Welcome to the Taixu Corpus Analysis Project
Explore our analysis of the works of Buddhist Master Taixu (太虛大師; 1890-1947), with a focus on how he engaged with Christianity throughout his life.
Explore our analysis of the works of Buddhist Master Taixu (太虛大師; 1890-1947), with a focus on how he engaged with Christianity throughout his life.
Our research aims to understand Taixu's approach to Christianity during a politically and intellectually complex and dynamic period in early twentieth-century China. By processing over 4.88 million Chinese characters and over 169,000 sentences, we have structured a comprehensive analysis of his works, centering around his views of Christianity.
Explore our key findings below.
We conducted keyword analysis on terms related to various religions, with an added emphasis on Christianity. This revealed the extent and depth of references to other religions within Taixu’s works, illustrating Taixu’s openness to engage with different religious traditions. Additionally, through extracting metadata from the texts, such as dates and locations, we created maps and timelines of Taixu’s engagement with Christianity, displaying the temporal and spatial aspects of his engagement with the religion.
Work in progress...
Using Python scripts and visualization tools, we created multiple data visualizations, including word clouds and heatmaps. Our resources explore the geographic, thematic, and temporal dimensions of Taixu’s thoughts, offering insights into how he approached other religious traditions while working to establish a ‘modern’ version of Chinese Buddhism.
Explore the links above for interactive maps and charts, or check out our readme for a deeper dive into our methods.