Major update of the BuddhaNexus database

7 August 2021

Photo: Orna Almogi

August 7, 2021.

We are happy to announce several major updates of BuddhaNexus, as follows:

(1) First and foremost the Sanskrit corpus has been considerably enlarged and now also contains the collection of the Digital Sanskrit Buddhist Canon (DSBC, University of the West) and a few other texts obtained from individual scholars and SuttaCentral (SC). The Sanskrit collection has been accordingly reorganized. For practical and structural reasons, the corpus of Buddhist texts is thematically arranged in accordance with the organizational scheme of the Tibetan Buddhist Canon. An overview of the new organization can be found in the sidebar upon clicking the triple bar symbol ≡ situated on the left side of the menu bar of the Sanskrit category.

(2) Another major update has been the publication of multilingual matches of Sanskrit texts with their Tibetan translations. The multilingual data has been automatically generated. Accordingly, the multilingual alignments are currently only offered to those texts for which relatively good results could be achieved.

(3) On the Pāli side, a new “English view mode” was introduced. This view mode displays the Pāli text together with a machine translation into English created by the Transformer machine learning model. This model is based on English translations by Bhikkhu Sujato (Suttas) or Bhikkhu Bhahmali (Vinaya) that were made available by SC. Additionally, the original English SC translations are also offered whenever available. Note that the machine-made translations merely aim at facilitating research and should by no means be considered definite.

(4) We have also widen our cooperation in terms of linking to other databases. Currently links with the following websites are available: SuttaCentral and VRI for Pāli; GRETIL, DSBC, and SuttaCentral for Sanskrit; BUDA and rKTs for Tibetan; and CBETA, SuttaCentral, and CBC@ for Chinese.

We are currently working on further updates, which will be announced in due time.

For questions and/or feedback, please contact us under buddhanexus.info@gmail.com.

With regards,

BuddhaNexus Team