History

BuddhaNexus is an initiative of the Khyentse Center that pools the efforts and results of several projects and individual research. “Scholars and Scribes,” a collaborative project of the Khyentse Center, Universität Hamburg (Orna Almogi, Dorji Wangchuk) and The Blavatnik School of Computer Science, Tel Aviv University (Nachum Dershowitz, Lior Wolf) funded by the German-Israeli Foundation, was launched in 2015 in order to develop computerized tools to advance and facilitate Tibetan Buddhist textual scholarship. One of the objectives of the project has been the development of a tool for locating (approximate) textual matches within Tibetan texts, with a special focus on the Tibetan Buddhist canon. For this purpose two auxiliary tools for the Tibetan language were also developed: a stemmer and a word segmenter.

In 2018 another collaborative project was launched between Sebastian Nehrdich (Universität Hamburg) and Oliver Hellwig (Universität Düsseldorf). This project has focused on the development of a word segmentation tool for Sanskrit and on “translingual text alignment” of Sanskrit Buddhist texts and their Tibetan translations. Later the same approach was applied (Nehrdich) to other pairs of “Buddhist languages,” such as Sanskrit and Chinese or Chinese and Tibetan. Following this, a collaboration was initiated between this project (Nehrdich), which mainly focused on translingual text alignment, and the Scholars and Scribes project, which focused on monolingual textual matches, in order to further facilitate and advance the study of the evolution of Buddhist scriptures and the formation of the various Buddhist canons. The goal has been to first determine monolingual approximate textual matches in each of the textual corpora available to us (Pāli, Sanskrit, Tibetan, Chinese) and then, whenever possible in terms of the availability of material, create the respective translingual alignments.

Consequently, with the financial support of the Khyentse Center the creation of the BuddhaNexus database has been initiated, the technical aspect of which was entrusted to Sebastian Nehrdich under the conceptual guidance of Orna Almogi and Dorji Wangcuk. Since 2019, Nehrdich has been collaborating with Ven. Ayya Vimala of SuttaCentral —a project focusing on early Buddhist texts, their translations, and parallels—and Hubert Dworczyński (financed by the Khyentse Center).

In order to facilitate the visualization of the results towards analysis of the numerous matches, in 2018 a further collaboration was initiated with the International Institute for Digital Humanities (DHII), Tokyo (Kiyonori Nagasaki), resulting in the creation of visual charts of the matches located in the Tibetan Buddhist Canon.