Index to the Aṅguttara-Nikāya

This book is a word index to the Aṅguttara-Nikāya, which is written in Pāli, a Middle Indo-Aryan language, and is included among the scriptures of Theravāda Buddhism, which is followed in Sri Lanka and countries in Southeast Asia such as Thailand.
 
The texts published systematically by the Pali Text Society, which was established in Great Britain in 1881, have been used as the base-texts for Buddhist scriptures written in Pāli, and today they continue to afford enormous benefit to researchers. However, these texts published by the Pali Text Society have continued to be reprinted without any corrections being made, and in addition to this elementary problem there are many other problems with these texts when considered from the current level of research. Consequently, it has long been pointed out that there is a pressing need to reedit all of the texts. Furthermore, almost none of the Pali Text Society’s texts include a word index, and even if they do, the word indexes are incomplete and contain many errors. This has been a major obstacle to undertaking the compilation of a comprehensive dictionary of the Pāli language, linguistic research on the Pāli language, and naturally also research on Buddhism.
 
In order to effect a breakthrough in this state of affairs, since the early 1990s there have been developed through international collaborative research by researchers of information science, linguistics, and Buddhism both in Japan and abroad tools able to systematically analyze texts written in Middle Indo-Aryan languages, including Pāli. This has made it possible to compile forward and reverse indexes of vocabulary and metrical feet from text data created using a proprietary font system developed for the purpose of analysis and also to analyze the types of metre used in verse on the basis of a neural network method.
 
This book is the final word index to be produced by a word index project for Pāli Buddhist scriptures and compiled using the above tools. It lists all the words, together with their locations, that appear in the five volumes of the Pali Text Society’s edition of the Aṅguttara-Nikāya, published between 1883 and 1900. In addition, it provides for the convenience of users a list of the vast number of corrections that need to be made to the original text, spanning 35 pages. As a result of the publication of this book, there now exist word indexes for all major Pāli Buddhist scriptures, and they are expected to contribute to the compilation of a dictionary, the reediting of texts, and research in linguistics and Buddhist studies, mentioned above.
 
Given the emphasis placed on the need for collaboration between researchers in the sciences and the humanities and on international cooperation in recent years, the fact that results have been continuously produced from an early stage under the aforementioned structure is a major feature of this project. In addition, as one of the pioneers in the field of humanities informatics in recent years, it has historical significance. Although original Pāli texts have been digitized in recent years, making comprehensive searches easier, word indexes like this will still continue to serve as useful tools in actual research using original Pāli texts.
 

(Written by KAWASAKI Yutaka, Assistant Professor, The University of Tokyo Library System / 2022)