Ghent Centre for Buddhist Studies

GCBS doctoral student, Longyu Zhang, organized the panel "Buddhist and Nestorian Texts as Multilingual Contact Zones: Phonological, Lexical and Grammatical Evidence" at the 2026 EACS held recently in Venice, pictured here with co-panelists Chia-Wei Lin (Lausanne University) and Haoxue Yang (Seoul National University). Huzzah!

Continuing GCBS's efforts to further academic cooperation between Belgium and Thailand, through the kind organization of the Thai Embassy we hosted Ajahn Fookij yesterday, who visited us from The UK. We were joined by Dr. Natchapol Sirisawad of Chulalongkorn University, and legendary scholar of Buddhism, Dr. Peter Skilling. Of course, Thai was on the menu for lunch.

GCBS researcher Dr. Xiaoming Hou participated in the ongoing “Translation across the Four Directions”: Buddhist Translation Institutions,
Canon Formation, and the Translingual Shaping of Asian Civilizations conference held at the Mount Kuaiji Advanced Institute of Buddhist Studies where she presented a talk titled, “Where Meditation and Wisdom Converge: The Translation and Conceptualization of sīzé 思擇 and niànhuì 念慧”

We are looking very much forward to a one-day workshop on July 10th with guest lectures by Taiwanese scholars, and project presentations by researchers of our department, as well as discussions concerning future collaboration in various fields of Chinese Studies, including Buddhist Studies.

Workshop “New Perspectives on Chinese History, Buddhism, and Cultural Heritage,” July 10, 2026 – Ghent Centre for Buddhist Studies Workshop “New Perspectives on Chinese History, Buddhism, and Cultural Heritage,” July 10, 2026 We are very happy to announce a workshop “New Perspectives on Chinese History, Buddhism, and Cultural Heritage: Taiwanese Scholars and Ghent University Researchers in Dialogue,” which will take pla...

Continuing the GCBS cooperation with the Thai Buddhist community we had another fruitful meeting today with Thai Ambassador to Belgium, H.E. Mrs. Kanchana Patarachoke, who came to visit us with the knowledgeable Venerable Chandako. We had an expansive discussion about the finer points of the translation of Buddhavacana and various other delightful topics.

We are very proud of GCBS researcher Massimiliano Portoghese who successfully defended his PhD thesis "The Advent of Buddhist Monastic Bodies in China: Symbolic Appearance, Identity Markers and Social Perceptions" (main supervisor: Prof. Ann Heirman; co-supervisor: Prof. Christoph Anderl) on Friday, June 5th! The exam commission consisted of Prof. John Kieschnick (Stanford University), Prof. Ester Bianchi (University of Perugia), Prof. Sylvie Hureau (École Pratique des Hautes Études), and Prof. Anna Andreeva (Ghent University), headed by Prof. Michael Meeuwis (Ghent University).
Many congratulations!!!

GCBS professor Anna Andreeva has recently participated in the Buddhism and Medicine held at Bristol University and sponsored by the Khentse Foundation where she presented her research on protective rituals for pregnant imperial consorts in medieval Japan. It was quite a stimulating gathering of excellent scholars. Huzzah!🎉

We had a wonderful workshop with Prof. Kiyonori Nagasaki and Dr. Wang Yifan as main speakers, as well as GCBS researchers presenting their ongoing research involving Digital Humanities tools. Here, we share some impressions from the meeting.

🇹🇭🤝🇧🇪 This week we were honored to host a delegation from Thailand led by His Venerable Somdet Phramahawirawong, Secretary General to the Supreme Patriarch of Thailand, and organized by H.E. Mrs. Kanchana Patarachoke, Ambassador of Thailand to Belgium. We held a fruitful discussion with plans to cooperate at the university level.

We are very happy to announce a mini-workshop on Digital Humanities, with a focus on the use of digital tools and AI in the editing of Buddhist texts and manuscripts.

Our featured speakers are Prof. Kiyonori Nagasaki and Dr. Wang Yifan:

“Scholarly Editing in the Age of AI: Navigating Uncertainty through the Compilation of Buddhist Canons”
(Prof. Kiyonori NAGASAKI)

This presentation explores the role of AI in scholarly editing through the case of Buddhist canon compilation. Focusing on the SAT Daizōkyō Text Database Project and related efforts toward the Reiwa Tripitaka, it examines how AI-OCR, OCR correction systems, and retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) can support the creation of reliable digital scholarly texts. The talk argues that AI should not be understood as a replacement for scholarly judgment, but as a means of restructuring editorial workflows. In particular, AI-OCR can assist in the large-scale transcription of printed and woodblock Buddhist texts, while correction interfaces can make errors, variants, and editorial decisions more visible and manageable. Generative AI and RAG-based systems further open new possibilities for searching, comparing, and interpreting large textual corpora, though they also introduce newforms of uncertainty concerning reliability, provenance, and accountability. By situating these technologies within the long tradition of Buddhist canon compilation, the presentation considers how standards such as TEI and IIIF can help create transparent, verifiable, and reusable research infrastructures. It argues that scholarly editing in the age of AI must be understood not simply as the production of corrected texts, but as the design of systems for navigating uncertainty.

“The Blessing and Curse of Digitization for Historical East Asian Texts” (Dr. WANG Yifan)

Modern text digitization schemes are fundamentally grounded in the synchronic state of writing systems and orthographies from the latter half of the twentieth century, operating under the governance of international information standards. While this foundational framework impacts the encoding of historical texts worldwide, it presents distinct challenges for East Asian languages, particularly those utilizing the Chinese (Han) script. Meanwhile, the study of pre-printing Chinese orthographic systems has recently garnered increased academic attention, only the establishment of robust quantitative methodologies to analyse them remaining an ongoing endeavor. Against the backdrop of these two relatively remote topics, this presentation provides an overview of the current landscape and the specific challenges posed by contemporary computational environments. Conversely, it discusses on a paradigm shift and positive perspectives granted by the open data era and recent technological progress, highlighting insights and methodologies from my own recent research.

Kiyonori Nagasaki is a Professor in the Faculty of Letters at Keio
University and Senior Researcher at the International Institute for Digital Humanities. His work focuses on Digital Humanities, Buddhist Studies, and the development of digital research infrastructures for textual scholarship. He has been actively involved in the SAT Daizōkyō Text Database Project and in the promotion of international standards such as TEI, IIIF, and Unicode for East Asian classical texts. His current work explores how AI-OCR, structured text encoding, and digital scholarly editing can support the compilation, sharing, and long-term preservation of Buddhist canonical texts.

Yifan Wang is a Research Fellow at the International Institute for Digital Humanities and a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the National Institute for Japanese Language and Linguistics. He holds an MA in linguistics and a PhD in library and information sciences from the University of Tokyo. For a decade, he has contributed to the SAT project, focusing on digitizing the Taishō Tripiṭaka (Chinese Buddhist scriptures) and researching medieval character dictionaries. He also actively participates in standardization, serving as an Ideographic Research Group (IRG) expert for ISO/IEC 10646 and Unicode, and as a Working Group expert within ISO/TC 37.

Time: MAY 22nd, 2026

Location: Ghent University, Blandijnberg 2, Room 5.50 (5th floor)