[Buddha-l] The state of buddha-l: a brief report

[Alberto Todeschini]

Dear Franz,

> Thank you for that provocative defense of notes including titles,  
> Alberto. In fact, having considered your point, I think you're right.  
> Perhaps a good solution is not having notes so much as changing the  
> form of parenthetical references to include titles (or perhaps  
> abbreviated titles).

I confess that I'm still experimenting, not only with notes and
references but with other possible stylistic improvements as well as
improvements to accessibility. I'd like non-specialists to be able to
follow what I say.

The paper that I'm working on at present could potentially be of
interest (that's my pious hope!) to philosophers, historians of Indian
and/or Buddhist thought and argumentation theorists. Most specialists in
one of these areas only have a passing acquaintance with the others (I
know, there are exceptions). So I'm including a fairly large amount of
references as well as remarks that, say, will sound obvious to the
philosopher but may be new to the historian of Indian thought. The risk
is that I'm killing readability for the sake of wide accessibility.

In my dissertation I'm using in-line notation for the main primary
sources I refer to frequently, footnotes, as well as a small number of
endnotes, when the latter are too long to be in the main body of the
text (for instance, a philological remark taking up a whole page).

There is another issue. Here's a translation from Schmithausen:

"[The means of proof (sādhanam) consisting in] what is directly
perceived (pratyakṣam) is an object (arthaḥ) which is proper [to the
respective sense-faculty] (sva-), [really] existent (sat-), manifest
(prakāśa-), and non-erroneous (abhrānta-)."

It's extremely useful, but frankly, all the added information makes it
difficult to read. So I'm thinking that now that we are in the digital
age and not restrained by paper in similar cases one could offer both
the version as above as well as a 'clean' one:

"The means of proof consisting in what is directly perceived is an
object which is proper to the respective sense-faculty, existent,
manifest, and non-erroneous."

Anyway, it's been very interesting to see on H-Buddhism how strongly
people feel about notes. We seem to treat them as if they were matter of
life or death.

Best,

Alberto Todeschini