Visualizing and Querying the Biographies of Eminent Monks

This is the website for the Gaoseng zhuan project at Dharma Drum Buddhist College. The project is funded by the Haoran Foundation 浩然基金會 .

Visit the Demo-Interface (往介面)

The collections of hagio-biographies of eminent Buddhist monks and nuns are one of the most interesting sources for the study of Chinese Buddhism. Comparable to the genre of Latin vitae in Christianity, these biographies offer a fascinating glance into the lives of religious professionals in China between c. 200 and 1600 CE. In contrast to similar genres in India or Europe the Chinese hagio-biographies do not, in the main, emphasize legend, but, following Confucian models of biographical literature, are replete with datable historical facts. Our project uses TEI to markup the four most important of these collections, which together contain more than 1300 hagio-biographies. The interface links the texts with the DDBC authority databases.

• Liang gaoseng zhuan 梁高僧傳, by Huijiao慧皎, dated 519
• Tang gaoseng zhuan 唐高僧傳, by Daoxuan 道宣, dated 665
• Song gaoseng zhuan 宋高僧傳 by Zanning 贊寧, dated 988
• Ming gaoseng zhuan 明高僧傳 by Ruxing 如惺, dated 1600

The aim of the project is threefold:

• To provide a user interface to read the biographies with instant access to information about names and dates, as well as GIS-like visualization of nexus-points of the form: Person(s) X was/were at place Y at time Z.
• To provide a search interface that allows querying the texts beyond usual indices. The interface outputs KML files, with which answers can be visualized. Thereby queries such as the following become possible: Show all the nexus-points concerning Chang'an between 300 and 500 CE [example 1]. Or: Show all birth-places for the monks in the Liang Gaoseng zhuan [example 2].
• To provide an open-source corpus of Buddhist biographical literature in TEI markup. The source files can be used by other projects.

The datasets for all collections are now available for download. The data is in TEI/XML format and published under a CC (Attribution Share-Alike) License.

Download zip-archives containing tei/xml source, rnc schema, readme file:

• 梁高僧傳 data
• 唐高僧傳 data
• 宋高僧傳 data
• 明高僧傳 data

For a comprehensive description of the project see: Bingenheimer, Marcus; Hong, Jen-Jou; Wiles, Simon: “Markup meets GIS - Visualizing the ‘Biographies of Eminent Buddhist Monks’.” In: Proceedings of the International Conference on Information Visualization 2009 (Published by the IEEE Computer Society).

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Gaoseng Zhuan-GIS Team:
Huimin Bhikṣu 釋惠敏, Aming Tu 杜正民, Marcus Bingenheimer, Jen-jou Hung 洪振洲, Bo-Yong Zhang 張伯雍, Jhih-Sian Lee 李志賢, Zhiwei Hsu 許智偉.