Text Digitization Projects

  • Daizokyo / SAT database, University of Tokyo http://21dzk.l.u-tokyo.ac.jp/SAT/index_en.html 
    Full text of 85 volumes of Taisho Shinshu Daizokyo 大正新脩大藏經. The catalog is placed in a tree-outline structure. Each text can be read in transcription form and facsimile form. Full-text search is available.
  • CBETA (Chinese Buddhist Canon) http://www.cbeta.org/
  • Ten Thousand Rooms, Yale http://tenthousandrooms.yale.edu/
  • Digital Archive of Chinese Buddhist Temple Gazetteers  http://buddhistinformatics.ddbc.edu.tw/fosizhi/
    A total of 237 gazetteers have been digitized. Of these, 13 gazetteers were digitized as full-text archives and marked up with TEI/XML, identifying all person and place names as well as dates. 
  • Scripta Sinica database http://hanchi.ihp.sinica.edu.tw/ihp/hanji.htm
    The project contains almost all of the important Chinese classics, especially those related to Chinese history. More than 949 titles（new titles）and 655,456,171 characters of materials pertaining to the traditional Chinese classics have been categorized and included.
  • Chinese ancient books collection (Zhonghua guji ziyuanku 中华古迹资源库) http://mylib.nlc.cn/web/guest/shanbenjiaojuan
    It is one of the collections curated by the National Library of China. As of early 2020, it contains more than 25,000 books. Asides from its own collection, it also has some items from Dunhuang, which are originally kept in the National Library of France. (note: users may need to create an account)
  • The sutra database in the Provincial Library of Shandong (Shandong sheng tushuguan fojing shujuku 山东省图书馆佛经数据库) http://www.sdlib.com/channels/ch00762/
    User name: fojing Password: fojing As of early 2020, there are over 20,000 sutras in the library.
  • The museum of Tianyi Ge (Tianyi ge bowuguan 天一阁博物馆）http://www.tianyige.com.cn:8008/default
    The museum had made 995 ancient books (about 4882 volumes) openly accessible to the public, and has also published roughly 376 genealogy books. Under the Zi Collection (Zi bu 子部), there are ancient books about religion, Confucianism, Taoism, and Legalism. (note: users need to create an account)

Text Scanning Projects

  • International Dunhuang Project http://idp.bl.uk/
    The International Dunhuang Project is a partnership of museums, libraries and other institutions which aim to make all manuscripts, paintings, artifacts and textiles from northwestern China and eastern Central Asia freely available to scholars on a multilingual website. Its directorate is at the British Library and its partners include the Dunhuang Academy, the National Library of China, the Guimet Museum, Paris, the Museum of Asian Art, Berlin, among others.  It also includes over twenty collaborating institutions.
  • Buddhist Rubbing http://rub.ihp.sinica.edu.tw/~buddhism/index.html
    The Buddhist rubbings collection in FuSsu-nian Library is the largest one in Taiwan. The majority of the rubbings are from China, dated from the 5th century to the modern time. The contents of the rubbings are generally about the wishes of the devotees, circumstances for making statues, including the organizations of the devotees.
  • CrossAsia – full text search https://crossasia.org/service/crossasia-lab/crossasia-itr/  The aim of the CrossAsia Fulltext Search is to help users to find texts and sources relevant to their research questions by performing comprehensive searches across the content of different databases that are licensed by CrossAsia. The CrossAsia Fulltext Search is built from textual resources hosted in the CrossAsia Integrated Textrepository (ITR), which is set up in the FID Asia project (Specialised Information Service Asia), generously funded by the German Research Foundation. Following the FID Asia project’s second funding period (2019-2021),  they will continue development of the ITR into an infrastructural service for external projects and develop additional services in the context of digital humanities.
  • Rubbing collection (Beitie jinghua 碑帖菁华) http://mylib.nlc.cn/web/guest/beitiejinghua
    With more than 230,000 pieces of rubbings of oracle bones, bronzes and stone carvings that kept in the National Library of China, the database covers history, geography, politics, economy, military affairs, nationalities, folk customs, literature, art, science and technology, architecture and other aspects. It currently has more than 23,000 pieces of metadata and more than 29,000 images. (note: users may need to create an account)

Relevant Digital Humanities Projects

  • The Chinese Religious Text Authority (CRTA) 宗教書籍規範索引 https://crta.info/
    The project that seeks to collect and present reliable bibliographic and scholarly information about religious texts in Chinese produced prior to 1949.
  • Database of Medieval Chinese Texts, Ghent University and DILA https://www.database-of-medieval-chinese-texts.be/
  • China Biographical Database, Harvard http://projects.iq.harvard.edu/cbdb/home
  • Visualizing and Querying Chinese Buddhist Biographies http://buddhistinformatics.ddbc.edu.tw/biographies/gis/
  • Buddhist Studies Authority Database Project http://authority.dila.edu.tw/
    The project includes 4 major databases, integrating information from various projects at the Library and Information Center at Dharma Drum Institute of Liberal Arts. By providing information on Chinese calendar dates, as well as an onomasticon of person, place names and Tripitaka catalogs from Buddhist sources they help with disambiguation and geospatial referencing of names and dates.
  • ChinaMap http://worldmap.harvard.edu/chinamap/
    A part of China Historical GIS. The website provides overlap online maps of nowadays with historical maps, as well as geographical and social data. Users can make their own map.
  •  Database of national census and registration of Chinese ancient books (Quanguo guji pucha dengji jiben shujuku 全国古籍普查登记基本数据库）http://www.nlc.cn/pcab/zhgjsmsjk/
    The database has information about ancient books’ serial numbers, call numbers, titles, authors, editions, volumes, missing columns, collection department/units, etc.  By October 2019, the database had collected data about 7,447,203 books from 217 collection department and units.

Guide to Buddhist Studies in France (updated August 2023)

This helpful guide was compiled by Masters student Weiyu Lin (UBC) and has three components:

1. Locate Institutions
2. Locate Resources
3. Locate Scholars

Plus, bonus tips for living in Paris!

Download the guide HERE!