Research Themes

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I study the manuscripts of the Sanskrit Saddharmapuṇḍarīka by combining traditional philological methods with computational linguistic analysis.

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1. Building a base text of the Saddharmapuṇḍarīka manuscripts

I have romanized the standard Kern–Nanjio edition (KN) and am publishing it, with its deficient footnotes supplemented by readings from the collated manuscripts, as the “Romanized Text with Supplemented Footnotes” in the Philosophica Mahāyāna Buddhica series. The romanized transliteration and digital text of the Central Asian manuscripts are complete; transliteration of the Gilgit and Nepalese manuscripts is in progress.

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2. Classifying the manuscripts by Levenshtein distance

With my research collaborator Chihiro Mayuzumi (information engineering), I developed a program that quantifies textual similarity between manuscripts. The results for the verses of Chapter 2 are publicly available as similarity matrices and reproducibility-audit data (Zenodo / GitHub).

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3. Examining Sanskritization

Using the variant readings, synonyms and verse meters in KN as clues, I examine how Middle Indic forms were Sanskritized in the course of transmission.

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4. The thought of upāya in the Saddharmapuṇḍarīka

Since my doctoral dissertation, I have traced the development of the teaching along the stages of the sūtra’s formation, focusing on upāyakauśalya and saṃdhābhāṣya.

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Future prospects

By integrating three factors — textual similarity, degree of Sanskritization and date of copying — I aim to clarify the transmission of the Saddharmapuṇḍarīka manuscripts quantitatively.