Dear friends,
happy new year! It seems that we already have a good start for 2009,
with the Saddaniiti discussion going on. Over the past few years, we
have a good range of activities in the study of Pali and the Tipitaka.
These are impossible without your generous support, those who send us
comments and opinions, and especially those who relentlessly share
their knowledge and wisdom. I must be counted to be among the many who
benefited from these wonderful sharings. I like to say big THANK YOU
to everyone, and look forward to your participation and contribution
in the new year.
Our aim this year is to consolidate this effort, particularly with
Pali language study. I plan to devote more time for open questions and
helping beginners, this is not within my control, but I plan to
develop some suitable materials for beginners over the coming years,
and encourage starters to post questions to the group. This is what I
hope to achieve with the plans I outline below. As always, all
constructive suggestions are welcomed.
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Pali Study
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Florent and myself will continue posting our solutions to The New Pali
Course Part II. I have posted the latest study guide for the exercises
on tipitaka.net. This guide aims to help those who attempt the
exercises by themselves. I have also posted a schedule of our
postings, seriesgplan.pdf, under the Files section of the group's
Yahoo! page (Yahoo! signin required). This schedule allows one to look
up any of the previous postings by clicking on the relevant link. I
highly recommend those who are working on the exercises to download
this PDF document for reference. It also lists the estimate time new
postings will appear on the list. The schedule reveals that we should
complete the book in the first half of the year.
In the second half of the year, I plan to continue our group reading
of Warder's.
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Pali/message/11219 The plan
is to pick up from where we stopped previously, and continue with the
second third of the book, and also to continue with our postings and
discussions of the exercises from where John (Kelly) stopped in series C.
A major revamp this year will be to merge all Pali study series under
one title. In the past, we have Pali Day by Day and Pali Word by Word.
"Pali Day by Day" is no longer relevant, because we no longer have any
daily series. It is more efficient at a more advance level to post at
longer intervals, at the same time, carving out the space for open
discussions. By combining both, we will simply call it Pali Study
Series. Pali Word by Word will be renamed Pali Study Series P (P for
padaso in Pali).
We have already made some moves on Saddaniiti, which will be Pali
Study Series H. One of the important tasks at hand now is to provide
the text in velthuis encoding for contributors to the series. I shall
discuss more on the plans for Saddaniiti in later postings.
I also plan to start posting extracts from The New Pali Course Part
III for study and discussion. This will be similar to what I am doing
now for the chapter on Pali Prosody by Duroiselle. There is also plan
for a new series I. Details for these will be given at a later date.
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Sutta Translation
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I hope to resume our sutta translation exercises for AN2. However,
with existing plans and focus on Pali, I will have to scale down on
AN2, so that we can still breathe after heavy doses of Saddaniiti.
Therefore, any sutta translation exercises I will do this year will be
very minimal. However, members are welcomed to post their attempts or
questions on passages from the Tipitaka anytime.
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Tipitaka Network
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Works will continue on the web front. The major projects are still
rolling. Anyone interested to contribute to the wikis are welcome.
Please let me know if you require any assistance to get started.
As mentioned at the beginning, I plan to develop some materials which
teachers can use in the classrooms. For the start, I like to develop a
set of slides each for some of the elementary texts we have studied.
This may be extended to multimedia presentations in the future. The
plan for presentation materials is as follows:
2009: Pali Primer
2010: An Elementary Pali Course
2011: The New Pali Course Part I
Any constructive suggestions are welcome.
I shall stop here, and look forward to your comments and suggestions.
With metta,
Yong Peng.