The Center for Buddhist Studies is dedicated to preserving the Buddhist heritages in all traditions, especially its textual products.
In collaboration with Special Collections at the University of Arizona, the Center makes systematic efforts to collect, catalog, store, and digitize rare Buddhist texts, especially those which are not curated by library and museum specialists, such as pamphlets, unpublished manuscripts, prints and documents with limited circulation, etc. Please contact the Center for possible donation and storage and digitization requests.
Digitization of Translation Notes of Rinzai Roku
The Center acquired a set of rare translation notes of The Record of Linji (Rinzai Roku) in the summer of 2017. These translation notes were the collaborative work of Ruth Fuller Sasaki, Philip Yampolsky, Burton Watson, Gary Snyder, Iriya Yoshitaka and Yanagida Seizan, who participated in a translation project in the 1950s. The documents are currently preserved in the Center library.
The Center is in the process of digitizing the physical copies and making them public through the UA library system in collaboration with the UA Libraries, the Center for Digital Humanities, and undergraduate and graduate students. A preliminary investigation of these precious documents shows that they will refresh our understanding of The Record of Linji and have a significant impact on the studies of classical Chan texts. The fifteen binders contain multilinguistic handwritten and printed texts, diagrams of sources, maps of Chan monasteries and handwritten notes. They also show how an East Asian classic can be translated into English, making them highly valuable as teaching tools for translation studies.
Here is one of the binders that has been digitized and is available to view: https://drive.google.com/open?id=1utkbQEQOrYwBR2MRt5kt50MTijkDOmi3
Please find the attachment below to download.
File Attachment:
(Sample page of multilingual printed and handwritten notes)
The Center for Buddhist Studies is collaborating with the University of Arizona Libraries, the Center for Digital Humanities, and Zhejiang University's China Academic Digital Associative Library (CADAL). This partnership provides expertise in archival preservation, digital scanning, and metadata, ensuring that the archives will be fully searchable within the CADAL system.
Project Director: Dr. Jiang Wu 吳疆 (Director, Center for Buddhist Studies; Professor, Department of East Asian Studies, The University of Arizona)
Archival manager and project coordinator: Ziling Wan 萬子菱 (PhD candidate; Graduate Assistant Program Coordinator, Center for Buddhist Studies, The University of Arizona)
Researcher: Dr. Ruihong Di 狄蕊红 (Professor, Northwest University, China)
Archival Assistant: Yichen Wu 吳一尘 (Ph.D candidate, Zhejiang University, China), Tengyun Zhang 張騰允 (Ph. D student, the University of Arizona)
Digitization specialists: Deborah Quintana and Kristi Smith
Archival consultants: Han Yan (librarian, the University of Arizona) and Ping Situ (librarian, the University of Arizona)
