The Sino axis opens: Classical Chinese, the Chinese Āgamas, and the Man'yōšū
20 July 2026 · Nabu news
Phase 32 opens the library’s Far Eastern axis, from Classical Chinese
to historic Japanese. The Kyoto treebank brings 86,239 gold-annotated
sentences of the Analects, Mencius, the Liji, the Chuci, and Tang
poetry behind one configuration row. The 272 Literary Chinese Āgama
texts of the Taishō canon — already on disk, held back only by a scope
rule — now mint beside their English translations, and SuttaCentral’s
parallels graph arrives as reference edges, so the Kālāma Sutta and its
Madhyama-āgama counterpart meet in one links query across canons and
languages.
On the Japanese side, the Oxford-NINJAL Corpus of Old Japanese brings all 4,991 texts of Old Japanese poetry — the complete Man’yōšū among them — lemmatized and parsed, with the corpus’s own lexicon as a dictionary shelf beside it. The reconstruction shelf spans Baxter-Sagart Old Chinese, the Guangyun critical edition of the Qieyun system (CC0), and Wiktionary’s dual reconstruction systems; the Unihan database, KANJIDIC2/JMdict, and the Heian-period character dictionaries of the HDIC project carry the Sinoxenic bridge — a character’s readings from Middle Chinese to go-on and kan-on.
As always: licenses read verbatim at ingestion (one genuine upstream contradiction found and journaled for a ruling), censuses measured against whole files, and every count dated. The Kanseki Repository and CBETA are the planned continuations.