What's actually in the archive
"The Buddhist canon" undersells it: CBETA isn't one collection but several, stacked on top of the Taishō Tripiṭaka that scholars have used as the standard reference edition since the 1920s and 30s. Here's what each part is, in plain terms.
| Collection | Code | What it is |
|---|---|---|
| Taishō Tripiṭaka | T |
The core: volumes 1–55 and 85 of the modern Japanese scholarly edition (1924–1934), itself a collation of the Korean, Song, Yuan and Ming canons against Dunhuang, Pāli and Sanskrit manuscripts. Sūtras, monastic rules, commentaries and treatises. |
| Xuzangjing (Shinsan Zokuzōkyō) | X |
90 further volumes of texts the Taishō editors left out — later commentaries and writings, mostly from the Chan and Pure Land traditions. |
| Jiaxing Canon | J |
Selections from a Ming–Qing dynasty print canon, added for material the other two don't cover. |
| Stone-carved sutra rubbings | — | Rubbings of Buddhist texts carved into stone during the Northern Dynasties, a medium print editions can't represent. |
| Modern works & catalogues | — | Contemporary scholarship and reference material, reviewed for inclusion by an advisory committee since 2024. |
A worked example: the Diamond Sūtra
One short, famous text shows how the pieces fit together. Kumārajīva's Chinese
translation of the Diamond Sūtra (金剛經) sits in the Taishō Tripiṭaka as text number
235, in volume 8 — cited in CBETA's own shorthand as T08n0235. Every text
in the archive has an address like this: canon letter, volume number, text number,
then page, register and line. Once you can read one, you can find any of the others.
Here's how to actually open it.
Scope and volume numbers are drawn from CBETA's published copyright and rights-holder notices (Daizō Shuppansha, Kokusho Kankōkai, the National Central Library in Taipei, Yuan Heng Temple, and scholars Du Doucheng and Fang Guangchang, among others), and from Christian Wittern's account of the project. See CBETA Online for the current, authoritative catalogue.