Introduction

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The evolution of Buddhist scriptures and the formation of the various Buddhist canons are complex processes that often stretch over a long period of time and involve numerous aspects of the societies in which they take place. Understanding these two related processes is crucial to our study of the history of Buddhism in general and of Buddhist ideas in particular. It is also instrumental in gaining an appreciation for the impact of social and cultural phenomena on intellectual and religio-philosophical developments and vice versa. It will necessarily mean at times shedding light on various issues related to these two processes, both on the macro and micro levels, such as the existence of intellectual networks, various stages in the evolution of a specific scripture, intertextuality between various scriptures, the linkage between treatises and scriptures, and the impact of various social and political aspects of society on both the evolution of scriptures and the formation of canons.

The first step towards a better understanding of the history of composition of individual texts, on the one hand, and the emergence of entire corpora of Buddhist works, on the other, is to locate in the various texts and textual corpora (approximate) textual matches and to study them from various angles. These textual matches may be cases of either acknowledged citations or “borrowed” textual passages with no attribution. Until not very long ago, such matches were searched for manually, but with the advent of computer technology, coupled with the ongoing digitization of Buddhist texts, faster and more accurate methods have been developed. BuddhaNexus is a powerful tool aimed at facilitating the study of the evolution of Buddhist scriptures and the formation of the various Buddhist canons by exploiting artificial neural networks in order to locate (approximate) textual matches.