Santipada is a label we have been using for the past few years for writings and studies that have been published from myself and the community here at Santi Forest Monastery. These writings reflect the work we have been engaged in at Santi, especially with regards promoting the full ordination of women. Most of the writing is by myself, but hopefully we will include broader contributions as time goes on.
A word in advance: unlike many teachers, whose books are often an edited and polished version of what they talk about, I tend to write about precisely those things that can’t be easily addressed in a Dhamma talk. So don’t expect ethical advice, meditation instructions, or practical Dhamma reflections here. To see how I approach these things in a teaching context, check out my talks on Dhammanet.
Santipada was originally built on the free and simple googlepages platform. This was always a fairly primitive form, and since its deprecation by Google, the sites have deteriorated alarmingly. Since I started blogging at the end of 2009, I’ve been impressed with the power of WordPress, so I’ve learnt to build WordPress websites.
The aim of this site is to present writing in the best possible way on the web. To accomplish this I have started with a text-oriented WordPress theme, The Erudite, and modified it to further enhance it as a writer’s platform. The appearance has been tweaked, and the font size increased. I’ve paid detailed attention to typographic niceties, like ‘hanging quotes’, proper verse layout, tables, footnotes, and so on. For seamless display of diacriticals in Indic terms, Gentium Basic is used throughout, delivered using @font-face by kernest.com.
The theme has been de-bloggified, removing comments, dates, and so on: I’m after a lasting repository of quality writing, not a changing diary. If you want to discuss stuff, see my blog.
There are a few experiments: notice that hovering the cursor will highlight the text, changing the dark grey text into black; this is because some readers find even dark grey difficult to read. In addition, this can serve as an attention focuser. On single posts, the same action will display automatic paragraph numbers to the side. This is because I am conscious that any writing these days will be published in a variety of media, and for reference sake texts should be marked according to paragraphs, which are a genuine textual entity, not pages, which are merely an artifact of the technology the text is presented in.
Buddhist Global Relief
If you feel grateful for the writings offered freely here, and would like to give something back, I’d like to encourage you to consider donating to Buddhist Global Relief. This is a wonderful charitable body set up under the guidance of Bhikkhu Bodhi and other great Buddhist leaders. Of course, its aims follow the Buddhist ideals to benefit all living beings, not just Buddhists! I have added a link to Global Buddhist Relief’s donation page at the right of all Santipada posts. Please give, out of compassion and in hope to ease the suffering of others.
Note that Santipada is in no way affiliated with Buddhist Global Relief. I simply think it’s a great initiative and want to support it.
