Significant Possibilities for the Humanities in East Asia for the Development of Globally Shared Digital Humanities: Illustrative Details Provided by Buddhist Studies

Recent innovations taking place in the digitization technology combined with the rapid proliferation of cyber infrastructure have been revolutionizing the way of preserving, transmitting, and exchanging knowledge in all fields of science. This newly emerging modus operandi, eventually liberating the knowledge heretofore confined within the terrain of each university, library, and museum into one vast worldwide horizon beyond institutional boundaries, has brought about drastic changes in milieu for the humanities studies. Even the highest-quality product in the humanities, once isolated from these evolving surroundings, would barely be visible, doomed to eventual disappearance from view. The pressing issue, therefore, is to create academic environments that properly respond to these challenging issues, as seen in the experiments carried out by several projects, such as the Digital Library and Museum of Buddhist Studies at National Taiwan University, CBETA at Dharma Drum Mountain in Taiwan, and the SAT Daizōkyō text database at the University of Tokyo. With this significant transformation of academic environments in mind, it is evident that the theme of the International Conference of this year, namely, “Focusing on East Asia” from the perspective of “Digital Archives and Digital Humanities,” covers a considerably wide range of the problematic areas of the humanities, much more extensive than one could expect at a first glance. Particularly attractive is the point that the term “East Asia” in this context is to be regarded not so much as a * Professor of the Graduate School of Humanities and Sociology, the University of Tokyo & Director of the Japanese Association for Digital Humanities (JADH), Japan. proper name of “a region,” but more as a term denoting “a method for research,” following a use of the term by Yoshimi Takeuchi in his influential book entitled “Asia as Methods” published in 1978. The subject of East Asia as a method for research reveals a strong potential that the humanities in East Asia has to make a great contribution to broadening and enhancing the humanities themselves, especially in the context of digital scholarship in the age of the radical transmission of the media of knowledge oriented by digital technologies. In order to implement this expected scheme, the following two characteristics of the humanities should be taken into account: first, the factor that defines the potential wealth of the humanities, and second, the essential role played by language in any form of humanities studies. Worthy of notice first of all is the fact that the richness of the humanities rests ultimately on the richness of the cultural legacy as the object of research accumulated in the individual history of each cultural region prior to the initiation of research. In this regard, East Asia has, from one point of view, a longer cultural history than the West, and is duly to be estimated as having wealthier legacy of knowledge as its object of study. We should pay attention to another characteristic of the humanities—that of its tendency to be dependent on the language used in materials of research and the presentation of the result. Whereas the natural sciences (along with social sciences to slightly lesser extent) tend to look upon language as nothing other than a medium for communication that has nothing to do with their method of research, the sciences of the humanities take language as not merely a means but also crucial part of the object of research that imparts fundamental influence on the method of research and the resultant products. The humanities studies in East Asia provided with these two characteristics can therefore be expected to have a promising potential to transform the long-standing situation of the humanities in general that have been substantially defined by the humanities in the West which has played an influential role as pathfinder. In order to clarify the aforementioned gist of my understanding, I will first overview as an example the significance of Buddhist studies represented by the compilation of Buddhist canons such as Pāli texts or Taishō Tripiṭaka in the context of the humanities in modern times after the late 18th century. I will then refocus on these histories in comparison with Buddhist studies in the humanities in the digital age, known as the digital humanities or the humanities of digital scholarship, a new field of study emerging in response to the transformation of the medium. There seems to be emerging continuity and discontinuity between the humanities and the humanities of digital scholarship as the relevant researches have increasingly been developing in both number and scope, and to observe the situation with due care is crucial not only to the development of Buddhist studies but also that of the humanities themselves. Lastly, I will briefly introduce as an example for epitomizing these issues my own project entitled “Constructing a Buddhist studies knowledge base in the international affiliations.” These observations should make us aware of a surprising fact that it is far from coincidence but as a result of the inevitabilities of history that illustrative details of “significant potentials of the Humanities in East Asia for the development of globally shared Digital Humanities” are provided by nothing other than “Buddhist Studies” among a variety of humanities studies. 東亞人文研究做為國際數位人文合作研究發展的 顯著可能性:以佛教研究為例說明