[Buddha-l] Re: Bodhisattvas in Taisho 474

[James Ward]

On May 22, 2005, at 12:03 PM, jkirk wrote:

> Hey James,
> No no--I did not take offense about anything-----I was trying to 
> rescue you from yourself (heh heh).

And a good thing, too!

> That's why I tried to underline the importance of giving credit--and I 
> have also learned as no doubt many others have as well that sometimes 
> people need to be reminded of this.
> Joanna

Yes.  Although in this case, the more I think about it, the more absurd 
it seems that I ever felt the need to mention it.  Probably the main 
point to be communicated by the compilation and distribution of the 
catalogue is that it could be useful as an investigative method.  In 
itself this one has some limited value as a way to begin to trace some 
translation and contact patterns, but it also needs some editing:  I 
haven't closely scrutinized the sentence context of each mention of the 
names to see if some of the character sequences have come together "by 
chance" and aren't really instances of the names, nor have I looked for 
cases in which a searched name is found embedded within a longer, 
possibly independent name.  The real potential of such searching 
probably won't emerge until more sutras have been examined and linked 
to each other, which certainly goes beyond attribution of credit to 
this one limited portion of the effort.  I suspect the thing to do is 
create a website database, and the thought alone is enough to make me 
boggle.

Cheers!

James