BERKELEY, Calif. -- Through the centuries, Buddhist countries have preserved their voluminous sacred writings on palm leaves, wood blocks and stone. Now, with the help of a University of California professor, the world's largest religious canon has entered the computer age.
As a gift for the King of Siam's 60th birthday, an army of typists in Thailand has transcribed the 52,000-page Pali version of the Buddha's words and accompanying commentaries. (Pali is an ancient Indian dialect.) The effort has reduced the 115-volume canon to a single CD-ROM, soon to be available in the United States to the lowliest researcher for $299. A bound edition starts at $12,000.
Already, some Thais are treating the plastic silver discs as sacred objects, to be placed on altars alongside incense, flowers and Buddha statues. But scholars say the computerized version also has great practical use and promises to revolutionize Buddhist studies by allowing researchers to comb through masses of text at the touch of a key.
The computerized version allows scholars to accomplish in seconds what once took months or even years. The disc is believed to be more than 99.9 percent faithful to the Pali original, which has been kept for centuries on the fragile surface of palm leaves.
The Thai project is the first of several efforts being overseen by Berkeley professor Lewis Lancaster. Through an international consortium of scholars, monks and nuns, called the Electronic Buddhist Text Initiative, he hopes to put the half-dozen versions of the Buddhist canon, including Chinese, Mongolian and Manchu, onto CD-ROM. The various canons differ by more than language. Some have only a few texts in common.
Eighty people worked for 13 months to type in the Pali Canon, going over each page five times. First it was typed by two different typists. Then, the two versions were compared by the computer, which found all mistakes except those made in common.
Next, a proofreader pored over each page, looking for mistakes both typists made and the computer could not detect. Finally, the page was checked against an earlier draft for mistakes that the proofreader inadvertently introduced.
Because of their size and diversity, sacred Buddhist writings are among the last of the world's canonical religious texts to be computerized. The Bible and Talmud, which are far smaller, have been available on CD-ROM for several years.