The Samantabhadra Archives
The Nyingma Tantras Research Project
'The Samantabhadra Archives' is an electronic and collaborative project designed to facilitate the reproduction, analysis, translation, and interpretation of one of the most important religious canons of Tibetan Buddhism, namely 'The Collected Tantras of the Ancients (rNying ma'i rgyud 'bum)'. The project is technologically innovative in its basis on Standard Generalized Markup Language (SGML) and Extensible Markup Language (XML) to ensure ease of access via the World Wide Web, enhanced search and analysis capability, and complete cross-platform compatibility. In addition, we are working towards the use of Unicode-compliant Tibetan language fonts as these become viable. Institutionally, it is based at the Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities at the University of Virginia and the Centre for Social Anthropology and Computing at the University of Kent at Canterbury, and is co-directed by David Germano and Robert Mayer.
By DAVID GERMANO AND ROBERT MAYER
The Collected Tantras of the Ancients is one of the most crucial, but least studied, collections of pre-fifteenth century translations and indigenous compositions in Tibetan Buddhism. This collection currently exists in at least six variant editions: the sDe dge, gTing skyes, mTshams brag, Waddell, sKyi grong (in two forms) and the Bai ro rgyud 'bum. We are actively seeking out other editions said to exist in Bhutan and Nepal, for example: partial collections of related or identical materials also exist in some bKa' 'gyur and bsTan 'gyur editions, and elsewhere. Although there is a basic core set of texts, there are considerable variations from edition to edition, even with respect to their contents. All are based on the tripartite classification scheme of Atiyoga, Anuyoga, and Mahðyoga, with the exception of the Bai ro rgyud 'bum, which is an exclusively Atiyoga-based collection. Moreover, individual texts may be found in other smaller collections or on their own. All together, The Collected Tantras of the Ancients contains more than a thousand unique texts that are not found in any other Tibetan scriptural collection. Many of the texts are translations into the Tibetan language, and are attributed to a wide variety of Chinese, Indian, and Central Asian authors; however, many of the texts appear likely to be indigenous Tibetan compositions.Until now, only one of these editions, the Tingkyay (gting skyes), has even been indexed (in a Japanese publication by E. Kaneko); other editions remain unindexed, much less analysed. Moreover, until now only limited scholarship on these texts has emerged in contemporary academic circles, few critical editions of even the individual texts have been published, and the historical relationships between the various editions have yet to be adequately analysed. For these reasons, research into these texts represents an important and relatively underdeveloped field of Tibetan and Buddhist studies. Although Canonical Studies has recently emerged as a central topic in Tibetan Studies, research to date has focused largely on analysis of the two normative collections of translations of texts: the bKa' 'gyur, attributed to various Buddhas, and the bsTan 'gyur, attributed to miscellaneous Indian authors. Despite its crucial importance, however, The Collected Tantras of the Nyingma has previously been largely overlooked within this developing field of research.
Multimedia environment
The Samantabhadra Archives is a significant attempt to redress this situation. The initial aim is to index comprehensively each individual edition of The Collected Tantras of the Nyingma in SGML and XML, and create a master cross-referenced index. The second major goal is to create digital images of the original manuscripts along with electronic editions that can then be searched and reformatted using Unicode Tibetan script fonts. The third aim is to utilize these different electronic editions systematically to facilitate the creation of critical editions. This will allow scholars to determine the historical relationships between the various editions, and will yield valuable insight into their historical development. The fourth aim is to solicit translations of each text, which will eventually result in the entire collection being translated into modern European languages.
Our long-term plan is that each text will have associated with it a research archive of translations, digitized images of the original manuscript, editions of the original Tibetan, analytical summaries, text critical analysis, relevant iconographic images, and so on. All of these materials will be interlinked via SGML/XML through the catalogues, so that a plurality of editions, research, and contextualizing information can be accessed through the catalogues of the texts. To facilitate this, we plan to launch a refereed electronic journal that will provide an important academic forum for publication of relevant research. Our orientation is interdisciplinary, and we will be actively soliciting participation by philologists, historians, historians of religion, anthropologists, art historians, literary specialists, and so forth.
The use of Standard Generalized Markup Language (SGML) and Extensible Markup Language (XML) will greatly enhance scholars' ability to search and analyse a vast amount of textual material. In addition to enabling a wide range of sophisticated operations, it will create a multimedia environment for the display of indexes, cross-references, texts, translations, and analyses that will be Unicode-compliant and Internet-accessible. In short, the use of SGML/XML in this project will maximize the functionality of these materials as research aids and insure their continued usefulness well into the future. Another essential goal is to create a diverse but interlinked set of electronic controls and co-ordinating mechanisms for the networked management of such a complex collaborative project based at multiple centres. This will open the project to the wider scholarly community with automated procedures for handling the different types of data in ways that minimize administrative labour, automate record keeping, and facilitate efficient exchange. In this way scholars in any country will be able not only to access these materials, but also to contribute their own translations, analyses, etc., to the evolving database with no difficulty.
By the beginning of 2000 we plan to have a public release of an initial version of the Archives over the WWW (http://jefferson.village.virginia.edu/
tibet/), which will consist of a partial form of the mTshams brag edition's catalogue. Over the course of 2000, the site will be gradually updated with the goal of completion of the mTshams brag edition's catalogue by June 1, 2000. The catalogue for the Waddell edition is due in 2001. Preliminary work on the other editions has begun, but the time schedule for them is partially dependent on pending funding requests. This initial public release will be accompanied by the launching of an interdisciplinary electronic journal devoted to Tantric studies in Tibetan culture with a strong emphasis on the rNying ma and Bon po traditions. *
David Germano, University of Virginia, Dept of Religious Studies,
E-mail: germano@virginia.edu;
Robert Mayer, Gastprofessor Tebetologie Zentralasien Seminar, Von Humboldt Universität, e-mail: r.mayer@ukc.ac.uk
TIBETOLOGICAL COLLECTIONS & ARCHIVES SERIES
The following article by David Germano and Robert Mayer describing The Samanta-bhadra Archives: the Nyingma Tantras Research Project is the first in a series devoted to important projects on cataloguing, 'computerization' (inputting and scanning), editing, and translation of important Tibetan language text-collections and archives. In the following issues of the IIAS Newsletter, various colleagues will briefly present their initiatives to a larger public, or, as the case may be, update the scholarly world on the progress of their already well-established projects. Some are high-profile projects, of which at least Tibetologists will generally be aware, yet some may also be less well-known. Nevertheless, I trust that it will be useful to be informed or updated on all these initiatives and I also hope that the projects presented will profit from the exposure and the response that this coverage will engender. If you are interested in any of the projects described, feel free to contact the author of the article. In case you would like to introduce your own (planned) work in the field, please contact the editor of the IIAS Newsletter or the author of this introduction. We should very much like to encourage our contributors to keep us informed on the progress of their projects by regular updates.
The next contribution in this series will be by Yasuhiko Nagano on his Bon project (based at the National Museum for Ethnology in Osaka, Japan). *
HENK BLEZER
Research fellow IIAS
E-mail: Blezer@let.leidenuniv.nl