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PANEL THREE ABSTRACTS DIGITAL BUDDHIST TEXTS
THE INTERNATIONAL DUNHUANG PROJECT RECONSTRUCTING, DISSEMINATING AND ENABLING SCHOLARSHIP ON THE WORLDS EARLIEST BUDDHIST LIBRARY Dr Susan Whitfield, Director, The International Dunhuang Project (IDP), The British Library The Library Cave at Dunhuang in western China is the earliest extant Buddhist Library in the world containing tens of thousands of texts mainly in Chinese and Tibetan, the latter being the earliest extant Tibetan manuscripts in the world. But since its discovery in 1900, it has never been studied as a Buddhist library. In fact most scholarship has concentrated on the small percentage of social-economic documents in the cave rather than the more representative Buddhist manuscripts. One of the problems has been difficulty in accessing all the manuscripts which were dispersed to collections worldwide in the two decades after their discovery. The International Dunhuang Project (IDP) was established as an international collaboration in 1994 to ensure the conservation, cataloguing, digitisation, research and, above all, greater dissemination of the Dunhuang and other Chinese Central Asian manuscripts. With centres in Beijing, Dunhuang, St. Petersburg, Kyoto and Berlin and collaborations with over twenty institutions worldwide it now gives free online access to over 130,000 high-quality images of the manuscripts along with transcriptions, translations, research papers and educational pages (http://idp.bl.uk). As well as manuscripts, the Dunhuang Buddhist Library also contained some of the earliest printed documents in the world. Just as the new technology of printing increased dissemination of the Dharma in the first millennium, today the new technologies of the web and digitisation are making it possible to give access to anyone worldwide to these important Buddhist documents. This will lead to a new era of understanding of the history and traditions of Buddhism and its spread from India across the Silk Road to China. CBETA – PAST RESULTS AND FUTURE EXPECTATIONS Huimin Bhikkhu, Aming Tu, Dharma Drum Buddhist College, DDBC This presentation introduces the aims of the Chinese Buddhist Electronic Text Association (CBETA), its results up to now and its plans for the future. The purpose is to provide data for other projects to make the Tripitaka more easily available to users around the world. CBETA has been formally established on Feb. 15, 1998 to create, maintain and distribute free of charge an electronic version of the Chinese Buddhist Tripitaka. Since then, the CBETA has finished the work of digitizing the Taisho Tripitaka volumes 1-55, 85 and the volumes 1-90 of the Shinsan Zokuzookyoo . In 2007 CBETA started the third phrase of digitizing all the sutras which are not included in the above two Tripitaka-edition, therefore we have compared 22 catalogs of different editions of the Chinese Buddhist Tripitaka . We will convert the metadata contained in the sutra catalogs into databases, which in turn form the basis for a Spatial-temporal Information System. This can be linked to text databases such as CBETA to provide researchers with an interface that generates spatial-temporal information. Related projects at Dharma Drum Buddhist College (DDBC) deal with digital Buddhist studies such as the databases of the "Yogācārabhūmi (YBh)", the "Saddharmapuṇḍarīka (SDP)" and the "Bieyi za ahan jing (BZA)" which consist of the Sutras and its Commentaries, including texts in Chinese, Sanskrit, Tibetan, both as digital text and in manuscript facsimile image files. CBETA was founded with the aim of creating electronic versions of Buddhist scriptures of the highest quality and greatest range of applicability - not only to reproduce the texts accurately, but to explore new approaches to the development, display, and distribution of research technology and methodology. Therefore, CBETA would like to offer its results and experiences to other projects exploring the use of information technology for the academic study of Buddhism. A 21st CENTURY TRIPITAKA: THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE DIGITAL SANSKRIT BUDDHIST CANON Min Bahadur Shakya, Director Nagarjuna Institute of Exact Methods This paper outlines the formation of the Digital Sanskrit Buddhist Canon, a project to digitize and freely distribute the Sanskrit texts of Buddhism. The scriptures which make up this Tripitaka comprise over a hundred thousand printed pages. Electronic access to Sanskrit Buddhist texts has profound possibilities for enhancing the scope and depth of research. To turn this dream into reality, in 2003, Prof. Lewis R. Lancaster, former President of University of the West and coordinator of the project, initiated cooperation with Nagarjuna Institute in Nepal to digitize the published texts which make up the Sanskrit Buddhist Canon. The Most Venerable Master Hsing Yun, Founder of University of the West, Los Angeles, kindly agreed to sponsor this meritorious project. Master Hsing Yun's vision for this project was to make the original Sanskrit Buddhist texts available online. In this way, the Sanskrit Tripitaka is being made easily accessible to all. We are accelerating our work by broadening our support and applying the latest computer technology. Currently we have placed the full texts of 62 Sutras, 87 Shastras, and 108 Stotras (hymns) online. Now, for the first time in history, the basic texts of Indian Buddhism are accessible freely downloadable via the internet at http://www.uwest.edu/sanskritcanon To have all the Sanskrit Buddhist texts online will be a major milestone in Buddhist scholarship, and this will also be immensely useful to teachers and practitioners within Buddhism. This paper will discuss the progress made to date and the steps that will be required to meet this great, yet still distant goal. APPEARANCE OF A CORPUS OF BUDDHIST SCRIPTURES AND APPEARANCE OF A WORLD OF BUDDHISM: A HISTORY OF BUDDHISM FROM THE PERSPECTIVE OF THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE MEDIUM Masahiro Shimoda, The University of Tokyo The transformation of the medium for the transmission of Buddhism has always exerted a decisive influence on the formation of Buddhism in its history. This influence has not been one-sided from the sender to the recipient, but, to some extent, always interactive. Given that Buddhism is a historical product of continuous communication, a history of Buddhism cannot but take into account the transformation of the medium of Buddhism. The emergence of a huge corpus of Buddhist scriptures in modern world as a result of the development of the media of its transmission, represented by the Pali Tipitaka in London and the Taisho shinshu daizokyo in Tokyo, has changed the image of the world of Buddhism, on one hand, and, on the other, has accelerated and multiplied the interaction among Buddhists and Buddhist scholars regardless of the historical order of the transmission of teachings. In this presentation, reviewing briefly the history of Buddhism in terms of communication, I will show a future image of Buddhism on the basis of the construction of a scholarly network in the Web dependent on the newly completed digitization of the full Taisho Tripitaka by the SAT project. |
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