Access to Insight
Access to Insight is one of if not the most prolific websites on Theravada Buddhism on the internet. For a lot of practitioners today it is their first resource on their journey.
Access to Insight is a website that provides a collection of Buddhist texts and translations, as well as teachings and practices from the Theravada tradition.
The website was founded by John Bullitt, a layperson who became interested in Buddhism while studying at the University of California, Berkeley in the 1970s.
Bullitt started Access to Insight in 1993 as a way to share the teachings of Theravada Buddhism with a wider audience. The website is maintained by volunteers and is sponsored by the nonprofit organization Buddhist Text Translation Society. Access to Insight has become a widely-used resource for those interested in Theravada Buddhism, and Bullitt’s efforts to make the teachings of this tradition more widely available have been widely appreciated.
More about ATI’s roots from their website:
“In early 1993, with the help of the Barre Center for Buddhist Studies, John Bullitt set up a dialup computer bulletin board service (BBS) in his home in an effort to see if networked computers might be useful as a support for other students and practitioners of Buddhism. Initially dubbed “BCBS OnLine,” the BBS soon joined Fidonet, an international network of dialup BBS’s, and adopted the name “Access to Insight” (node 1:322/750). By the end of 1993 it joined DharmaNet, Barry Kapke’s California-based Buddhist BBS network (node 96:903/1). In early 1994 DharmaNet launched the Dharma Book Transcription Project, of which Bullitt served as librarian, and under whose auspices about a hundred high-quality books on Buddhism were transcribed to computer through the dedicated efforts of an international team of volunteer transcribers and proofreaders. These books were soon distributed via DharmaNet to scores of BBS’s around the world. In mid-1994 a dialup Internet e-mail connection was installed that allowed anyone on the Internet to retrieve these books via an e-mail file server. This proved to be a popular service. By late 1994 the BBS — now independent of BCBS — spent far more of its time serving file requests from around the world via the Internet than in handling the requests of local callers. Internet users from far and wide were coming to depend on Access to Insight’s now rickety and overworked ‘386 computer as their link to information — both the timely and the timeless — about Buddhism. In March 1995 this website was born; the following November the BBS was closed down.
Over the next eighteen years Access to Insight steadily grew from a modest collection of two or three suttas and a handful of articles into an extensively indexed and cross-referenced library of more than one thousand suttas and several hundred articles and books. By the end of 2013 this growth subsided and it settled into “retirement” as a static website. In 2017 Bullitt transferred ownership of the domain name and management of the website to BCBS.”
To explore ATI’s history in detail, see the archives of old news summaries.
You can download the entire website with this link here. (Google Drive) or from the ATI website.
