Pali tools

I'm interested in applying digital approaches to assist research in Buddhist Studies. These tools aren't intended to replace specialist knowledge or language skills, but to assist scholars in reading and analysing texts more efficiently and accurately. The tools below are just some tentative first steps towards digital Buddhology:

Along with classmates at Cornell University, I've been compiling notes on Pali grammar from textbooks into an online, searchable Google Doc. This cuts down on the time students spend looking declensions and conjugations up in Pali textbooks or grammars, although it doesn't have the detail of something like Collins' Pali Grammar for Students. Note that this still has several entries still in the "to be completed" section.

PaliPal is a tool I'm developing that helps students analyse Pali words by suggesting possible case endings or declensions based on user input. It's written in python, and it's useful both to help me better understanding programming languages and Pāli grammar. This project was inspired by the parallels I saw between programming languages and the highly structured grammar of classical languages, in which single words can express incredible depth of meaning through case endings and conjunctions. PaliPal is currently on v0.3. It's a while off being useful!

The Politics of Religious Identity under Sri Vikrama Rajasinha (1798-1815)

The success of Nayakkar rule in Kandy has been attributed to the ability of the Nayakkar kings to construct a certain model of religious identity oriented around loyalty towards pious Buddhist kings. I am examining how this identity was constructed and contested during the famously unsuccessful reign of the last Nayakkar king, Sri Vikrama Rajasinha. While Sri Vikrama may have attempted to embody the role created by his predecessors, he faced challenges from political and religious elites within Kandy as well as the efforts of the British to undermine his legitimacy.

Religion, Politics, and Violence in Post-War Sri Lanka

What happens when a group comes to define its own identity in relation to a threatening "Other," only to have that Other disappear? With the defeat of the LTTE in 2009, we might have expected Sinhalese Buddhist nationalists to have become more confident and less aggressive in their relationships with Sri Lanka's minorities. Instead, we have seen a violent increase in anti-Muslim sentiment, which I have argued is an attempt by some nationalists to create a new "Other" for Sinhalese Buddhism.

I carried out this research for my MA in Religious Studies at Victoria University of Wellington, and have presented some of my findings at the conferences of the New Zealand Asian Studies Society and the New Zealand Association for the Study of Religion.