Authors and Translators Identification Initiative (ATII)

January 25, 2022

The Khyentse Center is proud to announce the launch of the collaborative undertaking Authors and Translators Identification Initiative (ATII).

One of the goals of the BuddhaNexus project is to explore the Buddhist intellectual networks that were active both within and outside the Indic cultural sphere and that were behind the formation of the individual Buddhist scriptures and non-scriptures and of the Buddhist literary corpora containing them as a whole. Such an exploration requires first and foremost an identification, to the extent possible, of the persons involved, including Indic authors, indigenous translators, and paṇḍitas who were members of translation teams. For this purpose, the Authors and Translators Identification Initiative (ATII), which involves collaboration among several institutions and individuals, was launched at the beginning of 2021.

The goal of ATII is the creation of an open source database of all the persons (authors, translators, etc.) involved in the creation of Indic Buddhist texts and the literary corpora containing them, including particularly the Tibetan and Chinese Buddhist Canons. The ATII uses person records instead of name records, and thus disambiguates names when multiple persons have the same name or one person has multiple names. This methodology has never been applied before in the case of the Tibetan Canon.

ATII consists of a group of students and scholars based at the Universität Hamburg, who works, generally speaking, in two teams. The first team, which focuses on the Indo-Tibetan part of ATII, concentrates on identifying persons of relevance to the Tibetan Buddhist Canon, including mainly Indic authors, Tibetan lo tsā bas, and their collaborating paṇḍita_s, by using primary and secondary sources. The team, which mainly consists of Orna Almogi, Nicola Bajetta, and Ryan Conlon, closely collaborates with Élie Roux from the Buddhist Digital Resource Center (BDRC). The basis of the data is BDRC’s person records and canonical texts attributions (authors and translators), which was compiled in collaboration with the Resources for Kangyur and Tengyur Studies (rKTs) project, University of Vienna. In the first stage, we extracted information from the colophons of the _sDe dge edition of the bKa’ ’gyur and bsTan ’gyur and created a one of a kind database of 1050 persons (300 Tibetans and 750 non-Tibetans, including 500 authors). More than 250 person records have already been added to BUDA, and dozens of duplicate records have been merged. Many authors of Indic texts represented in the GRETIL corpus have also been added to the database during this first stage. The team has been thus far focusing on offering standardized Sanskrit names, adding dates of the persons involved (Indic authors, Tibetan translators, and paṇḍita-translators), and linking these persons to the works in whose creation or translation they were involved. In this context, the team has also created innovative tools to check the temporal coherence of the data, based on assumptions such as that the dates of a translator and a paṇḍita who worked together must necessarily overlap; translators cannot predate the author of the text they translated, and the like. The translation and authorship attributions visible now on BUDA all come from ATII, and is a significant refinement on the existing data. The data will continue to be refined until the end of the project. The data is open source and collaborations are envisioned with other projects, such as 84000.

The second team, which thus far concentrates on linking Indic persons and their works to the Chinese Buddhist Canon, includes Sebastian Nehrdich and Marco Hummel and enjoys collaboration with Michael Radich and Jamie Norrish of the Chinese Buddhist Canonical Attributions database (CBC@).

The ATII is financially supported by Khyentse Center, Universität Hamburg under the directorship of Dorji Wangchuk.