British Academy: The UK's National Academy for the Humanities and Social Sciences
The E-Kanjur: electronic Tibetan Buddhist scriptures on the Web
Professor David Germano (University of Virginia) and Dr Ulrich Pagel (SOAS) on behalf of the British Association for South Asian Studies
This presentation illustrates current progress in the digitisation of the Tibetan Buddhist Canon and its application in Indo-Tibetan Buddhist Studies.
The digitisation project is sponsored by the British Association for South Asian Studies (formerly the Society for South Asian Studies), with funding from the British Academy.
For further information, visit: www.britac.ac.uk/institutes/SSAS/projects/kangyur.htm
Summary
The Tibetan Kanjur ranks among the most important sources for the study of Buddhism in India and Tibet. It is widely held to be the single
most authoritative repository of Buddhist thought among Tibetan speakers in Asia and beyond. Containing many hundreds of Sanskrit Buddhist texts translated in the eight/ninth century by teams of scholars from India, China, Tibet and Central Asia in order to create the literary foundation for Buddhism in Tibet, it is unrivalled in doctrinal authority and historical value. Its translations are the principle point of access to centuries of Buddhist developments in the Indo-Tibetan cultural world. While we possess digital versions of the Chinese and Palicanons, scholars using Tibetan sources still have to browse manually through endless volumes in search of a single term or concept. Since the Kanjur consists of more than 32,000 folios, this causes significant delays, consuming months of valuable, publicly funded research time. The digitisation project thrusts Kanjur studies into the 21th century as it offers instantaneous access to the content of tens of thousands of pages of scripture, many of which are attributed to the historical Buddha himself.
The project serves a number of distinct purposes. First, and foremost, it creates a powerful research tool for scholars working on Kanjur materials. Second, it contributes to the transformation of a textual tradition, hitherto available only to a small number of scholars in Tibet and abroad, into a globally shared electronic resource. This new format propels these ancient texts into modernity and contributes to their survival as a source of cultural identity and interfaith dialogue. Finally, their preservation in an electronic medium enhances Tibet’s presence on the web and secures unfettered access to its religious heritage as transmitted by its own institutions for more than a thousand years.