Sutamaya: a study app for the Pali suttas

The Watercooler
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Dear friends,

Since I discovered Bhikkhu Sujato’s work on segmenting the Pali & English to correlate them, I was fascinated by the possibilities. It also made it significantly easier for me to study the Canon because now I could just check any Pali word in the dictionary if any meaning was ambiguous, which would tremendously help in understanding.

Ever since, I have been using multiple tools to help me: store, categorize, bookmark and highlight suttas. I have had JavaScript injected into SuttaCentral to make it behave more to my liking. A bit of a Frankenstein job, which I couldn’t take with me anywhere else outside of my home computer. As a result – and as an ex-developer – building an app that was going to meet all of these needs was lurking on my mind.

As such, after a full month of hard coding work (which would’ve taken me a year or more without the help of AI), a new app called “sutamaya” was born.

My goal with this (progressive web) app was to meet all the aforementioned functionalities, but above all:

  • To have it snappy: fast and native-feeling
  • To offer a beautiful reading experience (similar to Apple Books)
  • To work on any device, anywhere.
  • To synchronize all of your data
  • To work offline.

And the most important thing was to continue to be able to click any English segment to reveal its Pali, along with clicking any Pali word to reveal the DPD entry.

You can see it here: https://sutamaya.org/.

Do note that some of the terms in the English translation have been modified, and this is explicitly stated on each and every sutta, as well as on the Help page, landing page footer, and other places. I have made these changes to make it easier for myself to understand and read within my own tradition, and I am hoping it will not put others off. I tried to stay faithful to DPD, the Pali, and mainstreams translators of the Canon. The full table of changes is linked on the website but I will leave a link here as well.

I would like to offer my depth of gratitude to Bhante Sujato for creating the possibility to do this, and for allowing me to use his texts in this way.

Looking forward to hearing your feedback, and please let me know if you find any bugs :slight_smile:

P.S. A short 4-minute walkthrough through the desktop view of the app can also be seen here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=teNMmoVf5Y0

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Sutta Pitaka App (Work in Progress) – Feedback and Collaboration Welcome
Research & translation app based on sc-data
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Hey! Thank you for this app. Its really cool. :slightly_smiling_face: :bouquet:

A suggestion about the modified terms. I understand your reasoning - these are terms that many disagree upon - therefore if one must replace them, perhaps it might be better to replace them with the untranslated pali?

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Thank you for looking :folded_hands:

About the modified terms, I have considered exactly what you are saying and am still thinking about it. If more people will request it, I may do that. For what it’s worth, a lot of them are replaced with the untranslated Pali already.

I want to make it 100% clear that I don’t disagree with those terms. I think immersion is a beautiful word that really paints the experience of samadhi correctly. I also think “choices” is a wonderful colloquial term for sankhara. It just doesn’t hit home for me in terms of meditation jargon because I’m already programmed differently when reading those

For those of you who have visited the app before, before I made this post here – you may be holding an old version in cache and not be able to see the latest. If so, you would have to clear all site data for sutamaya.org in order to see that. I added a 1-year cache to make it stick offline and be fast, but in hindsight it might’ve not been the best choice. I’m looking into fixing that…

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Can put the option to have pali first, then english second?

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That is a very nice idea, never thought of that. I will collect all the feedback I get and see what I can squeeze in at the end. Do you usually read like that?

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For those who have learnt Pali, it might be more of a test to see if one can directly read from the Pali first without needing to resort to English, but occasionally when one gets stuck, can see what’s the answer.

Yes, if I have the time and mental capacity to read the Pali, I prefer to put it on top.

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Nice app!

I second the suggestion to have the option to switch to Pali. I use an iOS app that’s very similar. It’s nice to know that I have the option!

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It would be nice to add this, and I think not very complicated. My only concern is related to the actual experience. Right now every Pali word is clickable to reveal a dictionary entry, how would this work if one would expect to click the Pali to reveal the English? There would have to be a different mechanism for it, but that would be counterintuitive, and dropping the dictionary reveal is not a good idea I think …

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This is not expected. Just that after clicking English to reveal Pali, have an option somewhere to put Pali on top of English.

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Ok, I see. For that I think it’s enough to go to the Menu, show Pali always and just live with English being on top like it is on SuttaCentral today.

What I initially understood was that you wanted to hide the English to try and practice your Pali understanding, with an option to look if you needed… Which is a nice idea :slight_smile:

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Sutta central has a box that says root text first, and if ticked, it made the pali on top of the english.

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Oh, ok. I didn’t know that! How interesting. Thanks for clarifying.

I would like to confirm that this is also what @Alokapada meant? It should be easy to add, but I would keep the colors as they are. Pali is orangeish throught the site.

Also, the way I expect this to work is: you open the menu on the side, click “Pali > Always” (not “On tap”), and then another option appears which allows you to put Pali first. So you see the whole page with both all Pali and the English at the same time, just like SuttaCentral. What do you think?

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Yes, he and I are on the same wavelength. That layout sounds good!

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Dear @NgXinZhao and @Alokapada. I have deployed the feature you’ve requested. I think it looks good. Please check it out and let me know. Go to the Menu in the Reader (top right), choose “Appearance”, set Pali to “Always” and then a new option should reveal just underneath it, allowing you to set the Pali to “Above”. In this view, I’ve also slightly reduced the English font size to emphasize the Pali more.

Thank you for your feedback, I think this is a good and useful change. I hope it is to your liking. Let me know if any other thoughts.

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It looks perfect! This will be very useful. Thank you kindly. :lotus:

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The content is so little, any plans to add in Vinaya, Abhidhamma, Commentaries etc? Also, Thematic analysis of EBT - #21 by NgXinZhao Here’s possible metadata for the suttas and vinayas.

Also, I want to let you know that your design and options is inspiring one of my co-resident monk to put them in our local website to read suttas, which has a lot of other features not found elsewhere, like Pali proper names dictionary, encyclopedia etc.

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Dear Bhante Paññādhammika,

The plan is for this app to show strictly the Early Buddhist Texts, without the Abhidhamma and commentaries. No plans on adding those. That being said, I may consider adding the Vinaya, especially if it is aligned to the Pali (which I see that it is).

I’m really glad the design and options inspired your co-resident monk. I genuinely spent a very big amount of time on this app, and I still do. I’ve recently just added a fairly powerful search (for such a “small” app). I’m also working on adding it as a native app to both the App Store (iPad, iPhone and macOS apps) and Android Play Store. Additionally, I’m also testing a feature that allows you to set aside up to 5 suttas into a functionality similar to tabs, so you can view and compare multiple suttas simultaneously. The text will also be kept up to date with the latest translations from Bhante Sujato and DPD releases.

Everything is open-source here if your co-resident wants to copy any feature: GitHub - gbbr/sutamaya.org · GitHub, he is more than welcome to :slight_smile:

The feedback is very much appreciated and I will post more updates here.

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Great app, thank you so much for your work and sharing!

Not sure how useful the following feature would be for others: selection-specific notetaking, similar to how Kindle app selections work, as opposed to the single sutta-level note available today. The current design may be sufficient for most users, though.

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