User talk:D.sans1997/Dhyāna in Buddhism

Hello D.sans1997!

You've picked a fascinating page to work on. And made some important interventions to clarify the disagreements among scholars about the status of jhana/dhyana, particularly in the Theravada tradition. I found the additions you made (helpfully indicated by underlining) highly effective at clarifying that a) there's a lot of debate among commentators on the nature and status of jhana, and b) the distinctions that scholars and scholarly practitioners make to clarify the stakes of the debate.

In order to do this, you had to do a significant amount of self-learning. Well done on that! Are there journal articles, encyclopedia articles, or book chapters that helped with those efforts? If so, those could be helpful to readers of Wikipedia too, and would help you get towards the improvement of the article by adding 10 new sources to the page. If you find something that confirms a claim asserted in the article, you can add another footnote/reference to strengthen the validity of that point. For example, the section on Buddhist origins with the stories the Buddha tells of his youth strikes me as "off" somehow. Does Bronkhorst really say this? What if you checked (looked up that book by Bronkhorst, checked the index for Buddha's childhood, or jhana)? Or if you found that same idea in a different text it would strengthen the reference to it here.

One of the things I see when I look at the original page, is that several footnotes are followed by a note saying "full citation needed," particularly in the sections of Theravada Buddhism you have picked. If you can easily find the relevant page numbers, that would be a great way to improve the page. Also, the page is crying out for an editor to make things more consistent throughout, for example with names: a) Alexander Wynne is sometimes cited by his full name, sometimes by just Wynn, and sometimes as Alex Wynne. Conventionally, you give an author's (or historical figure's) full name at first mention, and then in subsequent mentions just give the last name.  b) Golman is rendered as both Golman and Goleman. c) There is a list of names in the subjection on ' the "Jhana wars". Double-check to see that all these have been cited previously, and if not, fill in their entire name: Bareau, Schmithausen, Stuart-Fox, Bucknell, Vetter, Bronkhorst, and Wynne.  d) a careful read of the whole article may surface other instances.

Finally, the section you're working on on Theravada understandings of jhana has no pictures. Are there images from Wikipedia commons that would be useful here? Of Pali palm leaf manuscripts or some of the key figures involved in this debate, or images of the Buddha that make plain his embeddedness in a world where Jain and Brahmanical teachers and seekers worked alongside Buddhist ones to investigate the mind?

Great work here! Thank you for improving Wikipedia!

Ziegenbalg66 (talk) 15:15, 18 April 2021 (UTC)