Stylometric Analysis of Chinese Buddhist texts - Do different Chinese translations of the Gaṇḍavyūha reflect stylistic features that are typical for their age?
Marcus Bingenheimer, Jen-Jou Hung, Cheng-en HSIEH · Journal of the Japanese Association for Digital Humanities · 2017
Below we develop a method to determine whether the use of grammatical particles in Chinese Buddhist scriptures is characteristic for the period of their translation. The corpus consists of three different Chinese translations of an early Indian Mahāyāna text from two different periods. We use the results of Principal Component Analysis (PCA) to discern if the samples of texts from different periods cluster together.