The canon is enormous. The front door isn't.
CBETA, the Chinese Buddhist Electronic Text Association, has spent almost thirty years turning the Chinese Buddhist canon — thousands of scrolls, tens of thousands of pages — into a searchable digital archive that scholars everywhere now treat as the default. It is one of the great quiet achievements of the digital humanities. Its homepage does not tell you any of this.
Why this page exists
Land on cbeta.org without already knowing what a Tripiṭaka is, and you meet six dense navigation menus, a donation drive, and links to at least two versions of the site with no indication of which one you want. If you read English rather than Chinese, the only page written for you is a fundraising form. None of that is a small thing to fix — CBETA is a foundation, not a startup, and rebuilding its own site is not this page's job.
What a smaller page can do is add the door CBETA's own site skips: explain what's actually in the archive, show you how to find and read one real text in it, and then hand you off to the genuine thing. This page does that and nothing more — it is not affiliated with CBETA, and it does not host any of their texts.
Three things worth knowing before you click through
It's bigger than one canon
The core is the Taishō Tripiṭaka, but CBETA has added the Xuzangjing, the Jiaxing Canon, stone-carved sutra rubbings and modern scholarship on top of it. See the collection.
You can read it two ways
A browser tool for searching and citing, or a desktop app for reading offline. Neither assumes you already know the citation system. See how to read a sutra.
It runs on donations and volunteers
Money keeps digitisation staff paid; code contributions on GitHub keep the tools improving. See support & contact.
This is a course exercise for COMP4020 (an "unsolicited redesign" of a real organisation's site), built to point people at CBETA's actual work, not to replace it. The real thing is at cbeta.org and cbetaonline.dila.edu.tw.