The project aims at developing tools and methods that allow to gain new insights into concrete philological issues: the origins and the reception of the hanmun texts of Silla Hwaŏm Buddhism, and in particular those commonly ascribed to Wŏnhyo (617-686), the most renowned exegete on the Korean peninsula. In the larger of two sub-projects, we are developing research tools and methods, which eventually will be applied to tracing the reception of the works ascribed to Wŏnhyo within Chinese Huayan. Partially building on these tools and methods, a subsequent smaller project will focus on methods for authorship analyses, applying these to the works ascribed to Wŏnhyo in an attempt to gain new insights concerning the reliability of traditional ascriptions.
Conceiving computer-assisted philology not only as a means relieving researchers of onerous philological tasks, but also as a tool of methodological self-reflection, initially we are taking a step back and have a close look at actual text-reuse in the sources so as to be able to mold the reading strategies of an informed reader into algorithms. By doing so, we also aim at formalizing our intuitive knowledge of text re-use based on objectively verifiable criteria: Until now, we are far from a theory of textual re-use and intertextuality in East Asian Buddhist texts on a par with comparable research in European language philology (n.b. Helbig 1996). The hermeneutic circle of employing insights deducted from known cases of text re-use to the design of algorithms and testing these algorithms against these and further known cases, however, promises to yield new insights for advancing the philological methods of hanmun-oriented intertextuality research in general.
While both research projects follow Korea-related research interests, the methods developed in the projects should be applicable more widely across the disciplinary borders of East Asian studies. Thus, towards the end of the project, the n-gram software employed in the projects as well as related additional SQL- and R-/Python scripts resulting from the actual project work will be published under a FOSS license.
In order to substantiate the influence of Buddhist commentaries written on the Korean peninsula on China and Japan, Korean and Japanese scholars have produced extensive collections of quotations from “Korean” texts in Chinese and Japanese sources (cf., n.b., Fukushi Jinin 2011, 2012a, 2012b, 2013). These collections, however, are based only on open citations. Research on hidden textual influences carried out with conventional methods (cf., e.g., Plassen 2020) gives rise to the expectation that by computer-assisted search valuable additional material can be gathered that – in stark contrast to nationalist narratives – will testify to an even more pervasive influence of doctrinal developments on the peninsula on “Chinese Buddhism.”
Over the duration of in all four years, we are carrying out a thorough study on text re-use of Hwaŏm Buddhist texts from Silla in Tang period (617-906) commentaries, implementing a pipeline of identification of parameters of text re-use through philological analysis, development, testing and refinement of algorithms, and topic-related analysis of results. The goal of this study is threefold: 1. Identification of characteristics of different forms of text re-use in Tang period commentary literature; 2. Development of algorithms and script tools for the systematic identification of marked and unmarked borrowings (focusing on completeness) and basic information on their valence; 3. A preliminary survey on the influence of Silla Hwaŏm texts on Tang dynasty Huayan Buddhism.
The results will be compiled in a short monograph presenting unmarked textual re-use on a text-by-text basis. As the first systematic survey on “hidden” influences of Wŏnhyo, the icon of “Silla Buddhism” on “Chinese” Buddhism, this computer-assisted philological study should contribute significantly to the awareness of the pervasive influence of this Silla exegete also on “Chinese” Buddhism, and thus challenge the nation-state paradigms effectively still prevailing in the study of early East Asian Buddhism.
A subsequent smaller pilot project will address the works traditionally believed to have been authored by the eminent Silla monk Wŏnhyo (617-686). Ascriptions of East Asian Buddhist texts tend to blindly follow tradition and usually are informed by simplistic authorship models that stand in sharp contrast to our knowledge of texts originating from lectures recorded by disciples. By and large, this is also the case for the works traditionally ascribed to Wŏnhyo. – Due to the frequent cases of multiple authorship, in the planned project, we do not want to ascertain whether a given text was actually written by Wŏnhyo, but rather find evidence for decisions on whether specific texts can possibly originate from the same workshop.
Again resorting to the locally developed software, in a first step, different stylometric measures will be tested in order to develop a reliable classifier for Tang period Buddhist texts. Validation experiments will involve applying the stylometric measures to a subset of Huayan texts that can be reliably attributed to different authors or workshops. The resulting methods then will be applied to the texts traditionally ascribed to Wŏnhyo, aiming to independently re-assess the probability of the traditional ascriptions and independently verify occasional doubts raised in the secondary literature based on conventional, non-computer-assisted analyses.
Drawing on the methodological results of the first project, in parallel also text re-use in and of the texts will be analyzed, as the resulting information on the milieu of a given text may provide additional time constraints as to the workshop or text group a given text might derive from.
The planned publications on the ascriptions to Wŏnhyo that will not only contribute to the methodology of computer-assisted philological research on authorship (or rather, text group) ascriptions, but should also provide further valuable evidence for the necessity to overcome the still dominant traditional authorship attributions in Korean Buddhist Studies and beyond.
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Last update: Apr 30, 2024
