News
All Events Involving Project Members
| 14.04.2022 | Online talk for ELTE, Budapest Indology Department / Indian Embassy in Hungary: “The story of an odd Eurasian cultural meme”. (Online) | Péter-Dániel Szántó | - |
| 12.03.2022 | A study day titled “New Research in Sanskrit Yoga Literature” at the ÉFEO in Paris. Moreover, “The Amṛtasiddhi and the Amṛtasiddhimūla: the Earliest Texts of the Haṭhayoga Tradition,” which was co-authored with James Mallinson, was presented there. | Péter-Dániel Szántó | Programme |
| November 2021 | An “open philology” online discussion on academia.edu about a re-edition of Nāgārjuna's Suhṛllekha in the original Sanskrit (Online). During the same time, the text was also read with the Open Philology team during our Wednesday sessions. | Péter-Dániel Szántó | - |
| 27.10.2020 | TLT workshop (Online) | Marieke Meelen | Text Presentation |
| 21.01.2020 | Guest Lecture (Heidelberg) | Rafal Felbur | - |
| 11.11.2019 | The <Linked Open Data> Workshop for <Buddhist> and <Tibetan> Studies (New York) | Jonathan Silk, Gregory Forgues | - |
| 7.07 - 13.07.2019 | The 15th Seminar of the International Association for Tibetan Studies (Paris) | Jonathan Silk, Gregory Forgues, Christopher Handy | Forgues |
| May 2019 | Guest Lectures (Tokyo and Kyoto) | Jonathan Silk | Lectures |
| 8.05 - 10.05.2019 | Digital Access to Textual Cultural Heritage 2019 Annual Conference (Brussels) | Christopher Handy, Marieke Meelen | Poster |
| 26.03.2019 | Departmental Colloquium (Tel Aviv) | Jonathan Silk | - |
| 21.03 - 24.03.2019 | Association for Asian Studies 2019 Annual Conference (Denver) | Christopher Handy | - |
| 18.12 - 21.12.2018 | 9th International Conference of Digital Archives and Digital Humanities (Taipei) | Christopher Handy | - |
| 12.09 - 14.09.2018 | Open Philology - rKTs meeting (Leiden) | - | |
| 27.04 - 27.04.2018 | Digital Humanities Asia 2018 Summit (Stanford) | Christopher Handy | - |
| 19.01 - 23.01.2018 | Open Philology - Chris Blackwell, Furman University (Leiden) | Jonathan Silk, Christopher Handy, Jiang Yixiu | - |
2022
General messages
During the Covid lockdown, the project said goodbye to our programmer Christopher Handy and our Post-doc Gregory Forgues. Gregory is now Director of Research at the Tsadra Foundation and remains closely in touch with us.
We welcomed for a too short period Antonello Palumbo, though remotely due to the inevitable travel restrictions. Antonello likewise remains in close touch with the project.
More recently we welcomed Zhang Meiqiao, a post-doctoral researcher at Zhejiang University and specialist in Chinese Buddhist canons: welcome Meiqiao!
Marieke Meelen, Paul Vierthaler, Rafal Felbur have finished work on an article titled "Crosslinguistic Semantic Textual Similarity of Buddhist Chinese and Classical Tibetan." The article has been accepted for publication in Journal of Open Humanities Data, and it presents the first-ever procedure for identifying highly similar sequences of text in Chinese and Tibetan translations of Buddhist sūtra literature.
Lastly, the team has completed the User Design phase of the development of our open source, online Editing Environment app. Software development is under way. The Editing Environment will work with CollateX-generated collation files of multiple witnesses.
September 1, 2022
From September, Péter-Dániel Szántó will rejoin his alma mater, ELTE Budapest, to head the Department of Tibetology and Buddhist Studies. He will remain affiliated with the Open Philology Project until the end of the year.
Online, April 14, 2022
Péter-Dániel Szántó gave an online talk for ELTE, Budapest Indology Department / Indian Embassy in Hungary (online): “The story of an odd Eurasian cultural meme”.
Paris, March 12, 2022
Péter-Dániel Szántó took part in a study day titled “New Research in Sanskrit Yoga Literature” at the ÉFEO in Paris, where his co-authored book with James Mallinson was also presented.
The programme of this event can be found here.
Péter-Dániel Szántó published a co-authored monograph, “The Amṛtasiddhi and the Amṛtasiddhimūla: the Earliest Texts of the Haṭhayoga Tradition”. For more details, see here.
Abstract
This book introduces, edits, and translates the two earliest texts of the haṭhayoga tradition, the Amṛtasiddhi and the *Amṛtasiddhimūla (which survives only in Tibetan translation). Basing their study on a bilingual manuscript, an extremely rare phenomenon, the authors argue that the origins of hathayoga are found in an eclectic tantric Buddhist milieu, probably active in the second half of the 11th century CE. The texts provide fundamental and later very influential teachings on the nature of the yogic body, psycho-physical practices centred on manipulating bindu, the types of practitioners, and much more. The book is addressed primarily to scholars, but will also be of interest to students and practitioners of yoga.
Partial access has been provided by the authors, and it can be found here.
The book will become open access within a year.
February 1, 2022
Péter-Dániel Szántó published a formatted diplomatic transcript of the only known Sanskrit manuscript of the *Tathāgatācintyaguhyanirdeśa on our website: openphilology.eu/materials.
2021
December 31, 2021
Péter-Dániel Szántó published a co-authored obituary for Géza Bethlenfalvy, a pioneering Hungarian Tibetologist.
The obituary can be found here.
Online, December, 2021
In a project initiated by the Open Philology team and in which we cooperate, the Tibetan research group of the Toyo Bunko launched a project to digitize the Manuscript Kanjur brought by KAWAGUCHI Ekai and preserved at the Toyo Bunko. It is our great pleasure to announce the publication of the images of the six volumes of Dkon brtsegs (Ratnakūṭa) section with introductions, catalogue, and references in collaboration with Prof. Jonathan Silk of Leiden University, Prof. Helmut Tauscher, Dr. Markus Viehbeck, and Dr. Bruno Lainé of the University of Vienna.
The database is directly accessible at the site: https://app.toyobunko-lab.jp/s/manuscript_kanjur/page/home
Online, December 8, 2021
Prof Imre Galambos from Cambridge joined the team on Zoom to discuss Chinese editions, what sort of readings to note and what not, and what is significant and what not.
December 1, 2021
Péter-Dániel Szántó published a lengthy study called “Buddhist Homiletics on Grief (*Saddharmaparikathā, ch. 11)” (Indo-Iranian Journal 64). The article can be found here.
The text was also read with the Open Philology team during our Wednesday sessions.
November 28, 2021
Péter-Dániel Szántó made pre-print proofs available for an article, “Two Palm-leaf Fragments of the Subhāṣitaratnakoṣa” (Acta Tibetica et Buddhica 13). You can download the study here.
Online, November, 2021
Péter-Dániel Szántó hosted an “open philology” online discussion on academia.edu about a re-edition of Nāgārjuna's Suhṛllekha in the original Sanskrit.
During the same time, the text was also read with the Open Philology team during our Wednesday sessions.
Online, October, 2021
We are thrilled to announce that the Open Philology project is featured in Brill's open access week this year. Brill's Open Access Week.
The official press release in which Brill annouces the cooperation between the Open Philology project and Brill can be found here.
Oxford, September 25-26, 2021
Jiang Yixiu presented her ongoing research on the Svapnanirdeśa (one of the Mahāratnakūṭa texts) at the "Reading Mahāyāna Scripture" Conference in Oxford, September 25-26, 2021.
More information on the "Reading Mahayana Scripture" Conference can be found here.
2020
Online, October, 2020
Marieke Meelen, a consultant for Open Philology, presented a new paper on the parsed version of the annotated corpus of Tibetan (PACTib) at the 19th International Workshop on Treebanks and Linguistic Theories, where she mentioned our Project’s ERC grant in the acknowledgements.
The video presentation can be found at the top of the News page.
Leiden, September, 2020
The Open Philology project is delighted to have signed a number of Memoranda of Understanding with partners, as follows:
- Buddhist Digital Resource Center (BDRC), Boston
- The Tōyō Bunko, Tokyo
- Esukhia, Dharmshala, India
- Resources for Kanjur and Tanjur Studies (rKTs), Vienna
Online, September 11, 2020
The team continues to meet online to discuss progress.
Online, July 17, 2020
Team members Gregory Forgues and Rafal Felbur, along with the PI, met with Paul Vierthaler to discuss one of the databases we are preparing.
Leiden, June 26, 2020
With life in the Netherlands slowly returning to normal, the Open Philology team met in real life, outdoors, in perfect picnic weather, to discuss work and to reinvigorate the team spirit, which had been tested by the lockdown.
Online, March 26, 2020
The Open Philology team is meeting virtually during this horrible time of pandemic, continuing our work toward alignment of the Chinese and Tibetan texts of the Mahāratnakūṭa collection. The team is now working to "score" the accuracy of alignments, in order to improve the algorithm's efforts to automatically align, our ultimate goal.
We wish only health to everyone!
2019
Paris, July 7-13, 2019
The 15th Seminar of the International Association for Tibetan Studies - IATS2019
Japan, May 2019
Professor Silk lectures in Tokyo and Kyoto. 
Brussels, May 8-10, 2019
Digital Access to Textual Cultural Heritage 2019 Annual Conference - DATeCH2019 
Tel Aviv, March 26, 2019
Department of East Asian Studies at Tel Aviv University - Departmental Colloquium 'Editing without an Ur-text: Buddhist Sūtras, Rabbinic Text Criticism, and the Open Philology Digital Humanities Project'
Denver, March 23, 2019
Association for Asian Studies 2019 Annual Conference - AAS2019
2018
Taipei, December 19, 2018
9th International Conference of Digital Archives and Digital Humanities - DADH2018
