A Study of Buddhist ChineseA Digital Comparative Edition of the Bieyi za ahan jing 別譯雜阿含經 (T.100) with English Translation

poster / demo / art installation
Authorship
  1. 1. Marcus Bingenheimer

    Chung-Hwa Institute of Buddhist Studies

Work text
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The Digital Comparative Edition of the Bieyi za ahan
jing is a project undertaken by the the Chung-hwa
Institute for Buddhist Studies, Taipei (www.chibs.edu.tw)
and funded by a three - year grant from the Chiang
Ching-kuo Foundation of Scholarly Exchange (www.cckf.
org/index-e.htm).
As Humanities Computing in Chinese is still a newcomer
to the scene, this poster presentation aims to introduce a
project that produces a sophisticated comparative edition of
texts in ancient Asian languages using modern “western”
technology (XML/TEI). We hope to discuss with other
participants, learn, listen and try find ways of bridging
the culture gap that exists between Humanities in the
West and Asia.
TheBieyi za ahan jing 別譯雜阿含經 (BZA) in 16 fascicles
belongs to the early Chinese Buddhist texts collectively
called Ahan (Āgama) sutras 阿含經 The Ahan sutras
belong to the earliest stratum of Buddhist literature.
Their originals in Buddhist Sanskrit are largely lost, only
a few fragments have survived. Next to the Chinese
tradition only the Theravāda tradition has preserved
a comprehensive set of these sutras in Pāli. For the
Theravāda tradition the Nikāyas, as the Ahan sutras
are called here, contain the “words of the Buddha”
and therefore have been extensively studied and fully
translated into English, Japanese and German. On the
other hand there are extremely few translations or critical
editions of the Chinese Ahan sutras.
Generally, all of the 364 short sutras contained the
BZA have at least one parallel in Chinese and one Pāli
parallel (with commentary). Often there are several
parallels in Chinese and Pāli, sometimes even a fragment
in Buddhist Sanskrit has survived. The aim of the project is
to create a digital comparative edition of the BZA, which
clarifies these text-clusters. The edition will be freely
available to the public. Moreover we are working on an
English translation of the BZA text. Textbase for Chinese
is the digital CBETA edition, for Pāli text the Vipassana
Research Institute has granted us permission to use the
text of the Chaṭṭha Saṅgāyana CD.
The markup of the XML files is designed according to the
encoding scheme of the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI)
which is transformed into HTML for the user. The parallel
texts in each cluster get markup that expresses the basic
dialogic structure of the content, names, differentiates
between prose and verse parts, and connects them to the
authoritative printed versions. The clusters are linked
through a comparative catalogue. If time allows, we
will add phrase-level markup for better alignment of the
parallels within a text-cluster. Middleware between the
source files and the user application will be eXist, an
XML database.
The digital edition will help to gain a better understanding
of the textual history of the BZA, especially as to the
as well as of the relationship between the BZA and its
Chinese, Pāli and Sanskrit parallels. This is a major
contribution to the research on the formation of canonical
texts in early Buddhism. By a comparison of the BZA with
its Chinese parallels we will learn more about the rendition
techniques of the early translators. With the help of
algorithisms for authorship attribution it might
even be possible to profile the ideolect of the BZA’s
translator(s).
The use of digital analysis for studies in Buddhist Chinese
textual history is still terra nova and faces a number of
problems different from European languages (incomplete
character sets, no automated word-segmentation etc.).
Also the delivery system based on eXist is a first for
Buddhist Studies as well as Humanities Computing in
Taiwan.
We hope that with the poster presentation we can start a
dialogue and continue to work towards a comprehensive
framework for textual studies across cultures.

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Conference Info

Complete

ACH/ALLC / ACH/ICCH / ADHO / ALLC/EADH - 2006

Hosted at Université Paris-Sorbonne, Paris IV (Paris-Sorbonne University)

Paris, France

July 5, 2006 - July 9, 2006

151 works by 245 authors indexed

The effort to establish ADHO began in Tuebingen, at the ALLC/ACH conference in 2002: a Steering Committee was appointed at the ALLC/ACH meeting in 2004, in Gothenburg, Sweden. At the 2005 meeting in Victoria, the executive committees of the ACH and ALLC approved the governance and conference protocols and nominated their first representatives to the ‘official’ ADHO Steering Committee and various ADHO standing committees. The 2006 conference was the first Digital Humanities conference.

Conference website: http://www.allc-ach2006.colloques.paris-sorbonne.fr/

Series: ACH/ICCH (26), ACH/ALLC (18), ALLC/EADH (33), ADHO (1)

Organizers: ACH, ADHO, ALLC

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  • Language: English
  • Topics: None