Efforts for Unified Buddhist Canons

Electronic Buddhist Text Initiative (EBTI) international academic conference, hosted by the Electronic Buddhist Text Institute of Dongguk University, is to be held at Dahyang-kwan on May 26-27.

EBTI is an association comprised of both the Buddhologists and the computer scientists to share information in the process of creating the electronic Buddhist text. Korea is the fourth country to host this conference, following India, Taiwan, and the US.

At the conference titled with `International Cooperation for the Electronic Buddhist Text,` 17 scholars from 6 nations will present their articles on the source analysis, Tripitaka, on-line document management, letters and encoding.

On completing the basic input of the electronic texts in Sanskrit, Pali, Chinese, and the English translation, discussions will focus on the measures to combine all the electronic texts.

The Korean Institute of the Koryo Tripitaka completed the electronic Tripitaka last year and the Chinese Buddhist Electronic Text Association also completed the revision of its electronic Tripitaka.

The Vipassana Research Institute in India has already published through Internet almost all Pali texts including Pali Tripitaka. More than 220 English translations of Pali texts are also available on Internet.

Jens Braarvig (University of Oslo, Norway) remarked in his previously distributed article, ``The ultimate goal of the electronic Buddhist text aims to unify all the Tripitakas, phrase by phrase in Sanskrit, Pali, Chinese, and English. Users will be able to search a phrase in a certain language and retrieve corresponding versions in all four languages.``

``Once the dictionary of the Buddhist text is created, researches on the Buddhist canons will dramatically develop in the 21st century,`` he added.

Ven. Bokwang, the chairperson of the Electronic Buddhist Text Institute of Dongguk University, said that scholars from each country will share the information of their projects of the e-Buddhist canons and also discuss about the technical problems including a unified computer operating system, fonts, and so on.

Song Pyoung-In pisong@donga.com