Despite the rising interests in modern East Asian Buddhism in recent years, studies on how the Buddhist textual tradition copes with modernity and reinvigorates itself as a vital force of religious changes are conspicuously missing. In this paper, I discuss the modern fate of the Buddhist canon in East Asia, including China, Japan, and Korea to highlight the unique time period when East Asia was undergoing significant changes in the face of Western “threats,” not only politically and militarily, but also culturally, intellectually, and religiously. This paper attempts to explore the relationship between religion and modernity by focusing on the transformation of East Asia’s scriptural tradition, more specifically the common cultural heritage of the Chinese Buddhist canon among East Asian countries. I argue that the modernization of the Chinese Buddhist canon is an integral part of the process of modernizing East Asia’s textual tradition, contributing to the rise of what I call “textual modernity.”

From the noble silence of Chan to the chanting of Nichiren and Pure Land, meditation practices represent a significant, if not dominant, role within American Buddhism. However, what role does the Buddhist canon fulfill for American Buddhists? Because of the significant work of the Bukkyo Dendo Kyokai (BDK) or The Society for the Promotion of Buddhism, Buddhist scriptures are now readily available to American Buddhists in English translation. This paper attempts to set a framework to define what “Buddhist scriptures” mean in America. In America, are there consistent distinctions between canonical texts included in catalogs like the Taishō Canon and attributed Shakyamuni or Huineng from writings of sectarian leaders past or present? A survey of six influential American meditation centers representing six different Buddhist traditions is then presented focusing on their statements about Buddhist scriptures. Are scriptures simply proof texts arguing for the efficacy of central practices or are they presented as scriptures with historical provenances and transcendent origins on par with America’s prevalent Abrahamic scriptures. Finally, this paper reflects on whether the statements made by American meditation centers are emerging as an independent and distinct scriptural tradition or are understandings of Buddhist scriptures simply a reflection of canonical discourses in Asia?

Starting in the late nineteenth century, East Asia has witnessed a lasting wave of making new editions of the Buddhist canon. Notably, during the period not only have the countries in the region embraced the West fully, forced or voluntarily, for the first time but their relationships with each other have been profoundly reshaped in the wake of the rapid rise of Japan in the world hierarchy of power. Against the backdrop, centering on the production of the Taishō canon in the 1920-1930s, this paper examines consistent efforts to create new editions of the Buddhist canon from both sides of Japan and China. It reveals how the canon has since been taken as a kind of symbolism of Asian cultures on the global stage, and how the struggle for the best version of it has become, beyond a religious or intellectual enterprise, part of a competition for cultural autonomy and national pride in the context of modern East Asia. Over the course, it shed light on motivations of the participants while engaging in the enterprise and, in particular, the tensions deriving from their dual-identity as scholars and/or Buddhists and as nationalists of a given country. Also, it explores how such complexities among the people involved have affected the contents, structure, and formats of the newly-produced canon as well as other significant consequences.

A few years ago, former director general of PRC’s National Religious Bureau Dr. Ye Xiaowen 叶小文 requested Professor Andrew L. C. Wong to act as the chief editor for editing new Chinese Tripitaka to replace Taisho-pitaka 《大正藏》being used as major reference materials for Chinese postgraduates and scholars of Buddhist studies. Professor Andrew L. C. Wong deemed it premature to do this as there was insufficient Chinese scholars to form the editorial board for such a large-scale edition, instead Dr. Ye and Professor Wong agreed to initiate the Buddhist Canon Selected Translation project. This could be considered as the continuation of the Essentials of Tripitaka 《藏要》 published by Nanjing Inner Studies Academy 南京支那内学院 ninety years ago, but the scope of texts will not be restricted to the sutras and sastras in the Essentials of Tripitaka. The project was formally launched on April 1, 2018 right after the Maitreya Twin Forum 慈宗双论坛 in Hong Kong. Under the Maitreya Culture & Education Foundation established by Professor Wong, a specific editorial committee has been set up and will select explanatory notes of important sutras and sastras in Chinese Tripitaka for editing. The editorial committee will proof-read different versions, make footnotes and translate the classical texts into contemporary Chinese language. The final version will first be uploaded online for internal studies by Prof. Andrew L. C. Wong’s students, then open for public and eventually be published into series of teaching material booklets. The first stage of editing will focus on commentaries on prajna-paramita-related sutras and vijnaptimatra-related sastras, such as, An Appreciation of Implicit & In-depth Meaning of Heart Sutra 《心经幽赞》written by Master Kuiji 窥基大师 of the Tang Dynasty, Yogacara-bhumi-sastra Bodhisattva-bhumi 《瑜伽师地论记 . 菩薩地》, important chapters compiled by Ven. Dunlun 遁伦法师, a disciple of Master Xuanzang 玄奘大师 in the Tang Dynasty. It will take about ten years to complete the first stage of contemporary Chinese translation and will then move to the next stage of translating into English. However, cooperation with foreign Buddhist institutions like The Center for Buddhist Studies at the University of Arizona University could speed up the whole process. We trust this project will be beneficial to the Buddhist studies worldwide as most of these commentaries have never been introduced to the non-Chinese academic circles.

A variety of barriers block researchers in religious studies and the humanities from taking advantage of advances in machine learning to investigate humanistic and religious studies questions. One of the largest is a lack of large-scale datasets curated by and for specialists. A second is a lack of machine learning models made specifically to investigate religious and humanistic questions. This presentation describes attempts to help researchers overcome these barriers. Specifically, the presentation details efforts by researchers investigating the Buddhist canon to curate individualized, large-scale datasets using a new software called Mo文oN. These curatorial efforts support the goal of building machine learning models that can facilitate the digital encoding of every extant version of the Buddhist canon. Several methods are described for adaptively extracting text from images of the Qisha canon using Mo文oN to create a large dataset of tagged images of characters. The presentation concludes with a description of how these individualized, large-scale datasets can be used to generate machine learning models that can facilitate the automated transcription of the entire Qisha canon, as well as other canon materials.

The significance of the Sutra of Forty-Two Sections as one of the earliest translated sutras transmitted to China has long been recognized by scholars. However, the significance of the changing identity of the Sutra of Forty-Two Sections has not been recognized yet. This article attempts to investigate the textual transformation of the Sutra of Forty-Two Sections in the Chinese Tripitaka. There are four versions of the Sutra of Forty-Two Sections in the Chinese Tripitaka and two versions outside of this collection. The versions included in the Chinese Tripitaka are: (1) the version included in the Tripitaka Koreana; (2) the imperial Zhenzong 真宗annotated edition; (3) the Shousui 守遂annotated edition; and (4) the version included in Baolin zhuan 宝林传. The versions outside of the Tripitaka are Liuhe Stupa’s六和塔 stone inscription edition and Huaisu’s 怀素 (725-785) cursive script version of the Sutra of Forty-Two Sections. This study will focus on the study of the former three versions in the Chinese Tripitaka, while incorporating the comparison to the other versions of the Sutra of Forty-Two Sections into the study. My study reveals the transition of the Sutra of Forty-Two Sections from an early Buddhist sutra to a Mahayana sutra, and finally to a Zenified sutra, and demonstrates that the transition should have taken place during the period between the mid-Tang to the late-Tang dynasty.

Recent breakthrough in the Tripitaka study unfolds that the organization of canonical tradition in China appears to be dynamic interplay of openness and closure, as suggested by scholars like Lewis Lancaster and Jiang Wu. It is commonly known that Zhisheng’s Kaiyuan Catalogue played vital role in the formation of the relative opened textual lineage of the Chinese canonical tradition. I will, in this paper, examine a textual lineage of esoteric texts in the Chinese canonical tradition. However, this examination will showcase the influence of a non-Han canon, the Khitan Canon on the whole Chinese canonical tradition which has not been closely studied. In this paper, I will retrieve and analyze the transmission of one esoteric manual Susiddhikara Worship Method in Chinese canons from the Song to the modern period. The main argument in this paper is that Khitan Canon has a significant influence on the transmission of the Susiddhikara Worship Method and the formation of a textual lineage of esoteric scriptures in the Chinese canonical tradition. This paper consists of three major parts: I first discuss the meaning and significance of the Worship Method in esoteric Buddhism during the Medieval time. Then I retrieve the transmission of this ritual manual in the Chinese canonical tradition from the medieval time to the contemporary period. Finally, I examine the differences of two versions of the Worship Method and analyzes the role of Khitan Canon played in forming this textual lineage.

The Summary of the Great Vehicle (Mahāyānasaṃgraha) is one of the central works of the Yogācāra School of Mahayana Buddhism. This text is written by Bodhisattva Asanga, and it explains the major doctrines of the Mahayana Yogācāra school such as the “latent container consciousness” (ālāya-vijñāna), “the three patterns of existence” (trisvabhāva), and “the five paths” (pañca-mārga). Its three Chinese translations and four translations of two commentaries have been included in most of the existent Chinese Buddhist canons. However, there is a hiatus in the incorporation of different versions of this text to the canons during the early Ming dynasty. In the Yongle Southern Canon and Yongle Northern Canon, Xuanzang’s and other translations of the commentaries were not included into the canons. It was not until the late Ming in the Jiaxing Canon that the commentary texts were reintroduced. In this paper, I argue that the reincorporation of Xuanzang’s translation into the late Ming Buddhist canon reflects integrated nature of the late-Ming Buddhist revival, which encompassed multiple Buddhist schools of thought, including historically less popular ones such as the Yogācāra School. This paper is divided into three parts. Firstly, it introduces The Summary and how it became one of the basic texts of the “School of Summary”; then it presents the history of Xuanzang’s orthodox Yogācāra tradition in imperial China, and analyzes why it was largely ignored from the Tang dynasty onwards; finally, the paper discusses the revival of the Yogācāra School in the late Ming dynasty, and how the reincorporation of Xuanzang’s translation into the canon serves as evidence of the revival of the Yogācāra School.

For those with sufficient means, printing the canon resulted in a welcome display of merit, a gift of unequal value. But what is the value of its contents to “end users,” those who actually read and applied its varied messages? For most practitioners, the Buddhist canon represents a massive corpus, impressive in size, but otherwise unwieldy for practical application. Because of its enormity, the Buddhist faithful looked to creative ways to manage and use the canon’s contents in keeping with their own religious and spiritual aspirations. My presentation explores ways in which Chinese Buddhist communities strove to make sense of this massive corpus. One such means was to select and rally around a certain body of philosophically and doctrinally consistent scriptures such as was done with the Sanlun school三論宗 or the Weishi school 唯識宗. Another means evolved in accordance with the well-known panjiao 判教 system of classification that effectively dissected the canon into a hierarchical doctrinal taxonomy, providing a sectarian guide from the perspective of the most elevated (and thus most important) teachings, as, for example, in the Tiantai 天台 (Fahua jing 法華經) and Huayan 華嚴 (Huayan jing 華嚴經) schools. There were also those who, upon surveying the massive output represented in the canon, constructed abridged versions that aspired to provide a digest of the entire corpus, as with the Zongjing lu 宗鏡錄 compiled by Yongming Yanshou. In addition, there were those in the Chan school who dispensed with the traditional canon altogether, criticizing it as a derivative representation of Buddhist teachings and posited the yulu 語錄 dialogue records of Chan masters as a new and more authentic canon in their place. A different type of critique of canonical scriptures was suggested in the use of dhāraṇī as a mnemonic device that encapsulates the meaning of a section or chapter of a sutra, and ultimately provides a kind of mysterious access to the truth implicit in the entire canon itself. As a result, when referring to the Buddhist canon, one should keep in mind different kinds of definitions of canon: as an officially recognized set of sacred books, either the entire corpus of Buddhist texts included in the Dazangjing 大藏經; as a restricted corpus, a “practical canon” determined by particular sectarian criteria with corresponding doctrines and principles; as a digest intended to reduce the essence of canonical teachings to a manageable size; or through various means to dispense with the canon in place of allegedly more authentic teachings or methods predicated on more direct access to Buddhist truth.

Jonathan Z. Smith has argued that “canon is best seen as one form of a basic cultural process of limitation and of overcoming that limitation through ingenuity.” This paper examines practices of citation of the Tibetan Buddhist canon to respond to the following questions: Where does the meaning of the canonical lie for Tibetan authors? Does authority reside only in the translation of Indian Buddhist sources or is it modified through the citation of the canonical in new contexts? How does command of the art of citation garner prestige and express authorial prowess? In responding to these questions, the paper proposes a unique methodology for mapping citations in Buddhist texts.

In recent years there has been a significant amount of new publications concerning texts and manuscripts found within Buddhist statues across East Asia. This presentation aims to bring together the rather disparate information and assess the nature of the texts that have been identified thus far in statues from China, Korea, and Japan. While the handwritten manuscripts, which tend to be devotional texts related to donors, are of interest and have attracted much attention, my purposes in this talk will try to arrive at some general conclusions concerning what types of canonical sources found there way into statues across Asia. This talk will address a series of interrelated questions. Do certain canonical texts appear in a certain type of statue? What is the date range for the canonical texts that have been discovered thus far? Are there any discernible regional differences for what types of texts appear in Buddhist statues across Asia? Is it possible to understand why certain texts were interred in statues? Should these materials be considered a type of alternative canon or archive? How might these newly discovered texts be integrated into the Buddhist canon of the future?

The ti-yong 體用 paradigm, which thoroughly pervades and informs the Buddhist, Daoist, and Confucian manifestations of traditional East Asian philosophy, has received surprisingly scant attention from modern-day scholarship. When it has been treated, it has been mainly: (1) the subject of mere philological/historical inquiry (in Japan); (2) treated as a strictly metaphysical paradigm (in Western studies of Neo-Confucianism), or (3) taken solely as a kind of onto-cosmology (by such scholars as Xiong Shili and Whalen Lai). While all of these are perfectly valid approaches to ti-yong, they do not capture the full original intent or scope of the paradigm, which is to provide a priorities-based soteriological system and an ethical framework for personal behavior. Such an application is readily visible in the Confucian and Daoist classics as well as East Asian Buddhist commentaries. This presentation will examine some of the major ways in which each of these three traditions applied this hermeneutic structure to resolve various conceptual problems, and also go a step further by suggesting that essence-function can be understood not only as a hermeneutical device or an onto-cosmological map, but as a conceptual tool for the practitioner to reconcile the contradictions that emerge in juxtaposing the world of one’s inner being with external “realities.”

Buddhist studies has played a significant role in the history of the humanities in modern times since the early 19th century and is expected to continue to fill the role in the future in the new context of the humanities in the digital age. The uniqueness in role of Buddhist studies is mainly by virtue of the characteristics of the transmitted knowledge of Buddhism, such as of polyglot and multicultural nature, of long-lastingness in history extending more than two thousand years, of a variety of texts compiled in a form of corpus of different languages, etc. The digitization projects of this whole corpus seen in such as SAT and CBETA in Chinese canon and BDRC in Tibetan and Sanskrit will make these features distinctly visible, benefiting Buddhist studies a clear advantage for being a model for other areas of studies in the humanities. In this presentation, I would like to discuss the significance of building a digital infrastructure for a whole area of a specific study by demonstrating the newly released SAT 2018, which has absorbed several important new functions and standards, such as IIIF, Word2Vec, Unicode CJKF and so forth.

The Digital Dictionary of Buddhism [DDB] is a compilation of Chinese ideograph-based terms, texts, temple, schools, persons, etc. found in Buddhist canonical sources. The Chinese-Japanese-Korean-Vietnamese/English Dictionary [CJKV-E] is a compilation of Chinese ideographs, as well as ideograph-comprised compound words, text names, person names, etc., found primarily in the Confucian and Daoist classics. It also includes vocabulary from Neo-Confucian texts, as well as other philosophical and historical sources. The information on individual ideographs in the CJKV-E is intended to be comprehensive, containing pronunciations and meanings from ancient and modern sources from the Sinitic cultural sphere including China, Korea, Japan, and Vietnam. Modern-day compound words are included incidentally, but the coverage of modern materials is not intended to be comprehensive. The dictionaries started out as a single project during my first semester of graduate school, and have, over time, grown to be standard reference works in the fields of Buddhist and Asian Studies. They are distinctive in being eminently successful crowd-sourced projects, supported by more than 300 scholars and subscribed to by 60 university libraries around the world. This presentation will briefly cover the history of the project, the major challenges that it has overcome, and those that it faces in the future.

A vast amount of digital resources for Buddhist studies have spread in the world through the Web due to the contribution of many important projects. But this turn of events has brought a somewhat dangerous situation. For example, while someone might make a presentation without finding an important research resource that exists on Web, an audience may easily show the resource with any digital device during the discussion. To share digital research resources appropriately while avoiding such a mishap, an ecosystem that allows any researcher to access any resources equally and efficiently should be required by use of common technologies which anyone can leverage. SAT Daizōkyō Text Database Committee (SAT) has been addressing the issue not only through creating text databases and its convenient interfaces but also through tackling international standards for digital cultural resources such as Unicode, TEI (Text Encoding Initiative), and IIIF (International Image Interoperability Framework). SAT registered 6 variant characters of Siddhaṃ scripts into Unicode 9.0 and over 2800 CJK unified ideographs into Unicode 10.0. The members of SAT established a SIG for East Asian/Japanese texts to form more suitable guidelines to encode East Asian texts. Moreover, SAT has released several solutions to leverage IIIF technology to enhance digital Buddhist studies, such as right-to-left viewing function in the Mirador IIIF viewer and SAT Taishōzō Image Database. The version 2018 of the SAT Database (SAT2018) which SAT has released in the end of March is a use case of such environment with Word2vec textual analysis function. SAT would like to seek for possibilities of the coming future of Buddhist studies to realize such an ecosystem with international colleagues.

Historical documents like the Tripitaka are invaluable treasures that human ancestors have left with us in past centuries. An important and efficient way to understand and protect these documents is through digitization, in which Optical Character Recognition (OCR) technology plays a crucial role. However, various Tripitaka document collections encounter serious quality degradations including stains, torn, ink seeping, etc, which makes the segmentation and recognition of characters of such document images very challenging. In this talk, I will introduce how to design a high-performance deep learning OCR engineer for Tripitaka, and a new recognition-guided character detection/segmentation method that achieves tight Chinese character detection/segmentation in historical Tripitaka documents. Experiments show that, the proposed CNN based OCR model can achieve very high accuracy for different collections of Tripitaka documents, and our method significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art methods and leading commercial OCR softwares.

The compilation of the Tripitaka in the past used to be a long-term and arduous task, which required enormous human, financial and material resources. The rapid development of AI in recent years is expected to greatly improve the compilation efficiency of the Tripitaka. Beijing Longquan Monastery has been continuously exploring the ways of collaboration in the fields between AI and the Tripitaka. It has already applied the AI trendy deep-learning algorithms into OCR(Optical Character Recognition) and text punctuation, the accuracy of such techniques used is approaching to professional level, and is more sophisticated beyond the ordinary beings in some applied cases. The Man-Machine model helps to reduce training costs, improve the efficiency and effectiveness of performances, as well as to facilitate the standardization. The AI technology has also been applied widely in fields like the Character-retrieval of different versions, Semantic Annotation, Sentence meaning explanation, and Old-fashioned language translation. It can be foreseen that AI will be an important tool for future studies of Buddhism and even humanities and social sciences, and will become a powerful assistant for scholars.

AI and Deep Learning technologies have opened up new possibilities for the study of the Chinese Buddhist Canon. In this presentation, we will report on our initial findings based on experiments using Google Attention OCR and TensorFlow Applications. We will focus on a manageable size of samples from the remaining volumes of Kaibao Canon created in the tenth century to test and train our system.

The implementation of an optical character recognition (OCR) to extract images of historical Buddhist manuscripts, printed or handwritten into machine-encoded text continues to be a major challenge in the digitization of Buddhist canon and textual studies, particularly those pertaining to Chinese Buddhist manuscripts that use non-Latin characters. This paper gives an overview of the design, implementation and performance analysis of an image-based search engine based on pattern matching and user-adaptive recognition system developed in “MooN” that allows preservation of the attributes of each character and word. Such architecture usually relies heavily on high performance computing, large storage capacity, interactivity and a Posix file system structure to successfully process the work. However, “MooN” creates a new environment for users to build and train their own datasets on the client-side application, enhancing effectiveness of text retrieval and text encoding of Chinese Buddhist manuscripts in the end-user environment.