Tripitaka Koreana

There is a movement by scholars to change the English name of the Tripiṭaka Koreana. Robert Buswell Jr., a scholar of Korean Buddhism, called for the renaming of the Tripiṭaka Koreana to the Korean Buddhist Canon, indicating that the current nomenclature is misleading because the Tripiṭaka Koreana is much greater in scale than the actual Tripiṭaka, and includes much additional content such as travelogues, Sanskrit and Chinese dictionaries, and biographies of monks and nuns. ==History==

The name 'Goryeo Tripiṭaka''''' comes from "Goryeo", the name of Korea from the 10th to the 14th centuries. Work on the first Tripiṭaka Koreana began in 1011 during the Goryeo–Khitan War and was completed in 1087. Choi's Goryeo Military Regime, which moved the capital to Ganghwa Island due to Mongol invasions, set up a temporary organization called "Daejang Dogam". The act of carving the woodblocks was considered to be a way of bringing about a change in fortune by invoking the Buddha's help. The first Tripiṭaka Koreana was based primarily on the Kaibao Canon completed in the 10th century, and involving monks from both the Seon and Gyo schools. This second version is usually what is meant by the Tripiṭaka Koreana. In 1398, it was moved to Haeinsa, where it has remained housed in four buildings. The production of the Tripiṭaka Koreana was an enormous national commitment of money and manpower, according to Robert Buswell Jr., perhaps comparable to the US 1960s Apollo program Moon landings. Thousands of scholars and craftsmen were employed in this massive project. ==Evaluation and significance==

The Tripiṭaka Koreana is the 32nd National Treasure of South Korea, and Haeinsa, the depository for the Tripiṭaka Koreana, has been designated as a UNESCO World Heritage Site. The UNESCO committee describes the Tripiṭaka Koreana as "one of the most important and most complete corpus of Buddhist doctrinal texts in the world". Not only is the work invaluable, it is also aesthetically valuable and shows a high quality of workmanship. Currently, the Palman Daejanggyeong is one of the three woodblocks in the world that are registered on UNESCO. The Tripiṭaka Koreana is stored in Haeinsa temple. While most of the wood blocks have remained in pristine condition for more than 750 years, a few were damaged when a new depository was built in the early 1970s (by the Park Chung Hee regime) and few blocks were transplanted to the new building on a trial basis. Those blocks were damaged almost immediately. They were subsequently moved back to their initial spots and the new building was shut down. That building is now the 'Zen Center'. Currently there are ongoing debates as to the quality of the current storage area. a survey found that the text does indeed have missing characters and errors. The compilers of the Korean version incorporated older Northern Song Chinese, Khitan, and Goryeo versions, and added content written by respected Korean monks. Contemporary scholars are able to conduct research about the older Chinese and Khitan versions of the Tripiṭaka using the Korean version. The quality of the wood blocks is attributed to the National Preceptor Sugi, the Buddhist monk in charge of the project, 45 complete printings of the Tripiṭaka Koreana were gifted to Japan since the Muromachi period. Every block was inscribed with 23 lines of text with 14 characters per line. Therefore, each block, counting both sides, contained a total of 644 characters. The consistency of the style - and some external sources - led people to believe that a single man carved the entire collection, but it is now estimated that a team of 30 men carved the Tripiṭaka. == Digitization ==

As of 2024, the Cultural Heritage Administration expects to have digitization files publicly available by 2027. ==Modern edition==

The modern edition has 1514 texts in 47 volumes. ==See also==