Should suttacentral includes tibetan, Pali and Chinese commentaries and sub commentaries in the future?

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I want to know not just ebts but how the northern and southern Buddhism develop their line of thinking over time
and how different and similar they are, I want to know how medieval monks practice meditation and how different and similar their practices are compared to others at that time, since all this information are contained in commentary and sub commentary I call the commentary and sub commentary as past snapshot which would enable us to look at the past

I believe it’s possible that we could see suttacentral to include the commentaries and sub commentaries from tibetan,Pali and Chinese sources at least 50 years and 100 years in the future but I am afraid I no longer live at that time

just my 2 cents
thanks
metta to you and your mother :heart:

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let’s add poll, so what do you think to my suggestion ?

  • yes I think it’s a good idea
  • I think suttacentral should focus more on ebts

0 voters

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I would love if Sutta Central would include all translation of all types of Buddhist canons and their commentaries as well as important classical Buddhist texts, and the discussion on EBT be compartmentalised so that those who are interested in EBT can discuss about it within that space.

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I am interested in clear parallels and intriguing differences between such texts, particularly when it comes to practice. I think I’m motivated primarily by unity between different groups within Buddhism.

Whether or not this is a reasonable request is not for me to decide, and it might better be taken up by another group: what you ask for might be quite a difficult task.

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First of all, I’m new to this kind “EBT” and “non-EBT” classification, so that I’m unfamiliar. But as I have similar suggestion as this title, I just want to express what I think here.

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Commentaries and sub-commentaries (the Atthakatha and Tika) of the Pali Canon as approved by the Chatta Sangayana are well-attached to each sutta on (tipitaka.app), we just have to click that “A” or “T” on the upper left side. This kind of interface is very possible to be applied on SuttaCentral.

I just think that it can be placed somewhere under the " translations in other modern languages" as “commentaries” for each sutta.

Whether Atthakatha and Tika are considered as non-EBT or EBT (it’s going to be a very long discussion), I think to serve them is going to be very helpful.

Thank you :heart:

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Sorry, I missed this at the time, so let me explain my position on this.

SC should focus on EBTs, i.e. the scope we currently cover, or else the size of the project gets out of hand. We are just a few people and the amount of Buddhist texts is huge. To get an example of the difference, the root texts we currently use have perhaps 10 million words, whereas with the expanded scope it would be many hundreds of millions of words.

However, SC’s data technologies are extremely good and highly suitable for expansion. In particular, our bilara-data format is, IMHO, the best way of handling Buddhist texts that there is. We have, in fact, already been in discussions with scholars of the Lingae Dharmae project:

Their focus is on making machine translations for scholarly work. But the underlying idea is that all the texts could be adapted to use bilara-data format.

This is really the critical thing. Forget applications. The hard part is the data. Once you have the data in a single, unified and predictable form, it is simple to make any number of applications to use that, whether it is for reading, translating, analyzing, etc.

So no, we won’t feature later texts on SC, or at least, we won’t devote our time to compiling and translating, etc. But we are happy to work with others who aim to do that, and once completed it will be simple to integrate them.

They’re not. The EBTs are those texts that can be reasonably thought to have been created in the Buddha’s lifetime or by the early Buddhist community before the split into schools. Effectively that means the Suttas and Vinaya, although not everything in there is early. We also include the Abhidhamma for completeness, even though only a small portion can be traced before the schisms. We also have some Sanskrit texts that are late (eg. Lalitavistara) but which include portions that quote early Suttas, as well as later treatises if they quote extensively from Suttas (eg. Upayika).

Thus the content on SuttaCentral is an “inclusive” idea of the EBTs; we aim to include all texts and collections that might contain at least some significant content from the early period.

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I’ve come across this website https://palitranslation.org/ which appears to be a collaboration between SC and OCBS. It suggests that there are a bunch of commentaries included in the section “Texts already translated but not on Sutta Central”. I’m wondering if these texts are available anywhere yet?

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Before SuttaCentral came along, Buddhist translations on the Web were mostly rooted in extant Buddhist traditions. There would be sites oriented primarily around Theravada, Chinese Mahayana, Japanese Zen, Tibetan Vajrayana, etc. They often viewed older texts through the lens of (much) later tradition.

SuttaCentral was unique because it was based primarily around the early Buddhist texts, trying to uncover shared textual traditions in a way that was fairly non-sectarian. I still think that is its special quality.

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It’s in abeyance due to lack of funding. The idea was that Alex Wynne would organize the Pali scholars and SC would provide the tech. Still open to proceed if funding comes through!

Indeed, yes thanks! That will always remain our priority. I’m happy to support work on later texts, which might either end up in a separate application or linked to SC in some way. It’d be handy, for example, to be able to check a commentary text/translation with a click.

As I do my notes for the Pali suttas, in the back of my mind I am assuming that something like that will come along soon-ish, so I don’t need to do what Ven Bodhi did and summarize the commentary in the notes.

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