I've been adding to the wiki for a long long time now... mostly because people drop in, tell us all about a new book, and then move on... leaving it to our intrepid reporter to update the wiki with at least the name of the book if not the implications of the book for the forum.
Who contributes?
Mostly it's me... but only because nobody else bothers. Often people who drop in to suggest a book aren't familiar with the wiki, but more often they aren't looking for a community so why would they learn about the wiki. Some of the most famous suggestions?
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Scholarship on why Zen isn't Buddhism:
- http://www.thezensite.com/ZenEssays/CriticalZen/What_and_why_of_Critical_Buddhism_1.pdf
- That suggestion led me to the book it came from: Pruning the Bodhi Tree
- Pruning, along with Bielefeldt's work, is the academic "bullet" that killed Dogenism's claim to being related to Zen. I heard about it in this forum for the first time. I also heard about Bielefeldt in this forum for the first time.
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Book of Serenity and Blue Cliff Record AND Measuring Tap
- That's right! I had heard of none of these until somebody talked about it in r/Zen.
Did you know you can see wiki updates?
If you click here: https://www.reddit.com/r/zen/wiki/revisions/ you'll see what pages have changed and who has changed them.
If you click on it, you'll see I've added a new section to fraudulent_texts called "Texts wrongly attributed to Zen Masters", the most significant of which is the so-called "Bodhidharma texts", which no Zen Master ever agreed to.
Also I uncovered a new breadcrumb in the great Zen Bulls debate which might end up proving me wrong, and I added that to r/zen/wiki/bulls.
Did you know that the wiki has a history?
The r/zen wiki was the target of vandalism by Dogenists, Western Buddhists, and other New Age Nutbakery?
Check out this history tab. That's just a bunch of deleted accounts trying to censor the /r/zen/wiki/lineagetexts page, which for awhile was the only reading list for the forum. I tried to better accommodate different starting places with this list: /r/zen/wiki/getstarted
/r/zen/wiki/buddhism was also a major target for various kinds of vandalism over the years. Apparently quoting established Buddhist churches about their beliefs is deeply offensive to some people. Who knew?
And that's just the beginning of "Wikigate" controversies.
What's next for the wiki?
I'm thinking about doing a "Weekly Wiki Discussion" segment for the 30 minutes podcasts about r/zen that I'm working on: https://sites.libsyn.com/407831
I'm thinking it could be interesting to do a 30 minute segment every week on some page from the wiki and talk about it's history, controversies, etc. Who would be interested in that? Who would be interested enough to be interviewed?
It's a lot like the question "who would be interested enough to actually create the wiki page for that".
Submitted May 22, 2022 at 07:16AM by ewk https://ift.tt/6FmQcwC
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