Computational thinking: a case study of Buddhist terminology using new software

With the advent of digital technology, there are radical changes sweeping through disciplines that cannot be resisted. It is part of this shift that is described by the term “Computational Thinking”. It is defined as the scholarly strategy of thinking at multiple levels of abstraction with the added use of the capacity of the computer to count and analyze complexity. As an example of “Computational Thinking”, I have used the digitized Korean version of the Chinese Buddhist canon, to explore an important term 本覺. The expression is usually translated as “Original Enlightenment” and is a major doctrinal teaching in East Asia. The analytic computation of the canon is further enhanced by the metadata tag of time, the purported date of translation. Providing temporal aspects to the computation gives us invaluable ways of analysis that would not be possible without the dating. The computation provides a glimpse of the history of the occurrences.