Study on the possibility of a text-database for Koshiki (buddhist ritual)

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Koshiki is one of the Buddhist rituals peculiar to Japan which sprang up in the latter half of the tenth century. It is different from other rituals in that it was spoken in Japanese and it can be said that it is an unique comprehensive cultural system which includes elements of music (wind and string instruments and buddhist vocal music), dance, theatre, and painting. Thus it is an important source for the study of not only Buddhism, but Japanese performance arts and culture as well.Basing on research and collection of materials, which were done over one decade, this project intended an online-catalogue of manuscripts, pre-modern and modern editions of koshiki-texts to provide researchers in and outside of Japan with the necessary informations. Over one thousand bibliographical data were classified in 320 works based on the Arai/Fukushima classification system, which is the most convenient description system for koshiki. The bibliographical data are linked with a fulltext-database which includes texts of the most important koshiki, a lot of them became for the first time accessible to a wider audience.The database was written as a SGML-application in HTML 3.2 (later modified to HTML 4.0). It has a simple structure and can be easily modified by the user to his own needs. As an application handling with pre-modern Jananese texts it used a triple identification for characters not included in the JIS-standard code : the 'on-yomi' (pronounciation of the character in Japanese syllables), the Morohashi daikanwa jiten-number and a bitmap-image of the character in the GIF-format.The database is accessible under the address :http : //faculty.web.waseda.ac.jp/guelberg/koshiki/datenb-j.htm.