As mentioned above, CBC@ grew out of a misguided attempt to survey single-handed the state of the modern scholarly literature on questions of ascription, which rapidly led to two gloomy conclusions: 1) That such a task is beyond my capacity, and probably beyond that of any single human researcher in much less than a lifetime; 2) that in the meantime, all researchers are probably operating, to a greater or lesser degree, in conditions of partial ignorance about our source texts. 

I therefore concluded that any project that hopes to address this problem adequately must be collaborative and open-ended. That led in turn to the conclusion that such a project must be web-based, and operate on a user-contributor model. 

We already have a successful example of such a model in Buddhist Studies—Chuck Muller’s Digital Dictionary of Buddhism (DDB). For this model to work, however, like the DDB, CBC@ vitally needs scholars to contribute their time and expertise. I therefore appeal to experts to contribute entries wherever they notice lacunae. Scholars who have done relevant research themselves, especially, might like to contribute entries summarising their own work—and feel free to check and correct entries already contained in the database based upon their work. 

I also encourage postgraduate students to contribute, and hope that scholars teaching postgraduates will encourage their students to contribute. I expect that this will be a good way for students to foster a critical awareness of problems of attribution, and the sources and methods that scholars rely upon in the effort to correct the record and place our research in many subfields upon a firmer text-evidential basis. 

Scholars interested in contributing should please contact me.

Next: Bibliography