EALC 370: The Lotus Sutra (HC/BMC) Spring 2024

Tripod is the easiest way to begin your search. It searches essentially the library's entire corpus of resources (or at least the descriptions of them!). Tripod by default searches for everything in the library collection: books, journal articles, films, book reviews, magazine articles, images, and so on. Oftentimes, doing simple searches for keywords related to your topic here will yield helpful and relevant results, even without a lot of fuss.

But because Tripod can return such a large number of results to searches, it is useful to know and try out some of these advanced searching techniques:

• AND, OR, NOT
  • If you wish to search for two terms together, link them with AND. This might be: buddhism AND epistemology or mahayana AND gender.
  • If you want results that feature at least one of a set of terms, use OR. One example usage might be buddhism OR buddhist / upaya OR (skillful means), where the parenthetical ( ) tells Tripod the terms enclosed should be taken together as a group.
• " "
  • " " or quotations tells a search engine/database to find results with the exact words indicated, and in the same precise order in which they were entered.
• Filters
  • In the Advanced Search area in Tripod, you can easily select different options which tell Tripod where to look for the words you are entering, whether they be title words, subject terms (which group like types of information/sources together, telling you what the salient content of an item is), author names, and so on. You will see this drop-down menu to the left of where you enter your search terms in advanced search.
    
    
     
• Subject headings
  • Books are grouped together with a set of controlled (that is, universalized or systematic) category terms, such that you may find other books related to one of interest of you just by searching its subject heading.
  • For books on the Lotus Sutra, they are grouped together with this heading: Tripiṭaka Sūtrapiṭaka Saddharmapuṇḍarīkasūtra
  • Once you click on a book in a list of search results, you will see a catalog record that looks like this. The highlighted portion is where you will find the subject heading.
     

The following are a few books which appear in a search for the highlighted subject heading (Tripiṭaka Sūtrapiṭaka Saddharmapuṇḍarīkasūtra):

Databases beyond Tripod

Below are some more general databases for research in the humanities and arts as well as some more area-specific databases for Asian studies and religion.

The reason you might choose to use these instead of Tripod is that they are drawing from a more curated pool of resources. While you will need to pare down your results with Tripod in most cases, specified databases already focus on much of the most relevant content for their subject areas.