佛教傳記文學的視覺化與搜尋
Visualizing and Querying Chinese Buddhist Biographies
This is the website for the Fojiao zhuanji wenxue 佛教傳記文學 project at Dharma Drum Buddhist College 法鼓佛教學院. The project is funded by the Haoran Foundation 浩然基金會 . Here you will find interfaces that allows to query Buddhist biographical literature in new and interesting ways.
Visit the one dataset three views interface. (往介面)
The collections of hagio-biographies of eminent Buddhist monks and nuns are one of the most interesting sources for the study of Chinese Buddhism. Comparable to the genre of Latin vitae in Christianity, these biographies offer a fascinating glance into the lives of religious professionals in China between c. 200 and 1700 CE. Our project uses TEI to markup a number of biographical collections, which together contain more than 3200 hagio-biographies. The interfaces link the texts in various ways with the DDBC authority databases.
- Buxu Gaoseng Zhuan 補續高僧傳 by Minghe 明河, dated 1647
- Chu sanzang jiji (Part 5: Biographies) 出三藏記集 (列傳部) by Sengyou 僧祐, completed 510-518
- Biqiuni zhuan 比丘尼傳 by Baochang 寶唱, dated 516
- Liang gaoseng zhuan 梁高僧傳 by Huijiao 慧皎, dated 519
- Tang gaoseng zhuan 唐高僧傳 by Daoxuan 道宣, dated 665
- Song gaoseng zhuan 宋高僧傳 by Zanning 贊寧, dated 988
- Mingseng zhuan chao 名僧傳抄 (X.1523), by Sōshō 宗性, 13th cent.
- Ming gaoseng zhuan 明高僧傳 by Ruxing 如惺, dated 1600
The aim of the project is threefold:
- To provide a user interface to read the biographies with instant access to information about names and dates, as well as GIS-like visualization of nexus-points of the form: Person(s) X was/were at place Y at time Z.
- To provide a search interface that allows querying the texts beyond usual indices. The interface outputs KML files, with which answers can be visualized. Thereby queries such as the following become possible: Show all the nexus-points concerning Chang'an between 300 and 500 CE [example 1]. Or: Show all birth-places for the monks in the Liang gaoseng zhuan [example 2].
- To provide an open-source corpus of Buddhist biographical literature in TEI markup. The source files can be used by other projects.
The datasets for all collections are now available for download. The data is in TEI/XML format and published under a CC (Attribution Share-Alike) License. 
Download zip-archives containing the TEI/XML source, the RNC schema, and a readme file:
- 出三藏記集 data (510.14kb, Last Updated: 2018-12-06)
- 比丘尼傳 data (402.87kb, Last Updated: 2018-12-06)
- 梁高僧傳 data (1.81mb, Last Updated: 2018-12-06)
- 唐高僧傳 data (4.35mb, Last Updated: 2018-12-06)
- 宋高僧傳 data (13.63mb, Last Updated: 2018-12-06)
- 名僧傳抄 data (268.24kb, Last Updated: 2018-12-06)
- 明高僧傳 data (635.63kb, Last Updated: 2018-12-06)
- 補續高僧傳 data (2.93mb, Last Updated: 2018-12-06)
- 居士傳(1-29) data (1.37mb, Last Updated: 2018-12-06)
For more detailed description of the project see:
Bingenheimer, Marcus; Hung, Jen-Jou; Wiles, Simon: “Markup meets GIS - Visualizing the ‘Biographies of Eminent Buddhist Monks’” in Proceedings of the International Conference on Information Visualization 2009 (Published by the IEEE Computer Society).
ISBN: 978-0-7695-3733-7 | DOI: 10.1109/IV.2009.91
Hung, Jen-Jou; Bingenheimer, Marcus; Wiles, Simon: “Digital Texts and GIS: The interrogation and coordinated visualization of Classical Chinese texts” in Proceedings of the International Conference on Computer Design and Applications ICCDA 2010.
ISBN: 978-1-4244-7163-8 | DOI: 10.1109/ICCDA.2010.5540738
