On May 30, 1988, Visakha Puja Day, the Digital Tipitaka Development Team under the Mahidol University Computing Center, Thailand, announced the completion of its project to record the 45 volumes of the Pali Tipitaka onto computer, together with the development of an application program, BUDSIR (BUDdhist Scriptures Information Retrieval), for searching it. BUDSIR could search and find every occurrence of every word, sentence, and saying of the Buddha occurring in the Tipitaka promptly, precisely and comprehensively. It was the world’s first digital edition of the Tipitaka
 

Then in September, 1996, BUDSIR IV for Windows has been developed so that the program can work in a Windows environment. BUDSIR IV for Windows works much that same as previous version of the program, with fast, accurate and, most importantly, comprehensive search capability. With the Graphic User Interface (GUI), it can display information from Tipitaka and Atthakatha in up to eight movable and resizable windows at a time, and the text size and color can be changed as the user wishes. The program has also been given sound capabilities so that Pali passages can be read out by the computer.

Last year (1997), it marked another great step forward in the development of the project with the successful completion of the following : 

The Thai translation edition of the Tipitaka, and the new search engine BUDSIR/TT for Windows. BUDSIR in Multi-scripts. The program is able to display data from the original two scripts-Thai and Roman, to many more scripts : Devanagari, Singhalese, Burmese, Khmer. BUDSIR with Pali Dictionary. A Pali-Thai dictionary database is linked to the original BUDSIR database in this first version. The next stage will be to develop a Pali-English dictionary.

For the CD-ROM publication, so far 4 CDs have been produced and distributed as follows: 

The BUDSIR for Windows contains 115 volumes, or 50,189 pages of text. The data can be divided into two groups as follows :

1. The Pali Tipitaka, 45 volumes.
2. The Atthakatha and other important scriptures, 70 volumes.+

The data from each volume was entered twice and verified by a computer program which pin-pointed any discrepancies between the two versions, which were then corrected until the two versions were completely identical. This was done by eighty typists, each working at a rate of thirty Pali words a minute, or on average 15 pages a day.

For the BUDSIR for Thai Translation, it contains 160 volumes in all, consisting of 115 volumes in Pali text as in the product of BUDSIR for Windows, and 45 volumes of Tipitaka in Thai translation which is convenient for comparison with the original Pali source.
 
 

To perform gracefully, BUDSIR essentially needs equipment along the following specification :

1. An IBM–type PC computer or compatible with a Pentium CPU,
2. At lease 16 MB of RAM,
3. Monitor, keyboard and mouse,
4. CD-ROM drive,
5. Hard disk with at least 30 MB of free space (for collating results),
6. A 3.5”, 1.44 MB floppy drive,
7. A 9 or 24 pin dot-matrix printer or laser printer,
8. A sound card, such as Sound Blaster 16, and speakers (optional),
9. Windows 95 or higher, Windows NT.

For Macintosh users, BUDSIR for Windows can also be run on Macintosh computers, e.g., Power PC, etc., with the SoftWindows emulator program and the OS version 7.0 or higher.

The Mahidol University Computing Center is proud to have played a part in the continued preservation of the treasury of priceless wisdom that is the Buddhist Scriptures. We have many other projects to implement in the future to aid in the study and dissemination of the Buddha's teachings, as study and research of the Buddhist Scriptures is an essential duty of Buddhists. It is one way of ensuring the longevity of the Buddhist religion and that Buddhism to serve the people of the world.

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