to Home Page

News (May 24, 1996)

Some of the following items have been updated (May 24, 1996):

Institute news

Software-related news

Electronic Bodhidharma WWW site news

Input of the Korean Canon is finished!

• Since April 1 of 1996, Prof. Eshin NISHIMURA is the director of our institute.
• On the same date, Urs APP (previously Associate Director) was, according to his wish, relieved of many of his duties in order to be able to spend more time on research. He is now the institute's full-time researcher.
• Prof. Seizan YANAGIDA has retired as director of the institute on April 1 of 1995. He still lectures at Hanazono University on Wednesdays from 1 p.m. to 2.30 p.m. and is in good health, working on an edition of collected papers and some comprehensive "update information" which will be appended.
• Urs App's trusted and dear assistant and friend Shun MURAKAMI, who has helped our institute in many ways and was a scholar of great promise (see his excellent articles in the Zenbunka kenkyu kiyo 1994 and 1995 on "mushin" and "Buddha nature") has died after a brief illness at the end of May 1995.
• One day earlier, the revered Zen master and founder of our institute, MORINAGA Soko roshi, died in Kyoto. All those who had the chance of meeting this wonderful man will never forget him.
• Michel MOHR, who works in Edo-period Zen, is Urs App's new assistant and will collaborate also on the management of this site.
• Christian WITTERN, who has been an important member of the Zen KnowledgeBase research team, has returned to his native Germany and has just finished his dissertation on the Chan record genre (yulu) as refelcted in chapter 28 of the Jingde chuandenglu (Keitoku dentoroku).
• Prof. Silvio VITA of Rome University will pursue research at our institute from July to September of 1996.

1. Zen text files in JIS and Big5 are now available with long file names for use in Win95, Mac, OS/2 and Unix environments. They are arranged in four folders / directories for convenient downloading. The file names reflect the text title, its correction status, and its printed origin (T stands for the Taisho shinshu Buddhist canon, ZZ for the Zokuzokyo Japanese supplement to the Chinese canon). You can now download the text files in standard compressed format for your machine.
2. KanjiBase installation problems: If you get an error message after having installed Kanjibase, simply delete the "Kanjibas.ini" file in your Windows system directory. When you start up the KanjiBase program, it will by itself create a new ini file.
3. See our text download page for our search utilities and new batch files for DOS or Macintosh
4. For users of the MacOS who have used long file names for years, the files are available with long filenames in kanji. This greatly facilitates identifying the texts during search procedures.
5. Windows95 users can run our batch file to transform short into middle or long filenames in Chinese characters.

• Our site now has 50 additional megabytes of disk space; that allows us to put more of the contents of the ZenBase CD and additional materials on the Internet, to provide files with long file names in kanji, and to use the standard compression formats for Mac (Stuffit) and DOS (Zip)
• Traffic on the site has increased by leaps and bounds. Thanks for all the interest. We keep tabs on usage and try to live up to expectations.
• The hitherto empty "Zen Art" section now has a beautiful Japanese series of woodblock prints of the Ten Oxherding Pictures, together with Urs App's introduction and his English translation of master Kuoan's poems.
• The IRIZ KanjiBase is getting attention from lots of places. Apart from several input projects in Japan, some Taiwanese and mainland Chinese institutions are expressing interest in using KanjiBase. As KanjiBase is to my knowledge the only standardized, system-independent way to encode gaiji regardless of the base code (JIS, Big-5, KS, Unicode, etc.), use by input projects that plan to distribuyte their data certainly makes sense . . . A comprehensive article on this in English, Japanese, and Chinese will be available soon on this site.
• The easiest way to use the IRIZ KanjiBase with its 48,000 characters is to get the ZenBase CD and install it on your machine. By the way, it also works on English Windows, and also on SoftWindows on the Mac.
• For those who keep away from Windows and need to insert only a few gaiji into their documents, Christian Wittern, who wrote the program in the first place, is now preparing an Internet version that would allow looking up characters and getting the KanjiBase references online. Afterwards, you could run a macro in Word (Mac or Windows) which transforms the reference into a nice, printable 40x40 bitmap. See the Electronic Bodhidharma No. 4, p. 62 for an example.