Project Presentations
On special request by individual IABS members, a limited number of running projects supportive of academic research will be presented.
- Indo-Tibetan Lexical Resource (ITLR)
- Orna Almogi & Dorji Wangchuk (Hamburg)
- Masahiro Shimoda & Nagasaki Kiyonori & Toru Tomabechi (Tokyo)
- The SARIT Project: Enriching Digital Text Collections of Buddhist Sanskrit Literature
- Birgit Kellner (kellner@asia-europe.uni-heidelberg.de)
Liudmila Olalde-Rico (olalde@asia-europe.uni-heidelberg.de) - The critical edition of the Pāli canon being prepared at Wat Phra Dhammakāya
- Alex Wynne (alexwynne@outlook.com)
- Śāstravid: A New Electronic Research Tool for Studying Indian Philosophical Texts
- Jan Westerhoff
- Khyentse Foundation's Academic Activities
- Gregory Forgues (gregory.forgues@univie.ac.at)
Indo-Tibetan Lexical Resource (ITLR)
A Collaborative Project of the Khyentse Center for Tibetan Buddhist Textual Scholarship (KC-TBTS) at the University of Hamburg and the International Institute for Digital Humanities (DHII), Tokyo, and the SAT [Saṃgaṇikīkṛtam Taiśotripiṭakam] Daizōkyō Text Database at the University of Tokyo
Orna Almogi & Dorji Wangchuk (Hamburg)
Masahiro Shimoda & Nagasaki Kiyonori & Toru Tomabechi (Tokyo)
The Indo-Tibetan Lexical Resource (ITLR) is designed to be a digital (online) reservoir of Sanskrit (including Buddhist-Hybrid Sanskrit or Middle Indic) words/phrases and names of persons, places, scriptures/treatises with corresponding attested Tibetan translation(s), including a host of other information pertinent to the main entries, all of which are backed up by references to primary and secondary sources. The ITLR project aims at creating a research tool that is highly reliable, continually improvable and extendable, and easily accessible not only to those who pursue textual studies but also to those who are involved in translation projects on a personal or institutional level.
Our introduction will touch upon several issues, including (a) the history of and the motivation behind initiating the ITLR project, (b) the concept of the database as a collaborative platform, (c) the current state of affair in terms of the development of the database and its content, and (d) our visions for future developments and collaborations. The feature of the ITLR as a collaborative platform will be highlighted by presenting the collaboration with other projects such as the Vikramaśīla Project (led by Taiken Kyuma, Mie University).
The SARIT Project: Enriching Digital Text Collections of Buddhist Sanskrit Literature
Birgit Kellner (kellner@asia-europe.uni-heidelberg.de)
Liudmila Olalde-Rico (olalde@asia-europe.uni-heidelberg.de)
The availability of machine-readable corpora of Buddhist literature in various languages of its transmission, and of online dictionaries and databases assisting in their analysis, have transformed research on Buddhism substantially, even though this is rarely acknowledged.
A glance at existing resources in Classical Studies such as the PERSEUS project (http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/), however, demonstrates that scholars of Buddhism are still at a comparative disadvantage. In part, this is because in some of the transmission languages in question electronic texts that conform to existing standards in encoding and markup are wanting. Available e-texts are also often based on outdated editions; a closer tie-in of the production of online texts with ongoing text-critical research would be desirable.
A new project funded within the DFG/NEH Bilateral Digital Humanities Programme, directed by Prof. Sheldon Pollock (Columbia University) and Prof. Birgit Kellner (University of Heidelberg), sets out to improve the state of digital philology in Indic languages by creating high-quality machine-readable texts, by developing and disseminating standards and best practices, and by making more recently produced critical editions available online in searchable form. The Heidelberg component of this project focuses on Buddhist philosophical literature.
This new project builds on foundations laid by Dr. Dominik Wujastyk (University of Vienna) and Dr. Patrick McAllister (University of Heidelberg) with the e-text archive SARIT (http://sarit.indology.info), and has accordingly also adopted the name SARIT: Search and Retrieval of Indic Texts.
While still in its infancy, the new SARIT project will present its goals and first achievements, with the main aim to establish contact with related projects in Buddhist Studies, and to develop and discuss synergies
The critical edition of the Pāli canon being prepared at Wat Phra Dhammakāya
Of the various printed editions of the Pāli Tipiṭaka, none could be considered ‘critical’ in the sense of being a reconstruction of an original from which all manuscripts derive. This is largely a consequence of the practical difficulty of obtaining suitable manuscripts from the Theravāda countries of South and South East Asia. But issues of manuscript antiquity and conflation pose more theoretical obstacles to such work: the fact that most Pāli manuscripts date to the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries suggests that the old text of the Sri Lankan Mahāvihāra is beyond reconstruction, and that a comprehensive study of the manuscripts will only conflate separate regional traditions, effectively producing a hybrid text.
These practical and theoretical problems are now compounded by academic amnesia. The need for a critical edition of the Tipiṭaka has been more or less forgotten, and the editions prepared by the Pali Text Society – or other editions such as the Syāmaraṭṭhassa Tepiṭikam of Thailand (1926-28), the Buddha Jayantī Series of Sri Lanka (1957-89), and the Chaṭṭhasaṅgāyana of Rangoon (1954-56) – are considered sufficient. The recent advent of electronic versions of some of these editions has further obfuscated the need for a critical edition, for parallel passages in the different editions can now be easily compared, thus creating the impression that all significant variation is knowable, and that the text of the Tipiṭaka is more or less settled. Moreover, the easy availability of different editions of the Tipiṭaka hides the fact that all are full of mistakes, which could only be corrected by greater access to the manuscript tradition.
In recognition of these problems of Pāli scholarship, the Dhammachai Tipiṭaka Project was inaugurated in 2010 at Wat Phra Dhammakāya, Thailand, with the aim of preparing a critical edition of the Pāli canon for the first time. So far a digital library of almost 3000 Pāli manuscripts has been amassed, and a pilot edition of the first volume of the Dīgha Nikāya (Sīlakkhandhavagga) prepared, based on manuscripts from the Burmese, Sri Lankan, Khom and Tham traditions. A similar range of sources – but including Mon manuscripts from central Thailand – is currently being used to edit the remainder of the Dīgha Nikāya (the Mahāvagga and Pāṭhikavagga), and plans are in place to produce critical editions of all the books in the Pāli Tipiṭaka in the near future.
This paper will outline the aims of the project, propose solutions to some of the theoretical problems mentioned above, and present some examples of work already completed. This will show that a critical edition of the Tipiṭaka known to Buddhaghosa can be prepared, and that suitable methods to achieve this have been devised, and are being implemented, at Wat Phra Dhammakāya.
Śāstravid: A New Electronic Research Tool for Studying Indian Philosophical Texts
Śāstravid is a new web-based framework for the study of Indian philosophical texts (śāstras) that has been developed since 2010 with a major grant from the European Research Council. Śāstravid provides an innovative tool for an integrated presentation of root texts, commentaries, translations, notes, and bibliographical references. It also incorporates a custom-made format for displaying a conceptual analysis of the texts covered. The system is set up in such a way that users can easily move between a work's textual structure (as found in the root texts and commentaries) and its conceptual structure (the hierarchy of topics the work investigates).
At its present stage Śāstravid contains primarily Madhyamaka material in Sanskrit, Tibetan and Chinese, as well as translations into various European languages. However, the system is set up to allow for easy encoding of any Indic set of texts composed according to the root text/commentary model and encourages users to contribute to the notes and bibliographical references, and to add texts on their own. Śāstravid also provides an ideal platform for researchers in different physical locations planning to collaborate by editing, translating or commenting on a text.
A first, fully functional version of the programme is now available and this presentation will provide an introduction to its main features and its uses for researchers in Indology, Buddhist studies, the Study of Religion, and related disciplines.
Khyentse Foundation's Academic Activities
Gregory Forgues (University of Vienna, AUT)
As Buddhism expands in the West, Buddhist studies as an academic discipline in major universities plays a key role in bridging worlds.
Buddhist research programs at the university level require scholars who have a thorough grounding and grasp of Buddhist traditions. Khyentse Foundation has a successful record of supporting academic development, starting with the establishment of the Khyentse Chair of Buddhist Studies at the University of California in Berkeley in 2008 and the Khyentse Center for Buddhist Textual Scholarship at Hamburg University in 2010, as well as the Buddhist Translation Studies program at Vienna University in 2013.
In 2012, the KF board approved plans to set up a special Academia Fund to further expand its support to academic institutions. In addition to supporting established institutions in western academia, efforts are being made to strengthen Buddhist studies programs in formerly Buddhist countries, such as India, China, Mongolia, Cambodia, and even Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Indonesia, and in countries that are not traditionally Buddhist but where interest is high, such as Bulgaria, Poland, and Hungary. This flexible collaborative support program can range from endowing traditional chairs and visiting professors to support for seminars, forums, and exchange programs, as well as scholarships for graduate students and research.