Marcus Bingenheimer

This paper is part of a larger research project that attempts to apply historical social network analysis to the study of Chinese Buddhist history. The underlying research questions are whether social network analysis (SNA) metrics can be gainfully applied to Buddhist history, and whether network visualizations can enable us to better understand historical constellations and discover new patterns. Fundamental to this effort is a dataset of Buddhist

This paper relies on the dataset “Historical Social Network of Chinese Buddhism” (Ver. 2021‑06). The focus is on the period between c. 1570 and 1700 CE. We argue that the actor who was most influential for institutional Buddhism in the 17th century was not one of the “four great monks of the late Ming” but rather Miyun Yuanwu 密雲圓悟 (1566–1642). The network illustrates how Miyun’s Tiantong branch 天童派 of the Linji School became the dominant Chan lineage in China and beyond. The main results of this study are: (1) the data corroborate the assumption that (at least) monastic Buddhism declined between c. 1420 and 1570. (2) The network view de‑emphasizes the importance of the ‘four famous late Ming eminent monks’ for the development of 17th‑century Buddhist monasticism. (3) The data align well with a suggestion by Jiang Wu to distinguish two
different stages in the development of late Ming Buddhism. The first is characterized by the “late Ming revival,” led by figures such as Yunqi Zhuhong, Zibo Zhenke, and Hanshan Deqing; the second phase is the organization of orthopraxy around the Chan lineage discourse dominated by Miyun Yuanwu and his students. (4) For the 17th century, the network data clearly shows the centrality of Miyun Yuanwu and his network.

Mount Putuo, the Chinese Potalaka, is located in the Zhoushan archipelago not far off the coast from Ningbo. The abode of Avalokitevara/Guanyin was not only a popular pilgrimage site, but also played a strategic role for the naval control of the archipelago, especially in the Ming and Qing dynasties. In late imperial China, a number of military officials patronized the temples on Mount Putuo. In this paper we will follow Regional Commander Hou Jigao to Mount Putuo through a close reading of his travelogue (1588). Hou's travelogue offers a firsthand account of how a high-ranking military official experienced the island. As a case study, it serves as reference for future research into the connection between the military and institutional Buddhism in late imperial China, a topic that has received little attention so far.

This paper discusses issues concerning the creation of conversion tables for East Asian (Chinese, Japanese, Korean) and European calendars and describes the development of an open source calendar database as part of the history of converting East Asian calendars. East Asian calendars encode both astronomical and political cycles. As a result, date conversion must in practice rely on complex look-up tables and cannot be done merely algorithmically. We provide a detailed overview of the history of such conversion tables and find that the modelling of these tables into the digital follows a trend of increasingly detailed computation of chronological time. The Buddhist Studies Time Authority Database was designed to allow computational conversion of the Chinese, the Japanese and the Korean Calendar, between each other, as well as with the Gregorian, proleptic Gregorian and Julian calendar. It relies on the Julian Day Number (JDN) as common referent for all conversions. " We are sketching out some little diatribes to add to the little Computus "

ABSTRACT The focus of this article is a system for visualizing social network data derived from a TEI-encoded corpus of texts. It describes the collection of biographies of historical Chinese Buddhist monks, which constitutes this corpus and the TEI markup, in particular the innovative concept of a 'nexus-point' that was originally applied to them with the goal of producing GIS-like visualizations [see Bingenheimer, M., Hung, J.-J., and Wiles, S. (2009). Markup meets GIS - Visualizing the 'Biographies of Eminent Buddhist Monks'. In Banissi, E. et al. (eds), Proceedings of Information Visualization IV 2009. IEEE Computer Society: 550-4.]. Over the course of this work, it became clear that a data set of nexus-points could be derived from this markup which would support a representation of the social network which can be inferred from the corpus. The nature of this social network is explored and some interesting preliminary applications are suggested. The software architecture which supports the visualization, based on the PREFUSE toolkit, is introduced. Finally, the scope for the future development of the corpus and the system are discussed, and some avenues for potentially fruitful analysis are suggested. Throughout the article, it is argued that the methods and techniques employed here are applicable well beyond the present context. In describing this project of social network visualization, it is demonstrated that a well-marked-up TEI corpus can, with very little additional technical overhead and using the same markup, serve as the basis for multiple representations of the same data.

The identification of names and dates in larger corpora of historical texts is important for both traditional and digitally mediated research; it is part of reading as well as of exploring digital corpora. This paper is an introduction to a number of issues concerning named entity recognition (NER) for classical Chinese. In particular it introduces the " Digital Archive of Buddhist Temple Gazetteers " (http://buddhistinformatics.ddbc.edu.tw/ fosizhi/), as a benchmark corpus for NER on classical Chinese and illustrates how marked-up corpora can provide answers to question that could not otherwise be addressed.

Abstract This study provides an overview of what is known about the shorter Chinese Saṃyukta Āgama and also an annotated translation of its fi rst 22 suttas, which corresponds to the Pali Bhikkhu Saṃyutta. Recent research suggests that T. 100 belongs to the corpus ...

ABSTRACT This article provides quantitative evidence for a hypothesis concerning fourth-century translations of Indian Buddhist texts from Prakrit and Sanskrit into Chinese. Using a Variable Length n-Gram Feature Extraction Algorithm, principal component analysis and average linkage clustering we are able to show that 24 sutras, attributed by the tradition to different translators, were in fact translated by the same translator or group of translators. Since part of our method is based on assigning weight to n-grams, the analysis is capable of yielding distinctive features, i.e. strings of Chinese characters, that are characteristic of the translator(s). This is the first time that these techniques have successfully been applied to medieval Chinese texts. The results of this study open up a number of new directions for the lexicographic and syntactic study of early Chinese translations of Buddhist texts.