After Buddhism was introduced into China, it led to a large number of translation activities of Buddhist scriptures. These texts were later collected together to become Buddhist Canons. Nowadays, Taishō Tripiṭaka is the main source for the modern Buddhist scholars and researchers in their study of Buddhism. Large amounts of Buddhist texts present many issues worth studying. One of the research topics that has been widely discussed in recent years is the phenomenon of textual reuse between texts. By analyzing the textual reuse between texts, we are able to discover the implicit citation and historical inheritance between scriptures. However, due to the immense size of the Taishō Tripiṭaka, we rarely see the scope of research studies regarding textual reuse in the whole Taishō Tripiṭaka carried out in large-scale. In recent years, with the development of information technology, Digital Humanities has become an emerging topic in the traditional humanities research community. The digital methods mainly focus on the use of computer’s high-speed computing and precise comparison capabilities to deal with large-scale tasks that are difficult to be completed by traditional humanities research methods. In this study, we propose an effective algorithm that can detect and analyze the textual reuse phenomenon in the Taishō Tripiṭaka, and calculate the textual reuse ratio between texts. We then compare the results of our algorithm with those of the existing research studies. Our research methods are listed as follows: (1) take the XML files of whole Taishō Tripiṭaka as our main materials for this study. (2) split the texts into sentences. (3) pair sentences for preliminary pairwise comparison, and rule out the sentences pairs with less than a preset number of characters in common. (4) performs the Local Alignment algorithm, which is commonly used to align long DNA sequences, for identifying repeated passages between sentences in the Taishō Tripiṭaka. The results from the statistical analysis shows that: (1) extremely long repeated passages between texts, often happen in the text related to Tripitaka Catalogues and list of “Buddhas’ Names”. (2) huge amounts of similar patterns between texts can be understood as an idiom or common usages in Buddhist texts. (3) from the perspective of the proportion of reused paragraphs between texts, different translations of the same text tend to produce higher textual reuse percentages. However, we have also found that many texts are differently categorized, but have many similar common paragraphs, some of which have not even been discovered by the previous research studies. These results provide interesting clues for future research.
