Sutra is probably the earliest of the Prajñāpāramitā so maybe I should just be content with that and let it go.

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I’ve heard rumours to the effect that some Japanese scholars asserted this too, but I couldn’t track that down. Where can you lead me for some discussion on this matter?

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Actually, that was just my personal opinion. Based on the fragments of the Diamond Sutra that have been recovered so far, and the differences between the Schøyen and Gilgit manuscripts, I am guessing the sutra is a compilation of earlier smaller sutras, as compared to the later Praj sutras which are much better structured. The Sanskrit in the Diamond is also less structured, with sandhi often omitted.

It seems consistent with the theory that early Praj texts were the work of individual monastics spread across multiple sects (Mahayana started as a pan sectarian reformist movement without a separate ordination lineage). All of them documented the same concept, a response to the increasingly corrupted and ineffective agama texts. Later on someone must have collected all the good ones and strung them into the Diamond Sutra. Ie. the sutra to rule over them all and in the darkness bind them …

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Conze also seems to think first two chapters of Asta (not much different than Diamond Sutra tbh) were the first to be written down as well, from which rest of the sutra was built progressively. Those two chapters might be part of what you wonder here:

From EBT studies to EPT studies! :smiley:

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D&D typically does not support notice of other blogs or forums as ongoing threads unless there’s relevance for EBT discussions. We are closing the thread. Please continue further discussion through personal message.

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