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Subject Buried deep in the Taisho Tripitaka Buddhist Cannon, I found several ancient Christian texts
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Original Message First let me speak a bit about the Cannon itself. I have, in my own very humble and limited way, been exploring it for almost 20 years now, and I have even translated a very small amount of the material into English for the first time ever, to my limited knowledge. I am devoted to the Cannon as a stainless repository of Dharma and related wisdom.

The Taisho Tripitaka is the most comprehensive cannon of Mahayana Buddhist holy texts, or Sutras, plus commentaries and other related writings, mostly in classical Chinese and pre-modern Japanese. Compiled in the early 20th century, it is enormous: the total collection contains 5,320 individual texts, some allegedly going back as far as roughly 25 centuries.

To give you an idea of the size and "flavor" of sacred Buddhist texts, here is one row of such texts from a famous Buddhist temple repository in Korea:

https://imgur.com/otZ1XPM


The texts in the above collection have been preserved for centuries through a complex architectural schema that channels in the wind and uses a special earthen floor to modulate conditions for preservation. In recent times they tried to move the above collection into a "safer, more modern" building, but many of the texts immediately began to decay, so they moved them back to the original treasury. It remains a great mystery of architecture, design, and engineering as to how exactly the ancient building was constructed to preserve the texts.


And below a shot from a collection in Tibet:

https://imgur.com/Sbzyvzv



For those of you who wish to check out the original and can read Classical Chinese and other ancient languages, the entire corpus has been digitized and is online here:

[link to 21dzk.l.u-tokyo.ac.jp (secure)]

Here is a 36-page "map" of the Corpus with English titles (PDF file):
[link to www.onmarkproductions.com (secure)]


Of the 5,320 texts in the collection, I estimate that only roughly 500-600 have ever been translated into Western languages.

The Bukkyo Dendo Kyokai, an institution in Tokyo, was established in the early 1980s by a wealthy Buddhist with the aim of translating the entire Corpus into English. In the last 40 years they have done a magnificent job with some of the more famous texts, but it seems doubtful that even working each day, they will meet their original goal of finishing the project by 2200 AD. However, endowed with a vast sum of money, if all goes well, they will keep going however many centuries it takes.


Now, if you will forgive that lengthy introduction, let's look at the specifically Christian texts in my next post.
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