Taishō Tripiṭaka
Japanese edition of the Chinese Buddhist canon
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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 Kaigyoku, 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 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, found in archeological expeditions, were included. In addition, drawings and Japanese Buddhist literature is included in the Taishō Tripiṭaka.
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Contents
Volumes 1–85 are the literature, in which volumes 56–84 are Japanese Buddhist literature, written in Classical Chinese. Volumes 86–97 are Buddhism related drawings, includes drawings of many Buddhas and bodhisattvas. 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.
Volumes 56–84, although they were written in Classical Chinese, were composed by Japanese Buddhist scholars.