The Open Philology project was carried out at Leiden University over five years, ending in December 2022. Focused on the Mahāratnakūṭa Collection (MRK), a corpus of 49 Buddhist scriptures extant principally in Chinese and Tibetan translations, and in some cases also in Sanskrit and other languages, the project approached issues of Indian Buddhist textuality, exploring questions such as meaningful ways to edit texts which lack an Ur-text. Team members generally concentrated each on one particular scripture, establishing an edition of its available witnesses, leading to a critical edition, annotated edition and study. A survey of the State-of-the-Art was published through the project's online bibliographic database (
https://bibliography.openphilology.eu/bibliography/(opens in new window)) which provides a model and template for future such bibliographic databases, not limited to Buddhist literature. We further established a means to align corresponding Tibetan and Chinese translations, and developed
an Editing Environment (
https://openediting.eu(opens in new window)) for the use of those who wish to establish critical editions. The project has an Open Access book series, in which will appear the editions and other studies produced by team members.