Tripiṭaka Koreana
| The Tripitaka Koreana 팔만 대장경 |
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|---|---|
| Name as inscribed on the World Heritage List | |
 |
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| Location | Republic of Korea |
| Type | Cultural |
| Criteria | iv, vi |
| Reference | 737 |
| UNESCO region | Asia and the Pacific |
| Inscription history | |
| Inscription | 1995 (19th Session) |
| Tripitaka Koreana | |
| Hangul | also |
|---|---|
| Hanja | also |
| Revised Romanization | Palman Daejanggyeong also Goryeo Daejanggyeong |
| McCune–Reischauer | P'alman Taejanggyŏng also Koryŏ Taejanggyŏng |
The Tripitaka Koreana (lit. Goryeo Tripitaka) or Palman Daejanggyeong ("Eighty-Thousand Tripitaka") is a Korean collection of the Tripitaka (Buddhist scriptures, and the Sanskrit word for "three baskets"), carved onto 81,258 wooden printing blocks in the 13th century. It is the world's most comprehensive and oldest intact version of Buddhist canon in Hanja script, with no known errors or errata in the 52,330,152 characters which are organized in over 1496 titles and 6568 volumes. Each wood block measures 24 centimeters in height and 70 centimeters in length. The thickness of the blocks ranges from 2.6 to 4 centimeters and each weighs about three to four kilograms. The woodblocks are almost as tall as Mount Baekdu at 2.74 km when stacked, measure 60 km long when lined up, and weigh 280 tons in total. The woodblocks are in pristine condition without warping or deformation despite being created more than 750 years ago. The Tripitaka Koreana is stored in Haeinsa, a Buddhist temple in South Gyeongsang province, in South Korea.
There is a movement by scholars to change the English name of the Tripitaka Koreana. Professor Robert Buswell, a leading scholar of Korean Buddhism, called for the renaming of the Tripitaka Koreana to the Korean Buddhist Canon, indicating that the current nomenclature is misleading because the Tripitaka Koreana is much greater in scale than the actual Tripiṭaka, and includes much additional content such as travelogues, Sanskrit and Chinese dictionaries, and biographies of monks and nuns.
The Tripitaka Koreana was designated a National Treasure of South Korea in 1962, and inscribed in the UNESCO Memory of the World Register in 2007.
The name Goryeo Tripitaka comes from "Goryeo", the name of Korea from the 10th to the 14th centuries.
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