Tibetan

The Tibetan textual corpora used in BuddhaNexus were obtained from various sources, including Asian Classics Input Projects (ACIP) for the Tibetan Buddhist Canon, Buddhist Digital Resource Center (BDRC) for the rNying ma bka’ ma, and Karma Delek for the rNying ma rgyud ’bum. As a result the digital texts might occasionally differ in their conventions. Moreover, due to the huge amount of material, there has been no attempt by BuddhaNexus to improve the quality of the texts (e.g. removing typos, introducing identical conventions, and the like). Occasionally, however, some minor changes to the texts were made for technical reasons (e.g. standardization of transliterations or formats). Since our algorithms search for approximate (and not exact) matches, we believe that in most cases variants resulting from typos, or from different orthographies and the like, should not pose major problems in detecting textual matches.

Regarding matches involving the Prajñāpāramitā Section of the bKa’ ’gyur, due to the extremely repetitive nature of this corpus within itself, all matches among files of this section have been excluded from the results for the sake of a better performance.

The minimum match length is 14 syllables. Shorter matches are also displayed if the match in either the Inquiry or Hit text is a verse line consisting of a precise length of 7, 9, or 11 syllables. The verse lines are only detected if they are placed between a pair of either a single or double stroke (shad) at the beginning and a double stroke at the end. Matches that are longer than 13 syllables but consist to a large degree of stop words, grammatical particles, and the like have been filtered out from the results.

Background image: Courtesy of Burkhard Quessel.