There are originally 360 entries in this dictionary which reference each other. Only one giant cluster is found that interconnects 303 entries. This giant cluster is represented below with its emergent structure.
The splines in the centre represent the cross-references (connections) made by the entries, which are themselves layout on the outer circle. The size of the bullet and font is proportional to the number of references (in and out). The colour indicates the communities detected by the algorithm.
Great work thanks. Its useful to see the dhamma connections and strengths in one view.
The Manual of Buddhist Terms and Doctrines By Nyanatiloka Thera draws from both the canon and the commentaries. Do terms derived from the commentaries have any impact on the chart?
In the Preface (or here for the PDF), you can read:
As already pointed out by the author in the preface to his Guide through the Abhidhamma-Pitaka (Colombo 1938), there are found in the Abhidhamma Canon numerous technical terms not met with in the Sutta Canon; and again other terms are found only in the Commentaries and not in Sutta and Abhidhamma. The author therefore has made a first attempt - without, however, laying any claim to absolute reliability or completeness in this by no means easy undertaking - to indicate in the Appendix all the terms that in the oldest Sutta texts are either not found at all, or at least not in the same form or meaning, and to set forth how far these are deviations from the older texts, or further developments.
These terms appear in the dictionary and make their way therefore in the chart if they belong to the main cluster. For example, ārammana is on the bottom right of the chart, two positions close to the big node Khanda (if you look at the ārammana entry, it references it). Interestingly, checking if ārammana appears in the Sutta-Pitaka with a search on Digital Pali Reader (I think you can do the same filtered search on Suttacentral, but it is more difficult), you get 0 result
Because we have that list of terms in the Appendix, we could filter the node and only have Sutta terms in the chart, or putting a star on the terms to show that they belong to Abhidhamma or commentaries. Let see if I have the time to that one day!
Thanks for this very interesting work. I for one would find it fascinating to see if the visual mapping changes appreciably if commentary terms are filtered out. I suspect they will be too few in number to make a clear difference. So no pressure!
