to Home Page
Content: Input of the entire Chinese Buddhist canon stored on more than 80,000 wooden plates at Haein monastery in Korea. This project has taken a sudden jump after the chairman of the giant Samsung company decided to fund and drive the project. At the present time, 35 typists and several technicians are involved in input activities in Seoul. According to the reports I received, the input setup and strategy seem to be sound: a special font was developed to replicate the woodblock character s, and all typists are connected to an Ethernet network. They input each character exactly as they see it; if they do not find it, they input an asterisk, and a technician on the network constructs the character for use by all typists.
The project is advancing at a fast pace; in June 95, 12 volumes were already input. Input should be finished in March of 96; then the much more labor-intensive task of proofreading will start.
See the extensive report by Urs App about this input project (October 1995) The input project now has its own WWW site.
Institution: Honganji shuppansha
Address: Honganji-ha shumusho
Hanayacho sagaru, Horikawa-do-ri
Shimogyo-ku, KYOTO
Tel: (075)371-4171
In the wake of the bestseller success of their collection of Jodo shinshu texts and commentaries (1613 p., 1985), the Honganji decided to publish this work in the form of an electronic book for E-Book players. After two years of work, the 57-member Editing committee for sacred scriptures of the Jodo shinshu is going to publish this 3.5 inch CD in September of 1995. It will contain a total of 47 texts that include the basic Pure Land scriptures and works by Shinran and Rennyô. They are presented in a Japa nese transcription (yomikudashi) of the Chinese text. Included will be maps, chronological tables, and search utilities allowing the kinds of search possible on such electronic books. The price will be 9,800 Yen. (There is software that allows using electronic books of some formats on CD-ROM drives of personal computers ‹ for example Ddwin. Such software often even allows overcoming the most severe limitation of the electronic-book interface designed by Sony: its lack of kana-kanji conversion and therefore the inability to look for kanji.)
In April of 1995, the Tendai shûten hensansho at Eizan gakuin in Sakamoto city (responsible person: Mr. Nomoto) has revised its statutes to include an input project devoted to Tendai scriptures. The plan includes input of 2241 pages (3.6 million characters) from the Taishô and Zokuzokyo canons; they include the works of Tendai daishi whose completion is planned for the year 1998 (his 1400th anniversary). Apart from the 60-fascicle Tendai sandaibu and the Lotus sutra, various famous Tendai commentaries a nd works of the major figures of Tendai teaching will be included in the planned CD-ROM and floppy disk versions.
This project has published in June of 1995 the ZenBase CD 1 (described on p. 50) containing over 80 Chinese Zen texts, a large Chinese character database, and many tools. This is the world¹s first CD-ROM containing Chinese Buddhist texts.
Simultaneously, it has opened a World Wide Web site (www.iijnet.or.jp/iriz/irizhtml/irizhome.htm) where lots of data and information are available.
Institution: Editing Office for the Chinese Buddhist Canon
Person in Charge: Ren Jiyu. Collaborator: Prof. Fang
Address: See right column
Tel: (86-1) 852-6243
Content: Edition of supplements to the Chinese Buddhist Canon and computer input of such scriptures.
History: The Editing Office for the Chinese Buddhist Canon was founded in 1982 and was involved in the editing and publication of the Chinese Buddhist canon. In 1994, work on the first part (106 volumes) was finished; it will be published in 1996. Now work on the supplement part is ongoing.
Since 1986, efforts were made to use computers for the work; between 1991 and 1994, about 3 million characters worth of materials were input, about two thirds of which were used for the preparation of the printed edition.
Additionally, I have heard of several projects that are in various tages of inception or progress. Some of them are discussed in our report on the Haeinsa EBTI convention. Others are:
€ Lewis Lancaster of the University of California at Berkeley has been promised funds to input Buddhist Sanskrit materials and is now making preparations for input activities in Bombay and Bangkok.
€ The Soto Zen research institution Shugaku kenkyujo at Komazawa University is continuing input activities that should eventually lead to a Dogen text database.