This paper aims to introduce the contents of Sino-Nom scriptural materials, known as the Canh Phuoc Temple collection, and new research perspectives for Southeast Asian studies by using those religious materials. The Canh Phuoc Temple collection consists of 98 pieces of religious material written in Sino-Nom scripts from the late nineteenth to the twentieth century. The collection was found at a Vietnamese Buddhist temple in Bangkok and brought to Japan in 1979 by the late Yumio Sakurai, a Vietnamese history scholar.

Scholars of paleography, Asian history, linguistics, and other disciplines conducted a joint interdisciplinary study after forty years, in which they surveyed the materials in terms of both textual and physical characteristics using the latest documentary research methods.

The characteristics of the Canh Phuoc Temple collection are as follows. First, the collection is a mass of original materials held at one temple, Canh Phuoc Temple. Therefore, the collection gives us rich information about the activities at a Buddhist temple as well as the monks and laypeople associated with it. Second, it contains rich information about the process of generation of the documents, and helps us to investigate the spread and acceptance of Chinese Mahayana Buddhism from East Asia to Southeast Asia. Third, the collection includes several sutras established in China. Thus, it provides a clue to the transformation and spread of Chinese Mahayana Buddhism since the Ming Dynasty, which combined the Jodo and Zen sects and incorporated Confucianism, Taoism, and folk religions.

In the joint interdisciplinary research, both textual and physical characteristics were examined with regard to the original documents. The research results are reflected in the two articles and the bibliography in this special issue. The first article is an analysis of all the documents of the Canh Phuoc Temple collection, while the second is an analysis of the Sino-Nom scripts in the sutra and the bibliography.

The survey results of the Canh Phuoc Temple collection are expected to contribute to the following research issues for Southeast Asian studies in the future: research on Chinese Mahayana Buddhism and Vietnamese Buddhism, a local sect of the Mahayana tradition; the spread of Chinese Mahayana and Vietnamese Buddhism to Theravada Buddhist societies by overseas Vietnamese in Southeast Asia; research on the physical characteristics of documents in Southeast Asia.

In this article, we provide an initial examination of 104 samples of writing paper from the 98 items of the Sino-Nom collection archived by a Vietnamese temple in Bangkok (Canh Phuoc Temple) and held by the Center for Southeast Asian Studies, Kyoto University. We attempt to gather various forms of quantitative and qualitative information by means of external and surface observation, shape measurement, as well as optical observation and measurement.

In this collection the main fibers used to fabricate writing paper are wood pulp, bamboo, and mulberry. Items containing wood pulp (about 45 percent) can be dated to the end of the nineteenth century or later, while items made of bamboo and mulberry fibers may date back to earlier. Bamboo paper, which in China tends to be used for printed books, is also widely used for manuscripts. Such facts cannot be obtained solely through literary analysis of the documents’ contents; they were collected by expanding the range of information that could be obtained from a historical document. The study of material culture, namely, accumulating and utilizing information on these documents as objects, not only contributes to more concrete and detailed regional and historical research but also provides crucial evidence for the conservation and management of Southeast Asian materials.

This paper aims at analyzing the dialectal features of Nôm characters used in the Sino-Nom version of Phật Thuyết Thiên Địa Bát Dương Kinh contained in the list of Sino-Nom documents preserved at Canh Phuoc Temple in Bangkok and brought to Japan by the late Professor Yumio Sakurai, from the viewpoints of historical phonology and lexicography. Analysis of the phonetic component of each character will show the features of Central and Southern dialects of the Vietnamese language. So far, a primary index of the Southern Nôm characters has been compiled by Vũ Văn Kính [1994] based on some famous literary works, such as Lục Vân Tiên, Dương Từ Hà Mậu, Nguyễn Hữu Huân tiểu truyện, Kim Thạch Kỳ Duyên, Ngư Tiều Vấn Đáp, etc. The documents in Sakurai’s list might provide a certain amount of additional data for the index.