|
|
|
|
I used to keep a table here, describing some of the mailing lists related to Tibetan Buddhism, and providing sign-up links. However, when I came to refresh it early in 2001, two things became clear. One is that the number of lists is rising fast, and the job of keeping track of them was growing beyond a sensible scope. The second is that the changing commercial situation (e-groups took over onelist, yahoo took over e-groups, deja has broken up ...) means that a very high proportion of lists now come under the yahoo umbrella. This means that searching for lists is very easy, and that my efforts are no longer of much benefit anyway! The point of this is that the proportion of unwanted posts on fora such as alt.religion.buddhism.tibetan can be so high that meaningful discussion is extremely hard to achieve, and subscribing to one or more mailing lists is an option that many prefer. These can be moderated (although often they are not) and this keeps the proportion of abusive or entirely irrelevant posts quite low. Even those with quite fancy sounding names generally also contain discussion either of a general nature or suitable for beginners. So if you are interested, you can do a lot worse than going to the yahoo groups home page and entering terms like "Tibetan Buddhism", "Kagyu", "Nyingma", "Sakya", "Gelugpa" and so on into the search box, then browsing the groups that interest you. I subscribe to several, but the one that I take part in actively is the Kagyu list. The list tries to remain focussed but friendly and relaxed, and the rule we have is that "it is not essential for posts to be artificially confined only to matters that are strictly on topic, but most of the content of most of the posts should be mostly on topic." The list is not exclusively for adherents of the Karma Kagyu branch of the tradition, although it is aligned with the mainstream Karma Kagyu under the spiritual direction of His Holiness Ugyen Trinley Dorje, the XVIIth Karmapa. |