Sutta Central


Sutta Central is an excellent online repository of texts from the early Buddhist canon… but I preferred the old version. The new one is still an amazing scholarly collaboration, with exhaustive cross referencing to parallels, multiple modern language translations, and cutting edge coding etc, but the update seems not to have improved usability in my opinion. Search terms need to be spelled exactly correctly, diacritics and all, and there is no longer a site map or a table of contents in list view like in the simple old version, which was handy if you don’t know exactly what you’re looking for (though you can now tour a map of ancient sites mentioned in the texts!). On the plus side, the corpus is still exhaustively huge; see here for a view of the bewildering vastness of it all), but if you know the text code e.g. mn10, then you can go straight to it and even read it in Pali and English side by side which is useful. There is also a handy subject index here. And you can also listen to it being recited by a robot with good Pāli pronunciation. Perhaps there is hope for humanity if the next generation of AI absorbs some wisdom by reading the Dharma.

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