The path to enlightenment now crosses the information superhighway.
University of California Professor Lewis Lancaster has supervised putting all 115 volumes of the Buddhist canon in the ancient language of Pali on a single CD-ROM disk, condensing tens of thousands of pages into a whisper-thin slice of technology.One day, he even hopes to take the Buddha on line.
The merger of Buddhist wisdom with computer wizardry has been amazing, said Lancaster.
"Thousands of pages are being put in every year, so our whole discipline of study will be revolutionized by this," he said.
Putting Buddha on disk has many advantages. One is space. The Pali text, one of several versions of the canon, used to run to more than 50,000 pages. Now, it fits in the palm of a hand.
Scholars stand to save money as well as storage. The disks are being sold for $299. The printed texts cost $12,000.
But the most important advantage of the computerized canon is the way it reduces weeks of thumbing through texts to a few taps on the keyboard.
"I can search for any term or phrase and, depending on what kind of search I'm doing, it may take two seconds or at the longest maybe two minutes to find every example of what I'm looking for," said Lancaster, who teaches Buddhist studies at UC-Berkeley. "Plus, I know I can get every example and no concordance can touch that."
The search capability is particularly useful in Pali, which contains compound words, said Richard Payne, dean of the Institute of Buddhist Studies.
That slows down the human searcher, but a computer can whisk through the compounds and find a given word in seconds.
"If you were trying to find every occurrence, it could have taken weeks," Payne said.
In addition to Pali, which is used by the Theravada Buddhists of South and Southeast Asia, the canon comes in several other languages, including Chinese, Tibetan, Manchu and Mongolian.
Lancaster began advocating the switch to disk in 1988.
It was a backbreaking task. Eighty typists worked on the input, while Thai monks handled the proofing - checking and rechecking in a laborious process that took five times as long as the typing.
By the time the corrections were done and proofread again, "we figure that it really has to be done and looked at seven times," Lancaster said.
The new disk was published by the American Academy of Religion and Scholar's Press in Atlanta.
Commentaries are being input to provide guidance to the scriptures and stored texts must be kept up to date with technology.