APPEARANCE OF A CORPUS OF BUDDHIST SCRIPTURES AND APPEARANCE OF A WORLD OF BUDDHISM: A HISTORY OF BUDDHISM FROM THE PERSPECTIVE OF THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE MEDIUM

Masahiro Shimoda, The University of Tokyo

The transformation of the medium for the transmission of Buddhism has always exerted a decisive influence on the formation of Buddhism in its history. This influence has not been one-sided from the sender to the recipient, but, to some extent, always interactive. Given that Buddhism is a historical product of continuous communication, a history of Buddhism cannot but take into account the transformation of the medium of Buddhism. The emergence of a huge corpus of Buddhist scriptures in modern world as a result of the development of the media of its transmission, represented by the Pali Tipitaka in London and the Taisho shinshu daizokyo in Tokyo, has changed the image of the world of Buddhism, on one hand, and, on the other, has accelerated and multiplied the interaction among Buddhists and Buddhist scholars regardless of the historical order of the transmission of teachings. In this presentation, reviewing briefly the history of Buddhism in terms of communication, I will show  a future image of Buddhism on the basis of the construction of a scholarly network in the Web dependent on the newly completed digitization of the full Taisho Tripitaka by the SAT project.