We were saddened to learn about the passing away of our colleague Stefano Zacchetti. Although I was not his close friend, I do have some fond memory of him to share: he was indeed a solid and sincere scholar who cared about the Buddhist canon. Back in 2011, we invited him to attend our first international conference on the Chinese Buddhist canon at the kind recommendation of Jan Nattier who was unable to join us because of John McRae's illness. At that time, he was teaching for Dipartimento di Studi sull'Asia Orientale at Università Ca' Foscari Venezia, Italy. He immediately accepted our invitation during his vacation in the mountain. However, he had to cancel it at the last minute because his father just passed away and he had to take care of things. (He said he was surprised by this sudden news because his father was always in good health.) Although he didn't attend, he contributed a wonderful paper to our edited volume on the Chinese canon, entitled "Notions and Visions of the Canon in Early Chinese Buddhism." As one of the editors, I can testify that he was such a meticulous scholar that he checked things again and again. I have to confess that as a scholar educated in the American system I tend to focus more on readability and sometimes did some "editing" work on Stefano's "dry" but substantial paper. Stefano protested against it and we have to restore his original writing. He must have thought highly of this paper. Recently we published our volume in paperback and he gave us a list for corrections, which I attached below according to our last email conversation in June:
I met him later once, and only once at a conference on "TRANSLATING Buddhist Texts:
The Making of An English Buddhist Canon" organized by Bukkyō Dendō Kyōkai (BDK) on May 3, 2018 at the Berkeley Jodo Shinshu Center. We had a good conversation and agreed to arrange a talk for him at the University of Arizona when he came to the states next time. He had a lot of reasons to visit us. Our colleague Fabio Lanza was his classmate many years ago in Italy when they were young. Unfortunately, he will never be able to visit us. His career summary can be seen from these sites:
Here is a full list of his publications which I copied from a Chinese website:
However, among his many publications, I have to add that he had an impact in the area of digital humanities which is often easily overlooked. He was one of the Buddhist scholars who used the CBETA Buddhist Tripitaka Database intensively to do research on early Chinese Buddhist translations. He was interviewed at Oxford by Christine Borgman who wrote about Stefano's research in her Big Data, Little Data, No Data in which she made a long study of CBETA from a data scientist's perspective and considered the digitalized Buddhist canon as the data type represented by the humanities (pages 186-202). Borgman used Stefano's 2005 book In Praise of the Light extensively as an example of utilizing digital humanities data for research. I only knew this when a student from our School of Information showed me this book and pointed to Stefano's research.
It is no doubt that we lost a dear colleague and a superior scholar of Buddhist Studies. May his soul rest in peace.
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