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ChinaResourceNews No. 35 (September 29, 2006)
http://listserv.uni-heidelberg.de/archives/chinaresource-l.html
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New in ChinaResource.org:
"Tao-tsang. Traveaux d'Index" and "Daozang suoyin"

The Daoist canon, Daozang, is a key resource for the study of Chinese
culture. It contains a wealth of materials ranging from texts and
commentaries to the Daoist classics such as Laozi and Zhuangzi to
protocols of visions, from biographies of Daoists to descriptions of
Daoist temples, from cosmological speculation to ritual performance and
magical spells. Compared to the Confucian and Buddhist traditions which
have enjoyed sponsorship from the state and many institutions in East
Asia to this day such as monasteries, the Daoist canon is understudied.
To this day, it only exists in the reprints of a non-interpunctuated,
not critically edited and not annotated edition from the Ming period.

Kristofer Schipper, a Dutch scholar of Chinese Studies, developed an
early professional and personal interest in this tradition and has made
it his life project to explore it and make it accessible. In order to
facilitate access for other scholars, he developed, besides publishing a
number of seminal works on various aspects of Daoism, a variety of
research tools such as an index to the titles of this collection and a
modern sequel. After many years of labor, he recently also published,
together with Franciscus Verellen, the three-volume work The Taoist
Canon, a historical companion to the Daozang (University of Chicago
Press, 2004).

During the 1980s, Professor Schipper assembled a group of young scholars
interested in joining his Daozang project. To open this source for their
widely diverging interests and the field in general, he guided them in
developing a subject index for the entire Daozang. This would allow
scholars to find not just the titles of works in the Daozang but all
references to a given person, god, object, temple, ritual, text, spell
etc. in this entire gigantic collection. The work was achieved in about
1986 and already has greatly contributed to professionalize and improve
the quality of research in this field.

This subject index of about 10 000 pages was reproduced in a set of 37
microfiches. The computer disk from which it was originally printed is
lost. These microfiches have been copied and recopied by interested
scholars in an informal but very uneven diffusion. Especially in East
Asia, very few scholars have ever heard of, or seen, this research tool,
and rare are the libraries worldwide listing it in their catalogue.

The Institute of Chinese Studies, University of Heidelberg, has long
been committed to make accessible digital resources in Chinese Studies
to the scholarly community. Professor Schipper gracefully consented to
our suggestion to put this subject index online. Dr. Bumbacher, who had
originally been in the group doing the indexing work, kindly lent us a
fine copy of the microfiches that was less scratched than the copy the
Institute had made earlier with its many years of intensive use. Still,
as the original had been printed with a rather weak definition, our
efforts to actually redigitize the Index from the microfiches were not
successful, because the computer software was unable to safely spot the
difference between, for example, ?a? and ?g?. The scanned images,
however, are sharp enough to provide the human eye with the required
information.

Following a suggestion by Professor Schipper, we have added a further
research tool to the index, the index to the titles of the Daozang,
Daozang suoyin, Shanghai, Shanghai shudian 1996, which is long out of print.

Within each category (subject) the Index is arranged alphabetically with
the Pinyin transcription. Under each entry, the number assigned to the
text in the Comparative chart of the five Daozang editions is given,
followed by the full title, (juan) and page reference of the sources
will be given together with the information about the subject category
and the page where the item occurs in the text. The search mechanism is
described in a separate online manual.

Rudolf G. Wagner


Tao-tsang. Traveaux d'Index:
http://www.sino.uni-heidelberg.de/database/daozang-idx/

Daozang suoyin:
http://www.sino.uni-heidelberg.de/database/daozang_suoyin/





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With kind regards,

Matthias Arnold ([log in to unmask])

ChinaResource.org
http://chinaresource.org/

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