Digital Dao-Fa Hui-Yuan: Developing a Digital Archive of Daoism Documents

This study aims to build a digital archive for the Dao-Fa Hui-Yuan, which is composed of 268 volumes and an important compilation of Fus inherited by Daoism schools over time. We build the digital archive named Digital Dao-Fa Hui-Yuan for Daoism researchers, not only to browse and search the Fus, but also to analyze the structures and meanings of the contents. A Fu is an important expression of prayer and mystical messages used in Daoist ceremonies. It is represented as a complex graphical symbol composed of one or more parts. Despite Fu long being an important research topic, the study of Fus is not well developed because of the secrecy of Daoism and difficulties with understanding the meanings. A major research issue in this study was how to organize Fus and their constituent parts. We analyzed the Fus and their relationships using the digitalized contents of Dao-Fa Hui-Yuan. We built a graph of the volumes of Dao-Fa Hui-Yuan, Fus and their constituent parts. We found some relationships in the graph, which were not well recognized before by Daoism researchers. This paper shows the digital archive of Dao-Fa Hui-Yuan and discusses the results obtained from the archive. pp. 24-38