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Lojong

The Random Lojong Slogan Generator continues to work on desktop. Unfortunately, it isn’t doing so well on mobile anymore. I can’t just adjust the code. To make it work on mobile will require starting all over. So it isn’t even planned. But it still works on desktop.

Sanskrit

Apte’s Appendix A: Sanskrit Prosody

With the help of fellow students in A.M. Ruppel’s Elementary Sanskrit course at Yogic Studies, a clean, somewhat modernized version of  Vaman Shivaram Apte “Appendix A: Sanskrit Prosody” from The Practical Sanskrit-English Dictionary is posted on this site. It is still in progress, but I frequently use what’s posted. All of the information is there. Not all of it has been enhanced. View it here.

Mañjuśrī-nāma-saṃgīti

You have open access on this site to a metrical scansion and a musical setting of Mañjuśrīnāmasaṃgīti. Planned is a translation for chanting.

Sanskrit Reader for Aśvaghoṣa’s Buddhacarita Sarga 13

I’ve created a Sanskrit reader with text, vocabulary, introduction, notes, and musical settings of Aśvaghoṣa’s Buddhacarita Sarga 13. The text is nearly complete, but is in its final round of editing. When it’s complete, I’ll make it available on this website.

Near Future

The Buddhist Sutra that Conze translated as “its verse summary,” “its” being the 8,000 line Prajñāpāramitā. But the Ratna-guṇa-saṃcaya-gāthā is far more than just a “verse summary” of the Astasāhasrikā Prajñāpāramitā Sūtra. For one thing, it presderves the oldest language of all extant Prajñāpāramitā Sūtras. This means that it’s likely closer to an “original” because fewer changes have been rung on it than on the other extant sutras. The meter helped to preserve its form. Soon, I’ll begin a new translation of this important sutra. To my knowledge, the only available English translation contnues to be that by Conze.

Poetry

I’ve written a lot of poetry in many styles. What’s been posted here was almost more random than random.  Before the end of the day on March 7, 2022, I will post some garlands of poems. Most of them will be gestating narrative sketches about a character named Rhosonny, a name that despite a dactyl probably won’t last. I continue to call myself a poet, but give little to no evidence.

For the near future, I’ll be translating subhaśitas, or epigrams, from the Sanskrit tradition, possibly leaning fairly heavily on Bhartṛhari.

Commonplace Neglect

This site used to be the only place, aside from university libraries and some big-city libraries, where you could find all three volumes of George Saintsbury’s History of English Prosody in both PDF and HTML. Several university English Lit profs used to send their students to my site. But once google digitized it, there was no need for it here, so I removed it. Now there’s even a Kindle version, but I don’t know the quality of it.

At about the same time as I removed the Saintsbury, after several years of posting drafts of poems to my website, I also took the poems down. There was probably a plan that I don’t remember. The poetry download was several hundred pages. I’ve added them all to Scrivener, but haven’t decided whether to post them and/or new ones. They’ll likely come later. For now, a couple of old poems and some narrative sketches will suffice. This will also change.

Commonplace Book

Because I wasted so much time writing on social media my commonplace book hasn’t been much amended. This will now change. I’ve withdrawn from social media.

Memos

In addition to the Commonplace Book, I’ve added a section called “memos.” This will be my complete replacement for social media posts.

Poems on this Site

Only a small, nearly random selection of my poems are published to this site. The menu item “poems” displays snippets of all of my poems that are published on this site.  For those preferring to either see or not see Narrative Sketches, they are distinguished from other poems in two sub-menus that link to sub-pages “Miscellany” and “Narrative Sketches.”