tiltbillings wrote:
The interesting things that the "proliferation" of the various texts were paid for by either rich laity or by the land holdings of the monasteries or by royal patronage. Someone paid for it.
There is a difference, however, between relative wealth and absolute wealth. To demonstrate this point, you can ask any average person a simple question: Would you rather be a middle-class person today or the richest person in the world 2,000 years ago?
Most people would choose the former, because although their position is one of lower relative wealth (wealth with respect to the standard of wealth at the time), it is much higher in absolute value, because of technology. Whereas ancient kings would spend their riches extravagantly to have many easily spoiled goods delivered promptly and used by chefs to prepare cuisine, today, we have modern refrigerators, canning, grocery stores, TV dinners, and restaurants, many things that would've been considered luxiries in the past, like ketchup. Whereas kings would have dancers, jesters, magicians, and so on, today, we have television and the internet. So, a single middle-class person today has at their fingertips all the resources of a pre-historical king, if not more..
This being the case, today, with computers and Pali resources, it doesn't require a king's riches to translate and publish the Tipitaka. In fact, when I've pointed out the difficulty of acquiring a full Tipitaka, I've been told by people to simply learn Pali, as Pali versions are available online for free. And yet: If it's so simple for someone like ME to learn Pali and translate it for myself, is there not a single person out there, at BPS or anywhere else, who is capable of the same task? ...At least when it comes to the most important texts.
But as it is so far, there's no serious attempt by these institutions to provide an easily accessible, free translation, for the sake of protecting the institutions themselves. Although I am glad to see the Visuddhimagga be made available for free soon. I only hope it's definitely going to be the entire Visuddhimagga and not with certain important portions missing.
mikenz66 wrote:tiltbillings wrote:
The interesting things that the "proliferation" of the various texts were paid for by either rich laity or by the land holdings of the monasteries or by royal patronage. Someone paid for it.
This is something that it is easy for for westerners who don't interact with real-life Buddhist institutions to overlook.
That's a bit condescending, don't you think? To counter that, I could say that people who don't have experience with NPOs automatically assume that they are efficient and benevolent.
mikenz66 wrote:
All this stuff costs money, whether there is a fee charged or not.
Again, as I said, of course a traditional publishing company costs money. You have to pay translators, editors, and you have to pay for the ink and paper, obviously. But I'm not advocating that people provide paperback copies of the Tipitaka for free. I am talking about voluntary online collaboration, which clearly has a minimal cost. You look, for instance, at the size of Wikipedia. Only a few people fluent in Pali over a few years couldn't fully translate the Tipitaka? Come on. And the PTS, they've existed for so long, has it really been impossible to create a reliable public domain Tipitaka, over all these years? Of the translations they've made that are now public domain, they can't publish them online, because they have to keep tinkering with them to somehow make them better?
mikenz66 wrote:
It's not clear to me that non-profit publishers such as BPS, PTS, and Wisdom could continue to disseminate high-quality translations if they didn't have some sort of market model. It may be possible. Would those who complain about having to pay a few dollars for thousands of pages of high-quality translated text like to volunteer to set up such an institution?
Let's look to the future: Would it be desirable or undesirable for there to be a free, easily accessible, and reliable Tipitaka? From the perspective of humanity, of course, since the interests of humanity and the interests of protecting the financial stability of a non-profit organization aren't necessarily the same.
It seems plausible to me that within the next 10 years, such an edition will be made by someone, regardless. When it happens, will organizations like BPS continue to hold out, touting their copyrighted version of the Tipitaka as "better" and slandering the hard work of others? I've seen people make such remarks about Metta.lk's Tipitaka before. So, why not help release a better one? How is the financial security of a certain organization more beneficial or valuable than the greater proliferation of Buddhist texts? I mean, the goal is the proliferation of Buddhist texts...
Once you've got one really good translation of the Tipitaka digitized, upload it to the internet -- you're done -- no more work required, no need for any institution of any kind, right? It's not something that requires regular maintenance... Once the work is completed, you put it out there, and the world can see it. Unless you copyright it. Because then that limits the amount of people that actually will see it.