Digital Buddhist Texts and Buddhist Universities1

Digital Buddhist Texts and Buddhist Universities Digital Buddhist Texts and Buddhist Universities1 Lewis R. Lancaster2 It is a great pleasure to be part of this meeting of the International Association of Buddhist Universities. I appreciate the invitation to speak today about the role of IABU and the work that has been done with regard to digital Buddhist texts. Bangkok is an appropriate place to discuss these issues because on 30 May, 1988, The Digital Tipitaka Development Team at Mahidol University Computing Center, Thailand announced the completion of the first major project to digitize Buddhist texts. The Siam edition of the Pali Tipitaka in forty-five volumes had been successfully digitized and released. It is now 20 years later and since that time new projects have come into existence including the Pali version of the Chattha Sangayana edition in Roman and Burmese script, the Buddha Jayanti Tiptaka of Sri Lanka, the Pali Text Society Edition of U.K., the Tibetan edition by the Asian Classics Input Project, Buddhist Sanskrit Text Project of University of the West and the Nagarjuna Institute 1 Presented at the 1st IABU Conference on Buddhism and Ethics at Mahachulalongkornrajavidyalaya University Main Campus, Wang Noi, Ayutthaya, Thailand in September, 2008. 2 Lewis Lancaster, PhD. (Wisconsin), was professor at the University of California, Berkeley & president of University of the West, Rosemead, CA, USA; he is also the founder and Director of the Electronic Cultural Atlas Initiative (ECAI). (www.ecai.org). His works on East Asian Buddhism and digitization of Buddhist canonical texts.  of Nepal, Koryo Edition of the Chinese canon known as Tripitaka Koreana, and the Taisho Issaikyo edition available from CBETA at the Dharma Drum Buddhist College in Taiwan and SAT in Tokyo University. The digital versions of the Chinese, Sanskrit and Tibetan canonic material have altered the landscape of scholarship in the field of Buddhist Studies. This immense effort to produce the databases for the texts has also created a challenge and an opportunity for Buddhist universities. If the digital age is to fulfill its promise, it requires a well- coordinated effort to avoid incompatible platforms, codes, categorization systems and unnecessarily repeated work. Over the past two decades, there has been no organization such as the International Association of Buddhist Universities, to help with this effort. The work of input and the creation of digital Buddhist materials has been done by institutions and individuals who have often worked alone and with only local funding. There are a host of indispensable issues that need to be addressed by educators within theBuddhistcommunities. Oneofthemostpressingisthedevelopment of digital research and reference tools for the large datasets. With the growing number of online resources, the Internet has become the first choice of many students and scholars. It is crucial that these online materials provide the best and most accurate information. This shift from paper to digital resources is already an established reality and concerted action in providing leadership for the creation and appraisal of this material will determine the success of the new medium. This moment in history calls for prompt and definite action from an organization such as the IABU. There is a danger that we will become complacent about the digital Buddhist text material, feeling that the input has been completed and there is no need for further work. We must be aware that digital data is the most fragile format for information ever invented. It can disappear in an instant and beyond recovery. I think of digital data sets as being like a baby that never grows up, never moves beyond the need for support, never moves to a new location without extreme effort on the part of the creator, and is always susceptible to viruses. We have these wonderful versions of the Buddhist texts in the computer and now we must think and plan  about maintaining them so they will be sustainable for the future. Librarians are the best candidates to do this archiving and preservation and Buddhist universities must take the lead in providing for this necessary effort if our data is to survive. Sustainability is dependent on the coding, software, and formatting of information. Every day thousands of pages of information disappear from the World Wide Web because a server is closed, a project has completed the funded period, individuals retire, campuses stop supporting older software, and no allowance has been made to move the data to new platforms. Who will make certain that all of the Buddhist text input is carefully placed in an archive that will assure it a long life into the foreseeable future? I believe this is a task that IABU must consider carefully. Scholarship changes with the availability of digital information. Digital library initiatives around the world are providing an amount of data on the web that surpasses what most campuses have in printed books on library shelves. While the data is available, digital libraries have not yet created the tools for the referencing procedures. Our codex libraries have Reference Rooms with librarians who help the users find resources contained in those books. At this time, there is nothing comparable to a Reference Room in the internet environment and it shows in the problems that students have in assessing the value of the information found with a Google or Yahoo search. In order to give the best help possible, it will not be enough simply to point to acceptable sources. Researchers will need to be given support in understanding the context of the information. This context implies answers to a number of generic questions such as “Where was it done?” “Who did it?” “When did they do it?” For librarians it means that digital material cannot only be indexed as an “object” as our books are catalogued in the codex library. A new kind of cataloging must emerge that marks up every “object” but considers that “object” as an “event.” Consider a Buddhist text in digital form, it is important to know it by title and author or translator when appropriate. However, the text seen as an “event” must be marked up to show us the history of what we see on the screen. Which edition do we see, when was it made, where was it made, what version of the edition was used by  those who did the input, where was the input done, who was responsible, what software and procedures were used for the work, etc. The reference catalog for the digital canons will look very different from those of the former card catalogs. Because Buddhist material has its own context, it is going to be part of the task of librarians and scholars within the discipline of Buddhist Studies to provide this background. As we have easy access to the input projects for the Buddhist canonic texts, users will want tools to aid them in managing the search results, finding images of the original manuscripts or prints where available, cross links between different language versions for the same text, built in dictionaries, and analytic software to determine patterns within the texts. Our users will want to have more than individual sets of data that must be searched independent of all other sets of data. The word “silo” has been selected to describe the amassing of specific information in one site. In the future, we must have search engines that will find results across many “silos” without the user having to enter and exit each one individually. For Buddhist Studies, this will mean being able to search for a term in all of the canon databases at once and retrieving the information in a variety of forms. I have been researching this problem for some time and have now developed a prototype interface. It is a prototype only and still has much work that needs to be done and I hope to find others who wish to participate in the effort. The prototype shows us a word or phrase search. (See Appendix I) When the results are returned, they are shown as an image where red dots appear representing the target word within a sea of blue dots that represent the text itself. Images allow us to see either the whole of the canon in one view or details limited by our interests. This immediate display of the patterning across the whole of the canon gives us an idea of whether our word is widely used, rarely used or only used within certain texts. The interface exhibits a window where we can go into the image and ask for the natural language text and we can then show a scanned image of the printed source or manuscripts. The pages of the canon images are shown to us so we can move back and forth between examples. (See Appendix II) If we add analytic software, we can  also see patterns displayed for us in a variety of ways such as one that shows the number of target words according to the time of translation of texts or structural patterns such as Ring Composition. Our context builder for the Chinese version can present the canon by time of translation, order of catalogs, translators, or place of translation. This is just one way to see context building. (See Appendix III) Researchers will want to have a window in the interface that will allow the appearance of multiple versions of the same section. For example, with the Chinese canon we would like to have a scanned image for the Taisho Issaikyo printed page, the Koryo print from the blocks of Hae-in Monastery, manuscript images from Dunhuang, rock cut rubbings from Fang Shan in China, as well as the corresponding passage in Sanskrit, Tibetan, or Pali. For each version, the user may want to draw into the window images of prints, manuscripts, and fragments for any passage. The capabilities described above will change the way in which we edit and translate texts. No longer will multiple footnotes at the bottom of the page indicating alternate readings be acceptable. With the computer, we will ask instead to see an image of the “witness” that shows a different reading. The user will be able to judge for themselves the variety of readings in a way that is much more complete and accurate than relying on notations from one scholar who had access to a number of resources. It has been nearly impossible for readers to challenge the footnotes of editions because there has not been easy or even possible access to the original documents used by the editor. With the new expanded interfaces, we will all have the opportunity to view for ourselves the images of these “witnesses” and for the first time have the ability to “falsify.” I look forward to the future and to the new insights which we can gain by using the computer to help us with pattern identifications that we have never noted before. The comparisons of canonic versions, witness imagery from both prints and manuscripts, and use of databases available to all other scholars opens us a new horizon. The International Association of Buddhist Universities will be an important part of these developments.  The Journal of The Journal of Digital Buddhist Texts and Buddhist Universities Digital Buddhist Texts and Buddhist Universities 138 138 133 133