---------------------------------------------------- ChinaResourceNews No. 35 (September 29, 2006) http://listserv.uni-heidelberg.de/archives/chinaresource-l.html ---------------------------------------------------- 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/ ____________________ With kind regards, Matthias Arnold ([log in to unmask]) ChinaResource.org http://chinaresource.org/ _______________________________________________________ An archive of this list as well as an subscribe/unsubscribe facility is available at: http://listserv.uni-heidelberg.de/archives/chinaresource-l.html