Creating the Digital Sanskrit Buddhist Canon in the 21st Century
November 30, 12:00 PM
Ārya Prajñāpāramitā hṛdaya nāma dhāraṇī manuscript written in Sanskrit
This presentation will discuss the Digital Sanskrit Buddhist Canon project, a joint endeavor by the University of the West in Los Angeles and the Nagarjuna Institute of Buddhist Studies in Nepal. The project’s primary goal is to create a comprehensive and accessible Buddhist Sanskrit Canon tailored for the contemporary world. Given the absence of a unified collection or catalog of Sanskrit Buddhist texts, the DSBC project draws its source material from printed editions of Sanskrit Buddhist texts published since the late nineteenth century. Now, for the first time in history, the primary texts of Indian Buddhism are becoming accessible to the world via the internet, not only as scanned images of book pages but also as e-texts produced by the DSBC. The DSBC is accelerating its work by broadening its base and applying the latest computer technology. This project has, so far, digitized more than 700 titles, amounting to more than fifty thousand printed pages. Since 2005, DSBC e-texts have been available for free download via the internet at http://www.dsbcproject.org. This presentation will delve into the evolution of the DSBC initiative and shed light on the intricate challenges encountered during the digitization and preservation of Buddhist Sanskrit texts.
About the Speaker
Dr. Miroj Shakya is an Associate Professor and Chair in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of the West in Rosemead, California, USA. His research interests include the Sanskrit language, literature, Pali language, the Buddhist canon, Indian Mahayana Buddhism, Newar Buddhism, Tibetan Buddhism, and Hinduism. He is the Project Coordinator of the Digital Sanskrit Buddhist Canon Project (www.dsbcproject.org) and the Rare Buddhist Sanskrit Manuscript Preservation Project at the University of the West. Additionally, he holds the position of Director at the Nagarjuna Institute of Buddhist Studies in Lalitpur, Nepal. Dr. Shakya is also a founding member of the Great Compassion Fund, Los Angeles, which provides funds for food and financial support to impoverished people in Nepal (greatcompassionfund.org). Furthermore, he served as the Convener of the Sanskrit Language Working Group for the Union Catalog of Buddhist Texts, sponsored by the International Association of Buddhist Universities (IABU) in Bangkok, Thailand. Dr. Shakya has contributed to academic publications, including his role as the editor of “Catalog of Digitized Rare Sanskrit Buddhist Manuscript Vol. 1 (2010)” and “Vol. 2 (2019),” as well as co-editor of the book titled “Sacred Art of Nepal” (2013). He received the Straniak Foundation Grant through the Department of South and Southeast Asian Studies at the University of California, Berkeley, for the Spring semester 2008. That year, he also spent a semester as a Visiting Scholar at ECAI, International Area Studies, at the University of California, Berkeley.