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BUDDHISM AND THE NEW TECHNOLOGY: AN OVERVIEW

Prof. Lewis Lancaster
University of California, Berkeley

It is a pleasure to participate in this United Nations Vesak Day celebration for 2008. One part of the program has been devoted to the issues of Buddhism and technology. In this first panel, we will have an opportunity to hear from three important projects in Europe, Asia, and Australia that have added much to our understanding of Buddhist culture. Subsequent panels bring the opportunity for the delegates to hear descriptions of various approaches and strategies to the use of technology. As part of the activity, we will try to provide support and information for any who are interested in starting work on some aspect of Buddhism that includes technical issues. Our participants are a very special group of experts and scholars who have already achieve much in their own work and are now able to share that expertise with the Buddhist communities.

The problems faced by Buddhism and the new technology are not limited to the religious tradition; they are matters of concern to all research in the fields of cultural heritage. If we consider this issues, it is important to recognize that Buddhism and technology share problems and solutions with a wide range of academic and media groups.

Humanities computing got underway nearly three decades ago. From experience, we already have seen that our first clumsy efforts to build silos of information are no longer adequate. From the time of stand-alone computers with software constructed specifically for one scholar to the present day internet connectivity, it has been a short journey in time but a very long one in terms of technology development. During these decades, we have, at times, been saddened to see how often the ill-constructed silos of the past have become empty of usable information. Some exceptional data prepared in the earliest days of the personal computer have already been lost. Scholars retire, servers are closed, projects come to the end of funding, universities stop support of functional software, and as a result scholarly work that would still have value in the Humanities has disappeared.

Today, our silos of information are lot more sophisticated and numerous. In fact, it is just the numbers of silos that causes concern. We are overwhelmed by having to go into one silo, extract information, go out and find another and repeat the same entrance and exit strategy. How can we work with copyright laws and intellectual property restrictions that impede rather than aid in the distribution of information…information that has after all often been gathered and paid for by society in the salaries and grants we receive? Is it time to review our ethical stand with regard to ownership of digital information and ask funding agencies to state that open access be a requirement for awarding grants?

At a recent meeting of librarians, someone said that we have a “9-5 problem.” Our reference desks are open from 9:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. but our students are doing their research and writing from the internet from 9:00 p.m. to 5:00 a.m. What should the new reference services attempt to do in a digital world? It is obvious that our great libraries, and we have just heard some encouraging words from one of them, need to be very involved in the construction of a digital reference service. It is not an easy problem. Our past approach was to train and empower reference librarians who could provide suggestions for codex material held within their building. For the internet world of digital information, we must empower not just the librarian but also, the user. Therefore, the role of the reference librarian must dramatically shift to construct the tools for this empowerment of others. If I use a metaphoric statement, in the past, we looked at users of libraries as those who were confronting a barrier that had to be surmounted. We had to help students and researchers figure out the best way and strategy of answering questions. They had to get over the mountain or barrier that blocked their access to the information that lay beyond the reference desk in the stacks of the library. In the digital world, it is not enough to merely give researchers a list of resources, books, or articles. We want to take them directly to the full text source. That changes the landscape. It is not like going over a mountain pass to information, it is a matter of perspective rather like an aerial view. We need to see the context of our data along with the ability to access it here and there when appropriate and relative to our search.

Recently at a conference in Taiwan, Professor David Germano of the Tibetan and Himalayan Digital Library at the University of Virginia in the U.S. stunned us all. He reported that after constructing a large database, it became clear that they had built a giant pyramid. But the pyramid presented a problem since it became more complex with each new tier and when finally completed had a very small capstone surmounting the whole. Only one or two persons can climb the entire way to the top of this pyramid and make full use of the resource. And as the old adage goes, the capstone of a pyramid is the only part of the structure that has no supporting role. Bravely facing the pyramid problem, Professor Germano and his staff have decided to disassemble the digital library, in his words, “reduce the pyramid to rubble.” Out of the rubble they plan to construct a whole series of databases that are centered on specific items of information. The challenge will be to figure out how to link these many new constructions in a way that makes them all interoperate with one another in a matrix.

The Electronic Cultural Atlas Initiative has been focusing on problems of referencing and archiving material. As a result of this intense research supported by the National Endowment for Humanities, the National Science Foundation, the Institute of Museum and Library Services, and the Luce Foundation, we have developed a program of working toward the 4 Ws. Where? When? Who? and What? are well known in the field of journalism and they work well in digital data. In ECAI, we started with Where? and that led us to Geographic Information Systems (GIS). The use of latitude and longitude has proven to be one of the simplest metadata categories for placing and finding information.

When? has been a surprisingly difficult category. We very early saw that calendar dates in the Common Era numerical format are not the only time references we find in the data itself. Instead of 1932, we find named time periods such as “The Mauryan Empire” “The Tang Empire” “Vietnam War.” In geology, named time periods are necessary to deal with vast spans that cannot be easily broken into short intervals of months or days. Our research in this arena was aided by the support of the Library of Congress that allowed us to use their digital catalogue for finding all of the named time periods listed in that repository. Through the software developed for this project, we can now identify nearly 3000 named time periods and relate them to other information. At a meeting of Virtual Reality researchers in Rome, I began to note the use of named timed periods and just to explore the problem made a listing of all that appeared in the papers of that three day conference. When you see over two hundred named time periods from one conference, it is brings to our attention the problem of dealing with time.

Who? came next for us. In terms of cultural study, identification of the place and the time must always involve actors. We are constantly constructing Who? When? and Where?. This led to the question of how useful the three elements are in markup and it opened up a new vista for ECAI. At the instant of the combination of Who? When? and Where? we have identified an event and this has become for us the 4th W … What?

Consider our situation right now. We are in Hanoi in 2008 with scholars and researchers from many nations and this is an Event. If we try to understand this Event, we will have to contextualize all of the information available to us. What is 2008 in terms of its characteristics? What is the role of Hanoi and its institutions in the world of information technology? Who are we delegates? Can we track the biography of each one of us and finally have a full Event markup and structure for this meeting? Event markup is needed as we do context building. At the Semantic Web Conference in Korea last summer, I presented this idea to a group made up of librarians, archivists, and software developers. Some of the European librarians cried out when I suggested that in the future our digital libraries should be catalogued or marked up not only as “objects” but also as “events.” They all said that our library catalogues are made to index “objects.” Of course, we need object identification and markup but if we see our objects as “Events” we will know much more about them and be able to combine information about Who? When? Where?. Even a book is an “Event” it has a history that includes authoring, editing, publishing, distributing, cataloguing, using, and referencing. I am suggesting that a major step toward interoperability between “objects” found in “silos” is going to be the strategy of seeing the event structures that put those “objects” into a context.

These are a few of the difficulties that people face who want to put Buddhist information into digital format. Much has already been accomplished and some of it is being shown in the panels. Let me just discuss one aspect of Buddhist technological efforts, those concerned with the texts of the tradition.

The initial digital input of Buddhist information centered on the canonic literature. Because of the size and variety of these canons, the computer offered an appealing method of housing and retrieving data. At the same time, the texts of the religion were held in high esteem by the religious communities and from these sources it was possible to raise the sizable sums of money needed for input activity. Scholars were also supportive of the enterprises, although slow to give recognition to the digital sources when annotating articles and books. While a passage might be located by searching the CDs and online versions of the canons, the older form of notation referring to the print copy was more acceptable for footnotes. Standard rules for citation had to be developed and scholars needed to be reminded that using a digital source without giving reference to that fact constituted a new variety of plagiarism. As with all of the technologies, the early use is an imitation of the former methods. When Buddhist texts became available in a digital format, they were seen to be simply another form of print. Later use of the digital canons began to utilize the potential of having an electronic version; a version that can be used for search and retrieval but can also be analyzed for structure and patterns through complex algorithms.[1]

The first major project for digital versions of the Buddhist texts was the input of the Pali canon. Completed on May 30, 1988, Visakha Puja Day, the Digital Tipitaka Development Team under the Mahidol University Computing Center, Thailand, announced the completion of the project. The Siam Edition of the Pali Tipitaka in 45 volumes had been successfully put into a computer format. At the same time, there was the release of an application program, BUDSIR (BUDdhist Scriptures Information Retrieval). The work had been directed by Prof. W. Supachai and the Digital Tipitaka Development team. At first the data was available on a WORM (Write Once Read Many) hard disk. Later it became available on a CD ROM (Compact Disk Read Only Memory) and several hundred copies were distributed by the American Association of Religion and Mahidol University. The availability of the entire Tipitaka meant that researchers need not seek for those few libraries in the world that contained the whole Pali canon in their holdings.

The program developed to archive and retrieve was BUDSIR (BUDdhist Scripture Information Retrieval).  For the first time, it was possible to digitally search for and retrieve every example of any word, sentence, or phrase occurring in the Tipitaka. The next step in development was taken in 1991, when King Bhumibol Adulyadej issued a memorial that the 70 volumes of the Attakatha (Commentary) be included along with the Tipitaka texts. This latter task was completed in 1994 and all 115 volumes were released on CD ROM with the improved BUDSIR IV software. This pioneering project reflected all of the necessary responses to new software, international standards, and user needs. The need for upgrade was followed by the release in 1996 of the BUDSIR IV software for Windows. This was enhanced by the use of GUI (Graphic User Interface) for the display of multiple windows for comparison of texts. An added feature was capability for digitally producing sounding of the words of the Pali texts. Continued work on the data came in 1997 when the Thai transcription was added with a new search engine that was able to display multi-script retrieval. In addition, translation tables from Roman and Thai script added the ability to view the texts in either Devanagari, Singhalese, Burmese, or Khmer. At this point in the development of technology, a dictionary of Pali-Thai equivalents was linked to the database allowing quick reference for Thai language readers. Finally in 2002, BUDSIR was upgraded to an internet software, allowing user to access and search the data through online connection. A continual stream of new features were put in place by 2004 when the Devanagari and Singhalese scripts could be used for retrieval.

Within a decade of the release of the Siam digital version of the Pali, a number of other groups began to input other editions. The Vipassana Research Institute (VRI) in India, chose to put the Chattha Sangaya edition into digital form. This version was produced in Myanmar at the time of the Sixth Council of Buddhism in 1956. The Indian government had commissioned the Nalanda Institute to prepare a print version of the Chattha Sangaya edition in devanagari. VRI prepared a new print edition of 135 volumes. By 1997, a CD ROM was available for the devanagari edition along with the software to convert the devanagari script into either Roman or Burmese script. Upgrades of the software included addition of five more script options and the ability to install the data on Chinese Windows. In the subsequent release the number of texts in the data was expanded to 216.

Sri Lanka

In 1991, the input of the Sri Lankan version of the Pali Tipitaka was started by the Vajiragnana Dharmayatana, a Bhikkhu training center in Maharagama. The edition that was used as the basis for the input was from the 58 volume Buddha Jayanti Tipitaka that had been compiled and published during the 1960s and 1970s with government support. The digital input was under the auspices of the Amarapura branch of the Sangha headed by Venerable Madihe Pagnnaeha Mahanayake. The work of creating the machine readable versions was completed in 1994. At that point, the data was not fully proofed and a number of errors remained in the digital version. In order to help with the process, the project was adopted by the Colombo Branch of the Sasana Sevaka Society and further proof reading as well as some annotation was done.  The project is known as the Sri Lanka Tripitaka Project (SLTP). In 1999, it was mirror sited with the Journal of Buddhist Ethics.

Dhammakaya and Pali Text Society

The most commonly used version of the Pali canon for scholarship has been the edition prepared by the Pali Text Society of London. Formed by Professor Thomas Williams Rhys Davids and Charoline A.F. Rhys Davids in 1881, the Society had the purpose of translating and publishing Buddhist Literature. Scholars recognized the importance of putting the PTS version into digital form. In 1988, Professor Jamie Hubbard and Professors Robert Thurman prepared a proposal to the National Endowment for Humanities seeking for the funds. Unfortunately, the NEH did not select the project for support. The next step was to make the Buddhist community aware of the potential for digital versions of Buddhist materials. Professor Hubbard joined Lewis Lancaster at the meeting of the World Buddhist Federation in Hsilai Temple in Los Angeles. A demonstration was given for the future use of computers for reading and working with text material. Hearing of this presentation, in 1989, the Dhammakaya Foundation indicated an interest in helping produce the digital version of the PTS. By 1990, the input was underway manned by volunteers of the Dhammakaya group who did the input and the proof reading. It was not possible for the team to locate all of the PTS texts in Thailand and the missing ones were used from the library of the University of California, Berkeley. There were difficult issues involving the copyright of the material. It was not until 1996 that a mutually agreeable memorandum of understanding was drawn up between the Society and the Dhammakaya Foundation. Prof. K.R. Norman went to Thailand in April of that year and signed the agreement for a joint venture between the two institutions. After the agreements were in place the CD ROM called EPaliTexti version 1.0 was released in June, 1996 containing the digital version of the Pali language volumes of PTS along with a search engine. The publication came at the time of the celebration of the Golden Jubilee of the Coronation of the King and the first copies of a revised version known as Palitext ver. 1.0 were presented to the monarch on November, 1996. Five hundred copies of the CD ROM were made and distributed world wide. At the same time that the Pali language version was being input, the Dhammakaya group also started work on the English translations of the PTS. To date, this English material has not yet appeared in digital format.

Pali Manuscripts

Palm leaf technology has not disappeared as a format for recording Buddhist texts. However, after printing became an accepted format for the canonic texts, manuscripts were less important. The existing palm-leaf documents often date to the 19th century when the copying of Pali texts was still a major form of merit making. By the latter part of the 20th century, the preservation of the manuscripts was no longer assured. In order to rescue these documents from neglect and destruction, a group was formed under the name of “Fragile Palm Leaves Collection.” One of the leaders of this movement to collect and preserve the older manuscripts was Peter Skilling. By 2000, the Fragile Palm Leaves Foundation housed more than 5,000 manuscripts with 10,000 titles. A catalogue of the manuscripts in Pali and Burmese was made in cooperation with the Pali Text Society. As new computer technology came into use, it was decided to scan the images of the manuscripts into digital form. This was established in cooperation with the Lumbini International Research Institute in Nepal.

Tibetan Canon Editions and Commentaries

The major work on the digitization of Tibetan canonic texts was started through the efforts of Michael Roach. He was influenced by his contact with Geshe Lobsang Tharchin, when the former abbot for Sera Mey Monastery in Tibet moved to New Jersey as the head lama of the Mongolian Monastery at Freewood Acres. The endeavor was given the title Asian Classics Input Project (ACIP). Centered on the Tibetan Buddhist material, the work of input was coordinated from the ACIP office in the U.S. with monastic colleges in India such as the Sera Mey Tibetan Monastic University, Sera Jey, Ganden Jangtse, Drepung Loseling, and Sakya (Rajpur). Another site for the input has been the refugee camps primarily in south India. The major facility of this group was the Hunsur Tibetan Settlement, and the other important places were the Rabling and Dekey Larsoe Settlements. Working with the refugee council of His Holiness the Dalai Lama, space was made available by the local groups in India while ACIP provided the hardware, training, and salary for the input. The project has been closely tied to the education of Tibetan youth in computer technology.

ACIP, in addition to the input of the Tibetan texts, has undertaken the work of creating a digital catalogue for the Tibetan woodblock prints in Russia. There are two large collections of these prints. The St. Petersburg Branch of the Institute of Oriental Studies of the Russian Academy of Sciences has 25,000 volumes containing nearly 200,000 titles. A smaller set of xylograph copies exists at the Oriental Library at the University of St. Peterburg where 3,300 titles are located. By 2005, the total number of catalogued titles reached 50,000 entries. Even at a preliminary stage, the number of text titles recorded far exceed the largest print catalogue content of about 1,000 entries. This is a good example of how the amount of data that became available online and in distributed digital formats surpasses that contained in print. Following up on the preparation of the digital catalogue of the materials at St. Petersburg, ACIP turned it attention to the collections of Tibetan materials in Mongolia. It is estimated that 1.4 million titles are found in the archives, many of them duplicate copies. When finally catalogued, ACIP estimated that the Mongolia materials will be far larger than the collections in St. Peterburg. In particular, the Gangdan Tekchen Ling monastic complex has preserved many texts. However, during the troubled times of the 20th century after 1937, the texts were often scattered or ill-housed and the first task was putting the physical objects back in order before preparing digital catalogues and input or scans.

In addition to ACIP, there are a number of projects in Nepal and India that are working to create digital versions of the literary traditions of major schools of Tibetan Buddhism. These projects focus on the writings of important figures in Tibetan history. Many of these efforts are combining printing with digital publications of the rare texts. For example, The Nitartha Document Input Center in Kathmandu used computer generated script to print the collections of the Karma Kagyu masters. The ability to create and use new fonts and produce clear copies for printing have enhanced many of the publications. Ironically, it is the computer that has spurred much of the growth of paper publication.

The Drukpa Kagyu Heritage Project (DKHP) has been closely associated with these attempts to collect and publish the texts of the writings of particular masters. Led by Tsoknyi Rinpoche and Tony Duff, the DKHP has led the way in development of software for dealing with Tibetan materials and shared it with other projects. There are a host of projects in this field. Leigh Brassington and Marvin Moser were software engineers involved in the early development of Tibetan software strategy. Some of the most advanced input projects are:

The complete collection of Dilgo Khyentse Rinpoche under the direction of Matthieu Ricard

The anthology of Jigme Lingpa at the Namdroling Monastery

The Gomang Pharkhang Project of Peter Gilks

The Mindroling materials at the center of Kochen Tulku

The collection of Taklun Kagyu texts being input by Sonam Tobgyal in Toronto

Sanskrit Editions

The digitization of Sanskrit materials has been delayed because there is no religious community to provide the support for such work. The most significant project to preserve the images of the Sanskrit texts was done through the Nepal-German Manscript Preservation Project founded by Dr. Wolgang Voigt and Professor Dr. Klaus Ludwig Janert. This work of microfilming was started in 1970 in an agreement between the Nepalese government and the German Research council. Prof. Dr. Albrech Wezler served as the Director from 1982 until the work was completed in 2002. The project has provided microfilm for more than 180,000 Sanskrit and Tibetan manuscripts that include nearly five million folios. A number of Buddhist texts have been included in this international project and it is an excellent target for future digitization.

Since there has never been a coordinated effort to input all of the existing Sanskrit found in either manuscript format or published critical editions, the early attempts came from individuals. These projects by scholars have usually involved a single Sanskrit text or a group of texts that relate to the particular interest of the researchers. This has been particularly true in Japan were private data sets were created for a variety of texts. Most of these data have never been made available to a large audience.

An attempt at putting in some of the most important texts was started by a young Korean graduate student at the University of Tokyo. Jong-cheol Lee set up a small input center in India and financed it mainly with his own money. Some support came from the Buddhist Studies Center at University of California, Berkeley. Professor Lee did the input with the desire to create a Sanskrit lexicographical polyglot database which will include mappings among Sanskrit, Tibetan, Chinese and Korean. This is a long term project that will be web based.  

As a follow up to the Pali project at Mahidol University, Professor Supachai also input several thousand pages of Sanskrit texts which he plans to make available in the future.

A new project was mounted in 2000 working with a grant from the Fo Guang Shan Educational Foundation. Joining is this effort was the Nagarjuna Center in Kathmandu under the direction of Min Bahadur Sakya. Setting up the input center in Kathmandu, the project group produced a dataset of published editions of Mahayana Sanskrit texts as well as Tantric texts from manuscripts. When completed, the texts were put online by the University of the West in Los Angeles for free public use. The project continues with additional support from Professor Tsai Yao-ming of Taiwan National University who is working on the dharani texts of Nepal. Miroj Sakya, now a visiting scholar at the University of California, Berkeley works with Professor Alexander von Rospott and Mr. Ralph Moon to formulate the project with best practices and international standards.

Central Asian Languages

Professor Dr. Jost Gippert of the University of Frankfurt established the Thesaurus Indogermanischer Text- und Sprachmaterialien (TITUS) for the purpose of creating a database of Buddhist texts written in Indo-European languages from Central Asia. In the first phase, slides of the manuscripts were prepared, scanned, and stored as graphic images. The second phase called for the input of the text using UNICODE for the various scripts and allowing the display as a screen font.

Chinese Buddhist Canon

It is difficult to establish exactly when input of Chinese Buddhist texts began. In 1986, a group at the Institute of World Religions of the Chinese Academy of Social Science in Beijing formed a “Bureau of the Chinese Buddhist Canon.” One of the first and most difficult issues to be dealt with was the lack of a font containing all of the ancient characters of the canons. Several attempts were made to create software that could produce the glyph form for any possible combination of the elements of Chinese characters. While thousands of these combinations were constructed, it did not result in the creation of a usable font. In the 1990s, Prof. Fan Guang-chang reported at one of the international EBTI meetings, that 106 volumes had been completed along with other data of imagery for art and artifacts. He also indicated that there was a project set up to input one of the Ming dynasty editions. The distribution of this data has not yet been documented.

The Zen Texts Project of Hanazono University

One of the earliest and most influential centers for the research on the input of Buddhist texts was the International Research Institute for Zen Buddhism (IRIZ) at Hanazono University in Kyoto. Under the leadership of Dr. Urs App, IRIZ explored the problems of doing computer input including the “missing” characters that did not exist in any available fonts. Working with Christian Wittern, Dr. App played an important role in helping to raise the consciousness of the scholarly community to the potential of the digital world. As early as 1990, he published the first volume of The Electronic Bodhidharma. It was in many ways the announcement of the arrival of the new technology. The paper publications were followed in 1995 with the release of Zen Base CD I, which created a digital resource of the study of texts from this important school of Buddhism. It is hard for later generations to understand the range of problems faced by those who began to explore the new technology at a time before there was industrial development of software, large memory capacity, and personal computer hardware. The contributions of scholars such as App and Wittern was essential to the process that unfolded over the past two decades. They, along with other scholars, helped to define the problems of computing for the humanities. The efforts of the pioneers affected the way in which computer engineers did their development of tools and standards.

Prof. C. C. Hsieh of Academia Sinica played a crucial role in helping with the various input projects. In the 1980s, he had headed up the first major input project of a Chinese archive, the Twenty Five Dynastic Histories of China. It was his work that inspired the Buddhist scholars to go forward with the canonic input. The Dynastic History database of 40 million characters proved that a large amount of information in Chinese characters could be put into digital form for search and retrieval.

Koryo Buddhist Canon

The oldest complete set of printing blocks for the Chinese Buddhist canon are found at Hae-in Monastery in South Korea. Carved in the 14th century, the collection is composed of more than 83,000 blocks. Based on the Kaipao Edition from the Northern Sung, prints from these blocks were used to produce the Tokyo edition of the 19th century and later the Taisho Issaikyo metal type print of the 20th century. Lewis Lancaster received support from the Buddhist lay community in Korea to start the input of the Koryo edition in 1993. Working together with Urs App, Christian Wittern, Sungtaek Cho, an input facility was found at the Shanghai Chemical Research Institute where the computer center had installed the newest technology in the late 1980s. Chinese institutions were having to adjust to new economic models and these included the requirement to seek for funding from contracts outside the campus. In order to accommodate the Buddhist input project, the Institute received permission to insert the traditional character font into their system. A staff was assembled at the institute and nearly 2 million characters (of the total of more than 52 million for the whole of the canon) were put into digital format. At the same time, Ven Chonglin and Ven Hyemuk of Haein Monastery were starting to experiment with the input of the Koryo version and held a summit conference to discuss the way in which the work could be accomplished. The Berkeley project and that of the Haein Monastery group were joined in 1994 and the work of the input passed over to Seoul. Fund raising efforts resulted in the adoption of the project by Samsung Corporation. Setting up an input laboratory, Samsung employed over 30 full time typists and 6 engineers who spent one year to make a complete input of the whole content of the 83,000 printing blocks at Haein Monastery. In January of 1996, the Samsung work was completed and the first CD ROM was made available. In that same year, the printing blocks were designed a UNESCO World Heritage. There was still the task of proof reading and this began in April 1997 after a fund raising project supported by a month long ad in the newspaper Joongang Ilbo asking for donations from the general public. In order to make the digital version look like the block print, a whole new font was developed that followed the glyph patterns of the 13th century scribes.It was necessary to create more than 30,000 user defined characters. Known as the Tripitaka Koreana, the project is still on-going under the leadership of Ven Chonglin. As part of the continuing effort, the Institute of the Tripitaka Koreana in cooperation with Nanzenji in Kyoto has been digitizing images of ancient printing and manuscript examples of the Chinese Buddhist canon.

Chinese Buddhist Electronic Text Association

While the Taisho Issaikyo has been the most used edition for the Northern Sung version of the Chinese Buddhist canon, copyright issues delayed the input. The publisher of the print version, Daizo Shupphansha, Inc. attempted to undertake the initial input as a commercial project. Working with the late Professor Ejima of Tokyo University, four CDs were produced for separate volumes of the printed edition. The recovery cost for production meant a very high cost for each disk and sales did not create enough income to make such a project possible. As a result, the work came to a halt. Another model was needed to make the digital version affordable and available. An agreement was reached between the publisher and the Chinese Buddhist Electronic Text Assocation (CBETA) of Taiwan. The leaders of the CBETA team were Ven Hui-Min and Mr. Aming Tu. Once the copyright license had been given CBETA set to work in 1998 on an electronic version. Support for the work came from a number of sources, the Chung-Hwa Institute of Buddhist Studies, the Yin Shun Foundation of North America and the Buddhist Bodhi Foundation. As with all the Buddhist canon input projects, it was the donations of the religious community that made such work possible. This agreement between CBETA and Daizo Shupphansha, Inc. was a milestone in terms of dealing with the intellectual property rights of information available on the internet. The copyright for the content remained with the publisher of the print edition while permission was granted for distribution without charge to users of the internet and CD ROMs. In 1999, the first release was volumes 5-10 of the Taisho. This was followed by an updated release for volumes 1-55 and 85 of the print edition. At this point, CBETA provided the contents of the Northern Sung edition found in the Hae-in Monastery printing blocks with a few additions. Volume 85 contained texts from Dunhung manuscripts. Because CBETA relied in part on existing data, it was possible to move rapidly toward the digital publication. Mr. Hsiao Chen-kuo, a Buddhist laymen, had been working on the input of the data for some years. Since he had done the work out of religious commitment, he released his data for use with CBETA. Christian Wittern took the input of the Koryo project in Korea and converted it to Big Five code for use in the digital publication. Since the Taisho text is a copy of the Koryo block prints, the data was easily adopted for C BETA. CBETA records a series of names and sources for the input data such as Tseng Kuo-feng and Leo Flamenco. In 2004, the project was enlarged with the distribution of materials from the Zokuzokyo, texts that do not occur in the core of Chinese canon contained in vols 1-55 of the Taisho. With the CD ROMs and internet versions of the Chinese canon from CBETA, Buddhist studies was finally able to have usable information for digital study of the tradition. While the Tripitaka Koreana had been completed earlier, it was CBETA that overcame the hurdles of introducing the digital canon to a wide audience.

SAT

Work on the input of the Chinese canon has been done in Japan. The group most responsible for this has been Samganikikritam Taisho Tripitakam (SAT). This same project has also been known as the Association of the Computerization of Buddhist Texts (ACBUT). Since the copyright for the print edition of Taisho is held in Japan, an early attempt was made to do the input of the edition in Tokyo. The nature of the Japanese project shifted after the untimely death of Prof. Ejima. Later the effort would be led by Shigeki Moro and Ishii Kosei. Through SAT, it was possible to negotiate the license for CBETA in Taiwan and thus make the Taisho available to the world. Rather than limiting activity to input, SAT began to explore the ways of dealing with the many variant readings in the multiple translations of the Buddhist texts and to research the best practices for using the digital version of the canon.

Hong Kong

In 1999, a separate project in Hong Kong produced a CD ROM with volumes 1-85 of the Taisho content. Because the CD can only be read with one reader that only runs on a version of MS Windows for traditional Chinese characters, the CD did not find a ready audience. Given the easy availability of CBETA on the web, it was not possible to make an impact using complex and limited methods.

Chinese Buddhist Manuscripts

In addition to the inputs of the canonic texts, there was a major digital project at the British Library in London. The International Dunhuang Project (IDP) led by Susan Whitfield has scanned in images of thousands of manuscript pages from the materials collected by the expeditions of Sir Aurel Stein during the early part of the 20th century. In particular, the digital Buddhist Chinese manuscripts from Cave 17 at Dunhuang constitute a major step forward for research. Scholars now have internet access to manuscripts that were previously only available for limited use in the British Library. A major figure in the development of this computer resource was Colin Chinnery. Since the Stein collection of manuscripts is mostly made up of Buddhist materials, this resource in invaluable for future work on the exploration of textual criticism for Chinese canonic readings. Added to the images of the manuscripts is a digital map with the photographs from the Stein archive giving context to the locations of the archaelogical sites that contained the Buddhist materials.

Persistence of Digital Data

One of the great dangers of relying on the digital technology is the fragile nature of the storage of data. Major libraries have not yet solved the question of how to preserve the databases for perpetuity. CD ROMs and DVD disks will only last as long as the layers are kept sealed. It has been estimated that 30 to 40 years is the longest lifespan for these disks. Even when material is stored in super computer centers, there is the question of whether the functional formats of the data will be usable when retrieved after several decades. There will be a great need to have the ability to transfer data from one platform to another over time to keep it current. The cost of maintaining high level security for data and the continual upgrade for the new software and hardware will put pressure on libraries and archives as they seek to fund this long-term commitment. The ACIP group has faced this problem and are backing up the digital material with microfilm which is thought to be useful for a century or more. In terms of longevity, acid free paper is still a very necessary storage option. Scanned images can be printed onto paper and thus will have centuries of potential usefulness. There is probably no one issue that equals the dangers of loss, as scholars and institutions opt to make use of digital information.

The attempt to engage in this work of transference of information in and out of the digital media brings with it a broad range of new problems, which require careful, well-coordinated solutions, without which the work of digitization can quickly turn into a quagmire of incompatible platforms, codes, categorization systems, unnecessarily repeated work and so on. It was with the solution of these sorts of concerns in mind, that the Electronic Buddhist Text Initiative was first convened at a small informal meeting at UC Berkeley in 1992, with 16 persons present. This has been followed by a more or less annual sequence of meetings, each of which marks a clear development in both scope and sophisticated digital projects. The administration of EBTI moved from Berkeley to Dongguk University in Seoul, where it continues to serve the scholarly community..

Buddhist Response to Digital Canonic Developments

Venerable Chao Khun Phra Dhammapitaka (Prayudh Payutto)Bhikkhu Prayudh Payutto has been a senior monk of Thailand responding to the new technology and giving his thoughts about the impact it will have on Buddhism. When Mahidol University was inputting the Siam Edition of the Pali texts, he served as adviser and worked closely with Prof. Supachai in the proofing of the texts. In his appraisal of the situation, he posed the question of whether there is a decision of “a natural humanity living in a natural world, or whether to attempt to make a 'scientific human' for the scientific world.” He noted in his public lectures that the data being housed in digital format is far beyond the memory capacity of the mind. With the construction of such large amounts of information, we must rely on the computer in the future to help us deal with the data banks. From the Buddhist perspective, Bhikkhu Payutto formulates the issue from the point of view of the concept of creating benefit. In this regard, he has suggested that the question of technology for Buddhism will rest on the decision of whether it is “creating benefit” or merely “seeking benefit.” This type of speculations from a Buddhist monk indicates that technology is being evaluated within the realm of benefit for “self” and benefit for “others.” The implication of his remarks are that seeking of benefit at any cost is quite different from the creation of lasting benefit. Another important point that Bhikkhu Payutto has made is the fact that in the past we have been dependent on the sense organs for information which is processed into perceptions. This process is described in great detail through out the Pali texts. Now, he asks whether we have a new source of knowledge that is from the digital and technological realm. Instruments can extend information collection far beyond what the physical senses are capable of achieving. This new data will challenge all of our previously held opinions and thus, Bhikkhu Payutto, states that Buddhists must decide how to handle this shift of sources for knowledge in terms of the basic doctrines of the tradition.

Perhaps the most telling example of acceptance of the sacredness of the digital form of the canon took place in the Olympic Pavilion in Seoul when the Jogye Order celebrated the completion of the input of the Koryo edition. In a solemn procession, monks carried a crystal stupa into the assembly. Sealed inside the stupa was the CD ROM containing the electronic data. In that ritual moment, the digital world became a part of the religious tradition.

The future work on Virtual Reality reconstructions, cultural atlases, image repositories, and historical studies will bring Buddhist materials to the attention of a large international audience through the internet. I wish to recognize all the work that has been done in the past and to invite all of you to consider the role that you and your institutions can play in the future.