The ''Taishō Tripiṭaka'' (;
Japanese: ''Taishō Shinshū Daizōkyō''; "
Taishō Revised
Tripiṭaka
There are several Buddhist canons, which refers to the various scriptural collections of Buddhist sacred scriptures or the various Buddhist scriptural canons. ")
is a definitive edition of the
Chinese Buddhist canon
The Chinese Buddhist canon refers to a traditional collection of Chinese language Buddhist texts which are the central canonical works of East Asian Buddhism. The traditional term for the canon is Great Storage of Scriptures ().Jiang Wu, "The ...
and its Japanese commentaries used by scholars in the 20th century. The name is abbreviated as "" in Chinese () and Japanese ().
Development
The Taishō Tripiṭaka project was initiated by the Department of Sanskrit and Indian Studies at Tokyo Imperial University. It was edited by
Takakusu Junjiro, Watanabe Kaikyuko, and others. More than 300 people contributed to the compilation.
The editors were educated in both Japan and Europe and their goals included modernization and meeting European academic standards, in addition to creation of a resource for Buddhist practitioners. The project adopted several innovations of previous Japanese editions of the Buddhist canon, including punctuation, indexing, and collation. The texts were collated and verified against other versions of the canon, building on the work of the ''Reduced Print Edition,'' published from 1880 to 1885. It used a sequential numerical numbering scheme for texts, as did the ''Manji Edition,'' in contrast to the ''Thousand Character Classic'' indexing approach used by previous Chinese and Korean versions of the canon. The Taishō Tripiṭaka uses footnotes to indicate the origin of the texts. While most texts are from the
Tripitaka Koreana
The is a Korean collection of the ( Buddhist scriptures), carved onto 81,258 wooden printing blocks in the 13th century. They are currently located at the Buddhist temple Haeinsa, in South Gyeongsang Province, South Korea. It is the oldest ...
, the Taishō Tripiṭaka uses a different ordering based on a combination of historical development and textual classification, abandoning the Chinese and Korean tradition of placing Mahāyāna scriptures first.
The Taishō Tripiṭaka includes an expanded number of Esoteric texts in comparison to the Tripitaka Koreana. These texts were sourced from manuscripts in Japanese temples. Several texts from
Dunhuang manuscripts
The Dunhuang manuscripts are a wide variety of religious and secular documents (mostly manuscripts, including Hemp paper, hemp, silk, paper and Woodblock printing, woodblock-printed texts) in Old Tibetan, Tibetan, Chinese, and other languages tha ...
, found in archeological expeditions, were included. In addition, drawings and Japanese Buddhist literature is included in the Taishō Tripiṭaka.
Contents
Volumes 1–85 are the literature, in which volumes 56–84 are Japanese Buddhist literature, written in
Classical Chinese
Classical Chinese is the language in which the classics of Chinese literature were written, from . For millennia thereafter, the written Chinese used in these works was imitated and iterated upon by scholars in a form now called Literary ...
. Volumes 86–97 are Buddhism related drawings, includes drawings of many
Buddhas
In Buddhism, Buddha (, which in classic Indic languages means "awakened one") is a title for those who are spiritually awake or enlightened, and have thus attained the supreme goal of Buddhism, variously described as awakening or enlighten ...
and
bodhisattva
In Buddhism, a bodhisattva is a person who has attained, or is striving towards, '' bodhi'' ('awakening', 'enlightenment') or Buddhahood. Often, the term specifically refers to a person who forgoes or delays personal nirvana or ''bodhi'' in ...
s. Volumes 98–100 are texts of different indexes of Buddhist texts known in Japan ca. 1930. The 100 volumes of literature contains 5,320 individual texts, classified as follows.
Digitalization
The SAT Daizōkyō Text Database edition contains volumes 1–85. The Chinese Buddhist Electronic Text Association (CBETA) edition contains volumes 1–55 and 85. The Fomei edition (佛梅電子大藏經) contains texts in Classical Chinese other than
Nichiren Buddhism
Nichiren Buddhism (), also known as ''Hokkeshū'' (, meaning ''Lotus Sect''), is a branch of Mahayana Buddhism based on the teachings of the 13th-century Japanese Buddhist priest Nichiren (1222–1282) and is one of the Kamakura period school ...
.
世界第一部漢文電子大藏經《佛梅電子大藏經》珍藏版
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Volumes 56–84, although they were written in Classical Chinese, were composed by Japanese Buddhist scholars.
Notes
Bibliography
* Matsumoto, T. (1934),
"Taishō Shinshū Daizōkyō" oder kurz "Taishō Issaikyō"
, Zeitschrift der Deutschen Morgenländischen Gesellschaft 88 (n.F. 13), No. 2, 194-199
External links
at the University of Tokyo
The University of Tokyo (, abbreviated as in Japanese and UTokyo in English) is a public research university in Bunkyō, Tokyo, Japan. Founded in 1877 as the nation's first modern university by the merger of several pre-westernisation era ins ...
Chinese Buddhist Electronic Text Association (CBETA)中國傳統佛教資料下載佛教電子書大正大藏經 【大正藏網頁版】
provides some English translations (pdf) from the BDK English Tripitaka series.
* ttp://thecompassionnetwork.org/tripitaka-lists/ Chinese-English Tripitaka with All Titles and Known Translations in English
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Tripiṭaka
Chinese Buddhist texts
Books about Buddhism in Japan