We present a dependency treebank of the Chinese Buddhist Canon, which contains 1,514 texts with about 50 million Chinese characters. The treebank was created by an automatic parser trained on a smaller treebank, containing four manually annotated sutras (Lee and Kong, 2014). We report results on word segmentation, part-of-speech tagging and dependency parsing, and discuss challenges posed by the processing of medieval Chinese. In a case study, we exploit the treebank to examine verbs frequently associated with Buddha, and to analyze usage patterns of quotative verbs in direct speech. Our results suggest that certain quotative verbs imply status differences between the speaker and the listener.

This article proposes a Universal Dependency Annotation Scheme for Mandarin Chinese, including POS tags and dependency analysis. We identify cases of idiosyncrasy of Mandarin Chinese that are difficult to fit into the current schema which has mainly been based on the descriptions of various Indo-European languages. We discuss differences between our scheme and those of the Stanford Chinese Dependencies and the Chinese Dependency Treebank.