The merger of Buddhist wisdom with computer wizardry has been amazing, said Lancaster. 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.
But the most important advantage of the computerized canon is the way it reduces weeks of thumbing through texts to a few taps of the keyboard. 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. In addition to Pali, which is used by the Theravada Buddhism of South and Southeast Asia, the canon comes in several other languages including Chinese, Tebetan, Manchurian and Mongolian.