Technology, Modern-Day Scribes Put Buddhist Canons On-Line : Computers: Recording the scriptures on CDs will revolutionize religious studies, a Berkeley professor says.

UC Berkeley Prof. Lewis Lancaster is accustomed to spending days, sometimes weeks, in the basement of the campus’s East Asiatic Library, poring over volumes of ancient Chinese texts and flipping through thousands of crinkly pages in search of a particular passage.

Inspired by computer technology, the 57-year-old Buddhist studies scholar will soon have the entire Buddhist canon at his fingertips.

Thousands of miles away, in South Korea, Thailand and Taiwan, monks, nuns and lay people under Lancaster’s direction are recording some of the oldest surviving scriptures on compact discs so they can be read on a computer screen--an undertaking the professor says will revolutionize Buddhist studies.

The disc, known as Compact Disc-Read Only Memory, or CD-ROM, is the computer cousin of the audio disc. Instead of music, CD-ROM holds pages of text and graphics, and can store up to 650 megabytes of memory--the equivalent of 1,500 floppy discs.

“My mind was completely blown away,” Lancaster said. “I used to think in terms of volumes and volumes of concordances. Now I’ll be able to call up everything on the screen.”

A confessed amateur when it comes to electronics, Lancaster said the idea came to him in 1988, when he brainstormed with several Buddhist scholars and computer specialists on ways to speed up tedious research.

Later that year, at a worldwide conference of Buddhist leaders at the Hsi Lai Temple in Hacienda Heights, Lancaster made his big pitch, demonstrating the use of compact discs to a roomful of interested monks and scholars.

From there, everything fell in place. Master Hsing Yun, the temple’s leader, told Lancaster he was interested in helping finance the project. Similar offers came from South Korea and Thailand, from monasteries and institutions where different canons--each containing passages not found in any of the others--are kept in their most complete and original forms.

“It all happened really fast,” Lancaster said. “Time was ripe for it.”

The task of typing the scriptures, word by word, into a computer and transferring them to a disc is being performed thousands of miles from Berkeley where labor is cheaper and experience greater in typing East Asian languages. Lancaster said he could not estimate the total cost of the project since Buddhist groups are handling much of the work.

In Seoul, the Korean Buddhist Lay Assn. has hired professional transcribers--at $6 per 1,000 characters--to copy the entire canon from 81,000 printing blocks, which have been preserved in a monastery since the 13th Century. The scriptures contain 50 million classical Chinese characters, or 10 sets of the Encyclopaedia Britannica if translated into English.

In Bangkok, 15 monks at the Dhammakaya Foundation will produce a second disc using Pali language textbooks prepared from palm leaf manuscripts--the ancient method of preserving and disseminating the canon in India. A third disc will hold a Thai translation of the Pali texts. Meanwhile, Fo Kuang Shan, a temple in Taiwan, will put monks and nuns to work recording the canon using 5,000 scrolls of ink rubbings from the Sung Dynasty.

Then the discs will be shipped to Berkeley, where Lancaster and his colleagues will check the work for accuracy. The Pali and Thai discs will be completed by the end of next year, while the two Chinese canons will take longer to finish, Lancaster said. Eventually, copies will be available through UC Berkeley for public use.

The compact discs will save hours of research and give scholars access to ancient texts. Modern versions, though widely accepted, contain new words that were added over the centuries as portions of the original manuscripts were lost or damaged, said UC Berkeley Prof. Padmanabh S. Jaini, an expert in Pali language scriptures who is assisting in the project.

“Once and for all, the existing versions will be preserved,” he said. “No further changes can be made.”

Venerable Hui Kai, a Temple University Buddhist scholar and former supervisor of the Fo Kuang Shan temple’s education department, said it will be possible to compare different versions of the Buddhist scriptures on the computer.

“Or we could take the Chinese scriptures and put modern punctuation into the classical text,” he added.

Others are taking advantage of the new technology.

At UC Irvine, scholars are recording all surviving Greek literature by Homer--from about 850 BC--to AD 650 on disc and so far have stored 42 million words of an estimated 62 million from that period, said classics Prof. Theodore F. Brunner, director of the Thesaurus Linguae Graecae project. Copies of the discs are available on loan to the public.

Jewish and Christian bookstores and publishers have been aggressively targeting their audiences with the latest in CD technology. There are several versions of the Bible on compact disc, complete with dictionaries, Greek translations and maps. There also are a variety of other electronic study aids, including pocket-size Bibles with footnote and note-taking functions.

“CD-ROM is the technology for the ‘90s,” said Jim Bolton, chairman and chief executive officer of CD Word Library Inc., a Dallas company that since January has been selling the $595 CD Word Library, a compact disc with four versions of the Bible.