Description of the Project The input of the entirety of the words of the Buddha and his immediate disciples, as preserved in the Sri Lankan version of the Pali 'Tripitaka', was completed at the 'Siri Vajiranana Dharmayatanaya', Bhikkhu Training Center, Maharagama, Sri Lanka in 1994. The texts, consisting of an estimated thirty five million characters, were keyed in over a period of three years, commencing in 1991. The edition used as the basis for this was the Buddha Jayanti Tripitaka Series (BJT) in fifty-eight volumes, published under the patronage of the government of Sri Lanka (Ceylon) during the 1960s and 1970s as part of the religious activities following the 2500th Commemoration of the Buddha's Passing away in 1956. The project was carried out under the auspices of Venerable Madihe Pannasiha Maha Nayaka Thera, Head of the Amarapura Branch of the Buddhist Sangha in Sri Lanka, with financial sponsorship from the Chandraratne family. The partially corrected texts have been placed on the JBE websites in Text format for downloading. It is freely available for non-commercial purposes as public domain material under the terms of a GNU license. The texts are encoded in accordance with the diacritic fonts for Pali, designed by Professor K.R. Norman. Important note: Proofreading of these texts is not yet complete. They are made available at this intermediate stage as a service to scholarship and in the hope that the material may, even at this point, be valuable for many purposes. The addition of references to the page numbers of the Pali Text Society's edition is now complete for the canonical texts. We hope to update the files regularly as proofreading and editing proceeds at IBRIC, where further projects are also in hand. We would like to emphasize that this is still some way from a final version, as only part of these texts have been proofread and they also contain many typographical errors from the Buddha Jayanti Tripitaka Series, on which the input was based. We are in the process of proofreading and also of partially editing the text, by adding whatever annotation is necessary to elaborate the more important variant readings from the various recensions already published in Burma, Thailand, India & the U.K. It is hoped to update these files every six ( 06 ) or so months with our proof-read / edited versions. The most recent versions of these files can always be found on the two webservers for the Journal of Buddhist Ethics (JBE) at the following locations: http://jbe.la.psu.edu/palicanon.html http://scorpio.gold.ac.uk/jbe/palicanon.html Links to these sites are at a number of other locations. Please address any constructive ideas or comments to: International Buddhist Research and Information Center Sri Lanka Tripitaka Project sltp@sri.lanka.net The files The BJT files have been placed on the webserver in fifteen files, compressed as zip archives: Pali Canon Vinaya..zip i.e. the Vinaya-pitaka (956K); Digha.zip i.e. the Digha-nikaya (490K); Majjhima.zip i.e. the Majjhima-nikaya (613K); Samyutta.zip i.e. the Samyutta-nikaya (760K); Anguttara.zip i.e. the Anguttara-nikaya (760K); khudd1.zip i.e. seven smaller works of the Khuddaka-nikaya and the Jataka (711K) khudd2.zip i.e. the two Niddesa of the Khuddaka-nikaya, the Patisambhida-magga, Peta-vatthu and Vimana-vatthu (833K); khudd3.zip i.e. the Buddhavamsa, the Cariya-pitaka and the Apadana of the Khuddaka-nikaya (441K); Abhidh1.zip i.e. all of the Abhidhamma-pitaka except the last two works (466K); Abhidh2.zip i.e. theYamaka and Patthana of the Abhidhamma-pitaka (686K). Other texts Grammar.zip contains eleven files i.e. Dhatu-patha, Dhttu-manjusa, Pada-manjari, Pada-sadhana, Balavatara, Maha-rupa-siddhi, Vakya-mala, Sadda-bindu, as well as Kaccayana and two versions of Moggallana and its vutti (637K); History1.zip contains six files i.e. Dipa-vamsa with its modern continuation, Maha-vamsa, Dhatu-vamsa, Hattha-vana-galla-vihara-vamsa and Jina-carita (833K); History2.zip contains ten files i.e. Thupa-vamsa, Nalata-dhatu-vamsa, Rasa-vahini and its tika, Samanta-kuta-vannana, Sahassa-vatthu, Sasana-vamsa and its commentary, Sihala-vamsa and Sotabba-malini (980K); Paracan.zip i.e. the three paracanonical texts: Netti-ppakarana, Petakopadesa, Milinda-panha and in a separate folder two commentarial works:Visuddhi-magga and Milinda-tika (956K); Misc.zip contains five folders and six works: (613K) a) Dictionaries i.e. Abhidhana-ppadipika; b) Poetry i.e. Tela-kataha-gatha and Jina-vamsa-dipa; c) Rhetoric i.e. Subodhalankara; d) Lay Ethics i.e. Upasaka-janalankara; e) Cosmological i.e. Loka-ppadipa-sara. The file sizes will vary on different harddisk formats. The suffix .zip is for the compressed zip format. Click on the files and they should automatically open the program Winzip if it is installed on your computer. Searching the files and concordancing A DOS-based program was created to edit and search through the text, with a facility to use Sinhalese characters, but its further development has now been prematurely terminated, due to limitations in documenting the source codes, etc. This program could be made available to a limited number of scholars, able to read and edit the texts using the Sinhalese characters or use the search facilities for works such as concordances, dictionaries, indexes, etc. Please address requests to: Director, Sri Lanka Tripitaka Project, 380 / 9 Sarana Road, Colombo 07, SRI LANKA. Telephone: + 94 1 68 9388 Or, by email to: sltp@sri.lanka.net For information on searching files on the PC, please see: Appendix One which gives information on some downloadable shareware programs for this purpose and how to use them with the Pali texts. Using the files Professor K.R. Norman has developed Postscript and True Type fonts, which must be downloaded along with these files in order to view the files in roman characters i.e. the Times Norman font. These fonts are available from the JBE websites and elsewhere. The keyboard assignments for the diacritics necessary for Pali can be found in any of the following ways: 1. In Microsoft Word6 and Word97, the Symbol function in the Insert Menu enables one to display and insert letters with a diacritic mark or to assign new key combinations. 2. One can also copy and paste the charaters using Character-map in the assecories Additional note Please note also that these files have been generated by converting the master files generated for the DOS program (still being used to proofread, edit and search through the texts, etc.). At times the files may need to be converted back into that format; so all annotations have to be protected from being converted into Sinhalese characters by using square brackets i.e. [ Ed ] around them. This may be aesthetically unpleasant in Microsoft Word documents and can be removed using the replace (all) command in the Edit menu, although this might create problems identifying page references in some concordancing software. It is intended that users should add their own cross-references, annotations and other comments to the files in using and circulating them for their work. Thank you for downloading and using the Sri Lanka Tripiaka Project files. APPENDIX ONE Text searching on the PC There are various shareware and freeware programs which can efficiently search the Pali text files. To use them, the BJT files should be arranged in an appropriate hierarchy of folders. So if the top folder is BJT, then put four folders inside that with the names Vinaya, Sutta, Abhidhamma and Other. Inside the Sutta folder put folders for Digha and so on. Similarly with the Others. This has two main advantages. Firstly, the result can give the location in the Canon by giving the path e.g. you might get a passage with the pathname Harddisk/Tripitaka/Vinaya/Vin I as the result of a search. This will obviously tell one that there is a passage containing the word you are searching for in the first volume of the Vinaya-pitaka. Searching with Examine Examine v2.22 Examine is a fast and versatile text search utility for Microsoft Windows v3.1, Windows 95 and Windows NT that can search any type of file. Text files with DOS, Unix and MacIntosh line endings, and files in Microsoft Write format, rich text format (RTF) and HTML format (web pages) are specifically supported. use either ordinary text or GREP-like regular expressions, based on the standard UNIX search utility. The logical operators OR, AND, NOT and XOR can be used with a specified search proximity. search files within ZIP archives. return a list of findings with file details, the selection highlighted in context, and line number. This program is shareware. After an evaluation period of 30 days you should register this program or discontinue using it. Examine has two major advantages: it can display the results in a font chosen by the user, such as the Times Norman font and it can directly access and display in that font a much larger context in the source file than is possible with other programs. This means that the page references are either visible or can be easily found by scrolling. It can be downloaded from the JBE site or from: http://www.cix.co.uk/~trevorpoile/aquila/" Searching with Windows Grep A complement to Examine is shareware Windows Grep Search tool for 32-bit Windows What's New? After a short break, development of Windows Grep has recommenced! Version 2.1 has been released, and work has started on adding ZIP file searching. This is almost complete, and once I register the rather expensive unzipping DLL, I'll make a beta copy available. Your support in registering the program will enable me to register this and expedite its release. Upgrades to v2.2 will be free and automatic. Windows Grep is a tool for searching files on your disks for occurrences of text strings that you specify. Although Windows 95 and many other programs have file searching capabilities built-in, none can match the power and versatility of Windows Grep. The program combines the power and flexibility of traditional command line grep utilities available on DOS, UNIX and other platforms with the ease of use of Microsoft Windows. In addition to searching, Windows Grep can also perform global replacing in your files, with complete safety. Windows Grep is designed for searching plain-ASCII text files, such as program source, HTML, RTF and batch files, but it can also search binary files such as word processor documents, databases, spreadsheets and executables. Windows Grep is developed and supported by Huw Millington. It too can be downloaded from the JBE site or from: http://www.pncl.co.uk/~huw/ Please note that the 16 bit version of the program is no longer available, but you could get a copy from IBRIC by sending an email to sltp@sri.lanka.net APPENDIX TWO (L.S. Cousins) List of Updates March/April 1996 Files placed on JBE webservers December, 1996 Update 1 placed on webservers Missing sections in Digha-nikaya, Jataka and Kathavatthu added. Revised version of Angutta-nikaya. Some additional PTS page numbering in the Khuddaka-nikaya. Amendments to the Mahaniddesa. Small numbers of errors in various texts corrected. February, 1997 Update 2 placed on webservers One volume of the Vinaya (BJT Vol 1/PTS Vol IV) and the whole of the Digha-nikaya and the Majjhima-nikaya have been proof-read once. The versions of the Mahaniddesa and Culaniddesa have been partially spell-checked. Further missing pages in the Kathavatthu have been added. All the PTS page numbering is now complete, including the the four postcanonical texts. IBRIC (assisted by L.S. Cousins) have identified and corrected some 30,000 errors in different texts . October, 1997 Update 3 placed on webservers The only change is that the whole of the Samyutta-nikaya has been proof-read once. January, 1999 Update 4 placed on webservers The whole of the Vinaya-pitaka has been proof-read once. SIL standard references (for use with concordancing programs) have been added. Thirty eight later Pali works are now available, including eleven grammatical works and sixteen vamsa texts. All proofread files have been gone through again (ie. Vinaya, Digha, Majjhima, Samyutta and Anguttara) using a method of error detection suggested by Frank Snow whereby impossible combinations in Pali were identified This has corrected aprox 5000 errors overall in these files.