Read about a major milestone in technological innovation of the Tibetan language as the open source software suite LibreOffice's latest update supports an important feature of Tibetan: very long paragraphs.
BDRC is proud to announce an exciting project that will contribute a powerful new app and millions of pages of primary materials to Tibetan Studies. This cutting-edge, cross-platform desktop tool for optical character recognition (OCR) of Tibetan scripts will 'unlock' the writing embedded in scans of manuscripts.
Do you wonder about the sources of the texts BDRC digitizes and puts online? Although we seek out undocumented texts ourselves, we also aim to amplify manuscripts that local partners have recovered, edited, and published. Here are two inspiring examples of community preservation work that was crucial to the revitalized religious traditions in Tibet.
BDRC is well known for digitization work with libraries and local partners, but did you know that our method of digital preservation involves much more than scanning? We also work alongside librarians to make improvements to library management and lending systems.
The BDRC archive has doubled the number of contemporary women writers and figures represented; an important step towards equality and full representation of Tibetan women in the global knowledge commons.
BDRC is pleased to announce three valuable additions to the archive which will be of enormous interest to students of Tibetan and Buddhist Studies. These have been generously provided by Jonathan Silk, Professor of Buddhist Studies at Leiden University, with an introduction to each. They constitute a very unique "behind the scenes" point of view on the world of 19th and early 20th c. Buddhist Studies, and the incredible work of scholars at the time.
BDRC recently published online the Matho Fragments, an extremely rare collection of ancient manuscripts—these are in fact the oldest manuscripts ever discovered in Ladakh. The Matho fragments were interred in a stupa dating from the 12th century.
BDRC recently published online the Matho Fragments, an extremely rare collection of ancient manuscripts—these are in fact the oldest manuscripts ever discovered in Ladakh. The Matho fragments are Tibetan Buddhist manuscripts and fragments that had been interred in a set of stupas, religious earthen reliquaries, including the "King's stupa," dating from the 12th century.
In addition to the skillful means of writing and translating, Tulku Thondup Rinpoche also sustained the scriptural Dharma in these dark times through his long term support for BDRC. Rinpoche was a founding board member–he joined in 1999 at the inception of the organization–and helped guide the organization as a director for nearly 20 years.
We honor our founder Gene Smith and we strive to uphold his vision. The Buddhist Digital Resource Center preserves Buddhist literature for the world.
The Buddhist Digital Resource Center is delighted to present our newly released BDRC Mobile App. The app allows users to view and search the entire BDRC library on their mobile phone, giving you access to 28 million pages of Buddhist literature via the slim iPhone or Android in your hands. The Newly Released App is available from both the Apple Store and Google Play.
The Aming Tu Prize recognizes our archival platform, the Buddhist Digital Archives (BUDA), for both its practical benefits to researchers and its technological breakthroughs.
One of the most interesting genres of Tibetan Buddhist literature is the lamyig text, the travel guide, or more appropriately the pilgrimage guide (a subset of lamyig, called the neyig). These travel and pilgrimage guides are not only the most accessible and useful of texts to a wide variety of readers, but they contain history, geography, biography, philosophy, religion, art and anthropology, and more.
Much like Gene Smith, Jann preferred to work on the ground, preserving the texts and making direct contributions to the field of Buddhism that will be felt for generations.
We are happy to announce the creation of an exciting new tool to crop and process manuscript images using AI, which up until now has been a laborious and manual process. Called the Segment and Crop Anything Model (SCAM), we have made the tool freely available to the public.
Given a large collection of 1.4 million scanned images of 5,000 text volumes and a catalog of 84,000 text titles, how can AI help us map the titles to their corresponding images? This article is an account of a successful project that used AI with humans in the loop to map these titles to their corresponding images by detecting library stamps on scanned images. We lay out our methodology and the various technical and non-technical challenges that arose in the process.
Through a recent interview with Geshe Monlam, of the amazing Grand Monlam Tibetan Dictionary, we learned that the man behind this terrific work is a modern day Renaissance man. Read on.
Our Executive Director Dr. Jann Ronis gave a book talk at the U.S. Library of Congress on Friday, March 31st. Dr. Ronis presented the Gene Smith photography book "Digital Dharma: Recovering Wisdom," and spoke about Gene Smith and his organization's Buddhist digital preservation as well as innovations and technologies for Buddhist digital humanities for the future.
The greatest Tibetan dictionary, the Monlam Grand Tibetan Dictionary, is now available on BUDA where it can be used to look up the meaning of every word in our vast e-text archive.
We are delighted to announce that BDRC Senior Librarian Kelsang Lhamo has published "The White Lotus Biography of Jamyang Gene Smith," her long-awaited Tibetan language biography of our founder Gene Smith.
སྤྱིར་བོད་ཀྱི་ས་མིང་ལ་རིགས་མང་ཞིང་རྒྱ་ཆེ་ལ་ཞིབ་འཇུག་བྱེད་པར་ཡང་མ་མཐར་ས་ཁམས་རིག་པ་དང་། ལོ་རྒྱུས་རིག་པ། སྐད་བརྡ་རིག་པ་སོགས་ཆེད་ལས་སྣ་ཚོགས་ཀྱི་རྣམ་བཤད་བྱེད་ཕྱོགས་ཕུན་སུམ་ཚོགས་པ་ཞིག་ཡོད་པ་གོར་མ་ཆགས་མོད།
Dafna Yachin is the indomitable director of Digital Dharma, the documentary, and now co-author of Digital Dharma: Recovering Wisdom, the companion photo book. Her deep friendship with our founder Gene Smith (1936-2010), who became her mentor, is what drove the first project.
On Tuesday, Jan 17th, BDRC launched our first-ever public event series with a book talk by Charles Manson about Buddhist master Karma Pakshi, advisor to the Mongol Khans and the founder of the Karmapa lineage.
The Dakinis' Great Dharma Treasury, or མཁའ་འགྲོའི་ཆོས་མཛོད་ཆེན་མོ། as this small library of 53 volumes of texts by and about Tibetan women is known, showcases the overlooked brilliance of Buddhist female masters from Tibet through the centuries.
On Tuesday, November 1, friends and supporters of the Buddhist Digital Resource Center gathered together in New York City to celebrate the publication of a beautiful photography book, on Gene Smith, called Digital Dharma: Recovering Wisdom.
This rare manuscript copy of Bod Khepa's Collected Works showcases the kind of work that BDRC does, seeking and making available these rare collections from masters whose works would be lost or inaccessible otherwise.
BDRC is proud to announce a new collaboration on a scholarly project: The Authors and Translators Identification Initiative. The goal of ATII is the creation of an open source collaborative database of authors, translators and other figures involved in the creation of Indic Buddhist texts and Buddhist canons – including particularly the Tibetan and Chinese ones.
The Buddhist Digital Resource Center is at the 16th Seminar of the International Association for Tibetan Studies—the IATS conference currently underway at Charles University in Prague in the Czech Republic! The majority of the text-based papers presented at the conference were enabled by BDRC's archive.
Mingyur Rinpoche spent two hours with BDRC staff, board members and friends discussing BDRC's essential work and the importance of textual preservation for the living Buddhist lineages.
We made a major new addition to BDRC's geo-data for Buddhist sites in the Inner Asian world, thanks to generous data sharing by the "Documentation of Mongolian Monasteries" project and Dr. Isabelle Charleux. Over time these new sites will become even more dynamic as we begin to link them with texts written or printed at these sites.
At the Library of Congress, she gave life to the Tibetan Collection, shaping and defining it into one of the most valuable collections at the Library. Because of her, what began as unidentified texts collecting dust deep in storage is now a treasure that draws researchers from all over the world.
As part of the University of Vienna-Tibetan Manuscripts Project and the Resources for Kanjur and Tanjur Studies project, Helmut Tauscher, Bruno Lainé and Markus Viehbeck have documented, and made accessible, valuable manuscripts from the western and southern Himalayas, including rare editions of the Kangyur and Tengyur.
BDRC is pleased to announce that we have successfully added Tibetan Collation Rules to the CLDR. This step will bring Tibetan closer to being fully supported on websites and smartphones, and will improve the digital experience of Tibetans worldwide. This effort is part of BDRC's practice of contributing back to the Buddhist communities in Asia who produced the precious texts we bring online. This post will also dive into the historical origins of the rules we have implemented.
On February 1, 2022, our old library website at tbrc.org will go offline and our new library website at the Buddhist Digital Archives will become the sole gateway into our extensive digital archive. BUDA, the result of years of effort and innovation, unifies the diverse array of Buddhist texts in our library on a single platform.
Dr. Petra Kieffer-Pülz is a scholar of Pali literature who has been studying a monastic boundary dispute in Sri Lanka for the past five years. Monastic boundaries, called sīmā, are crucial because a proper sīmā is absolutely necessary for ordaining new monks. The sīmā is, therefore, one of the preconditions for the continued existence of the sangha.
Our library platform, the Buddhist Digital Archives, is a vast ocean of Dharma texts. Please enjoy browsing a selection of our collections on BUDA. These collections are groups of texts that are part of the same preservation project, the same library, or come from a single BDRC institutional partner.
The Buddhist Digital Resource Center was rece...
One of our priorities in developing BUDA was to create a great reading room experience for our users, many of whom are practitioners, researchers and translators who spend a great deal of time poring over these Buddhist materials.
The site was down. That's how Chris Tomlinson first became connected with Gene Smith and the Tibetan Buddhist Resource Center in 2000. She would spend the next two decades as a key technologist for BDRC, helping share the Dharma globally and transforming the way people access Buddhist literature.
Our new website includes improvements to both the user interface and the architecture of the data. In this post we will introduce one of the changes to our data architecture and how this change will affect your searches.
Long-time friends of BDRC will know of Peter Gruber: founder of the Gruber Foundation Science Prizes, friend of Gene Smith, and a major benefactor of Buddhism in America who played an important role in bringing Buddhist teachings to the West.
While we have partnerships around the world, today we want to highlight and celebrate our partnerships with major institutions in India, which is in many ways the birthplace of TBRC/BDRC. Recently we have released online hundreds of volumes of significant works provided to BDRC by our long-time partners.
Search is how most of our users interact with our library and database. As fast and intuitive as the search on BUDA is, we continue to refine and improve it in order to offer our users the most seamless search experience. So we are happy to share the news that BUDA's search has been updated with three useful new features, developed based on feedback from our users.
A major update to BDRC's search engine was released in 2014 and today we are releasing a second major improvement to the search engine.
BDRC's Executive Director Dr. Jann Ronis and technical lead Élie Roux present an online demo of our new website and library platform, the Buddhist Digital Archives (BUDA), providing tips and tricks for the new user.
For close to 25 years now, a leading resource in Tibetan Studies has been Dan Martin's Tibetan Histories: A Bibliography of Tibetan-Language Historical Works, Serindia Publications (London 1997). BDRC is proud to be able to now make this resource available for download.
Even as BDRC builds on Gene's legacy and expands its holdings from Tibetan into Sanskrit, Nepalese, Chinese, Khmer, Pali and Burmese, the heart of our ever-expanding library remains our Tibetan texts.
Tibetan texts can be tricky to work with. Publication information is often missing or unstandardized, with some works lacking titles entirely while others have author information buried in the colophon. That's why BDRC has expert librarians with the specialized knowledge needed to catalog these challenging works.
With generous support from Khyentse Foundation, the Buddhist Digital Resource Center invites applications for a fellowship in Southeast Asian manuscripts, to begin 1 January 2021.
During 20 years of seeking out and preserving Buddhist texts, BDRC has found some remarkable collections. The monastic library of Vatt Phum Thmei in Cambodia is one such collection. The roughly 2,500 bundles of palm-leaf manuscripts are a treasure trove of thousands of years of Cambodian cultural knowledge.
With libraries and archives closed around the world, the value of BDRC's online platform has gained new significance as the most comprehensive collection of Buddhist writings in classical Asian languages.
BDRC is pleased to announce the Fragile Palm Leaves Digitization Project. This vital project is made possible by the gracious funding support of the Khyentse Foundation.
Buddhist Digital Resource Center (BDRC) is pleased to announce the development of the Sanskrit and Chinese Buddhist Library Network.
Following Gene's founding vision, BDRC doesn't solely focus on the preservation of strictly religious texts, but rather seeks out texts that reflect the full richness of Buddhist culture— including, for example, Medical and Astrological works in the Tibetan language.
Today we're featuring new acquisitions of texts from the Kagyu School of Tibetan Buddhism. BDRC founder Gene Smith championed Kagyu literary heritage and had fruitful relations with many Kagyu lamas.
BDRC has an excellent collection of Nyingma texts as a result of its close connections with Nyingma lamas. For decades, BDRC's founder, Gene Smith, was both a student and friend of H.H. Dilgo Khyentse (1910-1991), who was the head of the Nyingma School of Tibetan Buddhism from 1987-1991.
With support from the BDRC community and our generous funding partners, BDRC has been expanding its collection of Tibetan texts through new digitization efforts in Tibet and Mongolia, as well as through our long-term operations in India
Join the BDRC team and help us preserve and share Buddhist literary heritage!
We're seeking three technology and design experts—a UI developer, a UX expert, and a graphic designer—to help us finish our next-generation archival platform, the Buddhist Universal Digital Archive (BUDA).
The Buddhist Digital Resource Center's Board of Directors has selected Jann Ronis to lead BDRC as its new Executive Director.
With support from Khyentse Foundation, the Asian Classics Input Project and the Buddhist Digital Resource Center have partnered to digitize, catalog, and make accessible all Tibetan manuscripts and xylographs held at the National Library of Mongolia in Ulaanbaatar.
BDRC collaborates with many partners in Asia who are right at the source of important collections of Buddhist literature. With support from our local partners and generous sponsors, BDRC is able to digitize those collections and make them freely available in our online archive.
BDRC, with the generous support of the Khyentse Foundation, has been working with the Fragile Palm Leaves Foundation since 2016 to preserve their massive collection of palm leaf Buddhist manuscripts.
Your generosity during BDRC's end-of-year appeal raised well over $15,000 to help support the ongoing development of our new online education platform—which has just launched its first courses! Thank you for helping make this possible!
BDRC has been diligently seeking new collections of important Buddhist texts for preservation and archiving. The results of this work are coming to fruition as BDRC launches a new digitization initiative: the Nepalese Buddhist Sanskrit Manuscript Scanning Initiative.
After 17 years at the Buddhist Digital Resource Center, BDRC's Executive Director Jeff Wallman is stepping down. It is our priority to find the best individual to lead BDRC and the qualities and qualifications we seek in our next Executive Director are described in the announcement below.
BDRC has recently opened a new office in Munich, Germany, which will serve as the central hub for all of BDRC's European activities and operations.
The Fragile Palm Leaves collection includes over one hundred Kammavācā manuscripts, dating from the later 18th century through the early 20th century.
It may be a new year but it's not too late to reflect on what happened in 2017. The last 12 months was a busy time for BDRC, and we reached a number of significant milestones.
BDRC was visited by Khenpo Sodargye, one of the most eminent contemporary Buddhist teachers.
In collaboration with Buddhist Research and Resources Center of Zhejiang University, BDRC is thrilled to announce two significant product offerings: the launch of BDRC's online library for users in China and the release of its free mobile app, "BDRC Lib."
We are pleased to announce the addition of two new members to BDRC's Board of Directors: James Robson, of Harvard University, and D. Christian Lammerts, of Rutgers University. The knowledge and expertise of these two new members will vitally benefit BDRC as we develop our programs in East Asia and Southeast Asia.
We are pleased to announce the expansion of our institutional mission to include the preservation of texts in languages beyond Tibetan, including Sanskrit, Pali and Chinese.
We were honored and pleased to host Venerable Khenchen Konchog Gyaltsen Rinpoche at TBRC this week.
David Weinberger's talk, "The Future of Digital Libraries," surrounded importance of digital libraries as spaces in which the identities and values of communities can be expressed through data.
Khenpo Karma Jamyang Gyaltsen visited TBRC on Friday afternoon, touring the TBRC office and joining us for lunch. Khenpo la took time to visit TBRC before giving a talk at Harvard University later in the afternoon; it was an honor for us to host him.
We are thrilled to announce that TBRC Board President Leonard W.J. van der Kuijp has been awarded a 2016 Guggenheim Fellowship for his outstanding scholarship and contributions to the field of Religious studies.
During his time in the United States, Kyabgön Phakchok Rinpoche visited TBRC, touring our Cambridge office and discussing TBRC's work and mission with staff amongst the manuscripts in our library.
Please join us in our end-of-year push to raise $18,651 for a much-needed scanning equipment for our Cambridge office and our fieldwork in India!
Using scans from the TBRC archive, a new project in Chengdu, China, the Ragya Grant Kanjur Republication Initiative (RGKRI), is printing 1,000 copies of the Ragya Kanjur and distributing them to monasteries across Tibetan cultural areas of China.
Beloved Buddhist monk, scientist, photographer, author, and humanitarian Matthieu Ricard made time on Friday to visit the TBRC office, sharing stories, memories, and tea with TBRC staff.
Her Eminence Mindrolling Jetsün Khandro Rinpoche visited TBRC last week, touring the Cambridge office and discussing TBRC's work with staff and TBRC Executive Director Jeff Wallman.
We are pleased to announce the arrival of the TBRC exhibition space on the Google Cultural Institute (GCI) platform, online and via mobile device. The TBRC partnership with GCI will allow people worldwide to intimately explore and interact with high-resolution images from select manuscripts in our digital archive.
In collaboration with monks from Ragya Monastery in eastern Tibet, TBRC has digitally preserved an extremely rare woodblock printing of the Tibetan Buddhist canon: the Ragya Kangyur.
On Thursday, March 26 2015, the Tibetan Buddhist Resource Center had the great honor of hosting His Holiness Gyalwang Karmapa in our office for lunch.
With the gracious support of The Library of Congress Asian Division Tibetan Collection in Washington D.C., and in cooperation with the University of Virginia (UVA), TBRC is making available for download a digital version of the Tibetan Kangyur from the Rockhill collection at the Library of Congress.
Our new campaign, Unlock the Backlog, gives friends of TBRC the opportunity to discover unseen texts, wear wisdom in the form of a beautiful treasure pendant, and donate directly to support the dissemination of little-seen manuscripts.
A delegation of researchers from SOAS, University of London, visited TBRC for two weeks this autumn to learn about the inner-workings of the TBRC's data management, search mechanism, and the new eText collection.
After working with Gene for many years, and since his death, continuing his vision, I am amazed at where are today.
Last week, the Wikipedia fundraising campaign inspired us to copy their year-end effort. And why not? TBRC has millions of pages of Tibetan texts that are readily available to individuals – TBRC is a huge public resource of Tibetan texts .
An article about Gene Smith's life story was published in a prestigious Chinese Magazine called "Xin Zhi" in November 2014.
Negation and Verb Stems Classification
With Dr. Nathan Hill, University of London, School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS)
It is with great sadness I announce that our beloved friend Peter Gruber (1929-2014) passed away on Saturday October 18, 2014. Peter passed away peacefully at his home with his beloved wife Patricia by his side.
Lama Migmar Tseten has kindly offered to share his personal recollections of Dezhung Rinpoche and Gene Smith. This is a unique opportunity to hear, in an informal setting, about two extraordinary people who established the vision that is TBRC.
Leveraging Computerized Tools for Navigating an Uncharted Tibetan Buddhist Philosophical Corpus
Demo and discussion with Dorji Wangchuk & Orna Almogi
The following are entry points into the Tibetan eText Repository.
Browse eTexts /
Global Search eTexts /
Advanced Search eTexts /
Intra-Work search
Work that led up to the recent release of the Lineage records in the TBRC Library goes back ten years. This project to record Lineages from Tibetan gsan yig literature started with work that was done by Ralf and Jowita Kramer within a project originally devised by Jan-Ulrich Sobisch.
As part of our ongoing work in the Research Department, we are building a database of Lineage records in the TBRC Library.
We are systematically researching and tracking tulku lines (skye brgyud) to build successive multi-generational networks of incarnation relations amongst Person records in the TBRC Library.
I am over thrilled to announce a historic partnership between Tibetan Buddhist Resource Center and Harvard University. The Harvard Library and Harvard Digital Repository Services will support the long-term preservation of our entire digital collection. Please see the article in Harvard Magazine.
TBRC has just released on its online library, enhancements for Tibetan language searching.
We are pleased to announce the first in a series of phonetic name imports into the TBRC Library. This first import is of over 1700 new phonetic Tulku Titles, corresponding to Person records.
Though the oral precepts of the Nyingma were introduced from the time of the imperial period, it was not until Minling Terchen Rigzin Gyurme Dorje (1646-1714) and his younger brother Minling Lochen Dharmashri (1654-1718) wrote a series of commentaries on these teachings that the kama (bka' ma) or collection of oral transmissions were created.
We're happy to share this interview by Marco Werman, host of PRI's The World.
Here, he talks with New York Times reporter Andrew Jacobs about TBRC's founder Gene Smith.
If you are a major donor seeking to understand the incredibly rich opportunities that we have and the extraordinary impact potential of our organization – please read and reflect upon this quote of Jeff Wallman, TBRC's Executive Director, to the magazine "Buddhadharma: The Practitioners Quarterly" about the bright outlook of TBRC's future on Harvard Square in Cambridge.
We are thrilled to post this article about TBRC and Tibetan text-preservation in China, which ran in the New York Times on February 15, 2014.
A terrific conversation covering all things TBRC – from great insights about Gene Smith, to how the TBRC Library is essential today.
Read about a major milestone in technological innovation of the Tibetan language as the open source software suite LibreOffice's latest update supports an important feature of Tibetan: very long paragraphs.
BDRC is proud to announce an exciting project that will contribute a powerful new app and millions of pages of primary materials to Tibetan Studies. This cutting-edge, cross-platform desktop tool for optical character recognition (OCR) of Tibetan scripts will 'unlock' the writing embedded in scans of manuscripts.
Do you wonder about the sources of the texts BDRC digitizes and puts online? Although we seek out undocumented texts ourselves, we also aim to amplify manuscripts that local partners have recovered, edited, and published. Here are two inspiring examples of community preservation work that was crucial to the revitalized religious traditions in Tibet.
BDRC is well known for digitization work with libraries and local partners, but did you know that our method of digital preservation involves much more than scanning? We also work alongside librarians to make improvements to library management and lending systems.
The BDRC archive has doubled the number of contemporary women writers and figures represented; an important step towards equality and full representation of Tibetan women in the global knowledge commons.
BDRC is pleased to announce three valuable additions to the archive which will be of enormous interest to students of Tibetan and Buddhist Studies. These have been generously provided by Jonathan Silk, Professor of Buddhist Studies at Leiden University, with an introduction to each. They constitute a very unique "behind the scenes" point of view on the world of 19th and early 20th c. Buddhist Studies, and the incredible work of scholars at the time.
BDRC recently published online the Matho Fragments, an extremely rare collection of ancient manuscripts—these are in fact the oldest manuscripts ever discovered in Ladakh. The Matho fragments were interred in a stupa dating from the 12th century.
BDRC recently published online the Matho Fragments, an extremely rare collection of ancient manuscripts—these are in fact the oldest manuscripts ever discovered in Ladakh. The Matho fragments are Tibetan Buddhist manuscripts and fragments that had been interred in a set of stupas, religious earthen reliquaries, including the "King's stupa," dating from the 12th century.
In addition to the skillful means of writing and translating, Tulku Thondup Rinpoche also sustained the scriptural Dharma in these dark times through his long term support for BDRC. Rinpoche was a founding board member–he joined in 1999 at the inception of the organization–and helped guide the organization as a director for nearly 20 years.
We honor our founder Gene Smith and we strive to uphold his vision. The Buddhist Digital Resource Center preserves Buddhist literature for the world.
The Buddhist Digital Resource Center is delighted to present our newly released BDRC Mobile App. The app allows users to view and search the entire BDRC library on their mobile phone, giving you access to 28 million pages of Buddhist literature via the slim iPhone or Android in your hands. The Newly Released App is available from both the Apple Store and Google Play.
The Aming Tu Prize recognizes our archival platform, the Buddhist Digital Archives (BUDA), for both its practical benefits to researchers and its technological breakthroughs.
One of the most interesting genres of Tibetan Buddhist literature is the lamyig text, the travel guide, or more appropriately the pilgrimage guide (a subset of lamyig, called the neyig). These travel and pilgrimage guides are not only the most accessible and useful of texts to a wide variety of readers, but they contain history, geography, biography, philosophy, religion, art and anthropology, and more.
Much like Gene Smith, Jann preferred to work on the ground, preserving the texts and making direct contributions to the field of Buddhism that will be felt for generations.
We are happy to announce the creation of an exciting new tool to crop and process manuscript images using AI, which up until now has been a laborious and manual process. Called the Segment and Crop Anything Model (SCAM), we have made the tool freely available to the public.
Given a large collection of 1.4 million scanned images of 5,000 text volumes and a catalog of 84,000 text titles, how can AI help us map the titles to their corresponding images? This article is an account of a successful project that used AI with humans in the loop to map these titles to their corresponding images by detecting library stamps on scanned images. We lay out our methodology and the various technical and non-technical challenges that arose in the process.
Through a recent interview with Geshe Monlam, of the amazing Grand Monlam Tibetan Dictionary, we learned that the man behind this terrific work is a modern day Renaissance man. Read on.
Our Executive Director Dr. Jann Ronis gave a book talk at the U.S. Library of Congress on Friday, March 31st. Dr. Ronis presented the Gene Smith photography book "Digital Dharma: Recovering Wisdom," and spoke about Gene Smith and his organization's Buddhist digital preservation as well as innovations and technologies for Buddhist digital humanities for the future.
The greatest Tibetan dictionary, the Monlam Grand Tibetan Dictionary, is now available on BUDA where it can be used to look up the meaning of every word in our vast e-text archive.
We are delighted to announce that BDRC Senior Librarian Kelsang Lhamo has published "The White Lotus Biography of Jamyang Gene Smith," her long-awaited Tibetan language biography of our founder Gene Smith.
སྤྱིར་བོད་ཀྱི་ས་མིང་ལ་རིགས་མང་ཞིང་རྒྱ་ཆེ་ལ་ཞིབ་འཇུག་བྱེད་པར་ཡང་མ་མཐར་ས་ཁམས་རིག་པ་དང་། ལོ་རྒྱུས་རིག་པ། སྐད་བརྡ་རིག་པ་སོགས་ཆེད་ལས་སྣ་ཚོགས་ཀྱི་རྣམ་བཤད་བྱེད་ཕྱོགས་ཕུན་སུམ་ཚོགས་པ་ཞིག་ཡོད་པ་གོར་མ་ཆགས་མོད།
Dafna Yachin is the indomitable director of Digital Dharma, the documentary, and now co-author of Digital Dharma: Recovering Wisdom, the companion photo book. Her deep friendship with our founder Gene Smith (1936-2010), who became her mentor, is what drove the first project.
On Tuesday, Jan 17th, BDRC launched our first-ever public event series with a book talk by Charles Manson about Buddhist master Karma Pakshi, advisor to the Mongol Khans and the founder of the Karmapa lineage.
The Dakinis' Great Dharma Treasury, or མཁའ་འགྲོའི་ཆོས་མཛོད་ཆེན་མོ། as this small library of 53 volumes of texts by and about Tibetan women is known, showcases the overlooked brilliance of Buddhist female masters from Tibet through the centuries.
On Tuesday, November 1, friends and supporters of the Buddhist Digital Resource Center gathered together in New York City to celebrate the publication of a beautiful photography book, on Gene Smith, called Digital Dharma: Recovering Wisdom.
This rare manuscript copy of Bod Khepa's Collected Works showcases the kind of work that BDRC does, seeking and making available these rare collections from masters whose works would be lost or inaccessible otherwise.
BDRC is proud to announce a new collaboration on a scholarly project: The Authors and Translators Identification Initiative. The goal of ATII is the creation of an open source collaborative database of authors, translators and other figures involved in the creation of Indic Buddhist texts and Buddhist canons – including particularly the Tibetan and Chinese ones.
The Buddhist Digital Resource Center is at the 16th Seminar of the International Association for Tibetan Studies—the IATS conference currently underway at Charles University in Prague in the Czech Republic! The majority of the text-based papers presented at the conference were enabled by BDRC's archive.
Mingyur Rinpoche spent two hours with BDRC staff, board members and friends discussing BDRC's essential work and the importance of textual preservation for the living Buddhist lineages.
We made a major new addition to BDRC's geo-data for Buddhist sites in the Inner Asian world, thanks to generous data sharing by the "Documentation of Mongolian Monasteries" project and Dr. Isabelle Charleux. Over time these new sites will become even more dynamic as we begin to link them with texts written or printed at these sites.
At the Library of Congress, she gave life to the Tibetan Collection, shaping and defining it into one of the most valuable collections at the Library. Because of her, what began as unidentified texts collecting dust deep in storage is now a treasure that draws researchers from all over the world.
As part of the University of Vienna-Tibetan Manuscripts Project and the Resources for Kanjur and Tanjur Studies project, Helmut Tauscher, Bruno Lainé and Markus Viehbeck have documented, and made accessible, valuable manuscripts from the western and southern Himalayas, including rare editions of the Kangyur and Tengyur.
BDRC is pleased to announce that we have successfully added Tibetan Collation Rules to the CLDR. This step will bring Tibetan closer to being fully supported on websites and smartphones, and will improve the digital experience of Tibetans worldwide. This effort is part of BDRC's practice of contributing back to the Buddhist communities in Asia who produced the precious texts we bring online. This post will also dive into the historical origins of the rules we have implemented.
On February 1, 2022, our old library website at tbrc.org will go offline and our new library website at the Buddhist Digital Archives will become the sole gateway into our extensive digital archive. BUDA, the result of years of effort and innovation, unifies the diverse array of Buddhist texts in our library on a single platform.
Dr. Petra Kieffer-Pülz is a scholar of Pali literature who has been studying a monastic boundary dispute in Sri Lanka for the past five years. Monastic boundaries, called sīmā, are crucial because a proper sīmā is absolutely necessary for ordaining new monks. The sīmā is, therefore, one of the preconditions for the continued existence of the sangha.
Our library platform, the Buddhist Digital Archives, is a vast ocean of Dharma texts. Please enjoy browsing a selection of our collections on BUDA. These collections are groups of texts that are part of the same preservation project, the same library, or come from a single BDRC institutional partner.
The Buddhist Digital Resource Center was rece...
One of our priorities in developing BUDA was to create a great reading room experience for our users, many of whom are practitioners, researchers and translators who spend a great deal of time poring over these Buddhist materials.
The site was down. That's how Chris Tomlinson first became connected with Gene Smith and the Tibetan Buddhist Resource Center in 2000. She would spend the next two decades as a key technologist for BDRC, helping share the Dharma globally and transforming the way people access Buddhist literature.
Our new website includes improvements to both the user interface and the architecture of the data. In this post we will introduce one of the changes to our data architecture and how this change will affect your searches.
Long-time friends of BDRC will know of Peter Gruber: founder of the Gruber Foundation Science Prizes, friend of Gene Smith, and a major benefactor of Buddhism in America who played an important role in bringing Buddhist teachings to the West.
While we have partnerships around the world, today we want to highlight and celebrate our partnerships with major institutions in India, which is in many ways the birthplace of TBRC/BDRC. Recently we have released online hundreds of volumes of significant works provided to BDRC by our long-time partners.
Search is how most of our users interact with our library and database. As fast and intuitive as the search on BUDA is, we continue to refine and improve it in order to offer our users the most seamless search experience. So we are happy to share the news that BUDA's search has been updated with three useful new features, developed based on feedback from our users.
A major update to BDRC's search engine was released in 2014 and today we are releasing a second major improvement to the search engine.
BDRC's Executive Director Dr. Jann Ronis and technical lead Élie Roux present an online demo of our new website and library platform, the Buddhist Digital Archives (BUDA), providing tips and tricks for the new user.
For close to 25 years now, a leading resource in Tibetan Studies has been Dan Martin's Tibetan Histories: A Bibliography of Tibetan-Language Historical Works, Serindia Publications (London 1997). BDRC is proud to be able to now make this resource available for download.
Even as BDRC builds on Gene's legacy and expands its holdings from Tibetan into Sanskrit, Nepalese, Chinese, Khmer, Pali and Burmese, the heart of our ever-expanding library remains our Tibetan texts.
Tibetan texts can be tricky to work with. Publication information is often missing or unstandardized, with some works lacking titles entirely while others have author information buried in the colophon. That's why BDRC has expert librarians with the specialized knowledge needed to catalog these challenging works.
With generous support from Khyentse Foundation, the Buddhist Digital Resource Center invites applications for a fellowship in Southeast Asian manuscripts, to begin 1 January 2021.
During 20 years of seeking out and preserving Buddhist texts, BDRC has found some remarkable collections. The monastic library of Vatt Phum Thmei in Cambodia is one such collection. The roughly 2,500 bundles of palm-leaf manuscripts are a treasure trove of thousands of years of Cambodian cultural knowledge.
With libraries and archives closed around the world, the value of BDRC's online platform has gained new significance as the most comprehensive collection of Buddhist writings in classical Asian languages.
BDRC is pleased to announce the Fragile Palm Leaves Digitization Project. This vital project is made possible by the gracious funding support of the Khyentse Foundation.
Buddhist Digital Resource Center (BDRC) is pleased to announce the development of the Sanskrit and Chinese Buddhist Library Network.
Following Gene's founding vision, BDRC doesn't solely focus on the preservation of strictly religious texts, but rather seeks out texts that reflect the full richness of Buddhist culture— including, for example, Medical and Astrological works in the Tibetan language.
Today we're featuring new acquisitions of texts from the Kagyu School of Tibetan Buddhism. BDRC founder Gene Smith championed Kagyu literary heritage and had fruitful relations with many Kagyu lamas.
BDRC has an excellent collection of Nyingma texts as a result of its close connections with Nyingma lamas. For decades, BDRC's founder, Gene Smith, was both a student and friend of H.H. Dilgo Khyentse (1910-1991), who was the head of the Nyingma School of Tibetan Buddhism from 1987-1991.
With support from the BDRC community and our generous funding partners, BDRC has been expanding its collection of Tibetan texts through new digitization efforts in Tibet and Mongolia, as well as through our long-term operations in India
Join the BDRC team and help us preserve and share Buddhist literary heritage!
We're seeking three technology and design experts—a UI developer, a UX expert, and a graphic designer—to help us finish our next-generation archival platform, the Buddhist Universal Digital Archive (BUDA).
The Buddhist Digital Resource Center's Board of Directors has selected Jann Ronis to lead BDRC as its new Executive Director.
With support from Khyentse Foundation, the Asian Classics Input Project and the Buddhist Digital Resource Center have partnered to digitize, catalog, and make accessible all Tibetan manuscripts and xylographs held at the National Library of Mongolia in Ulaanbaatar.
BDRC collaborates with many partners in Asia who are right at the source of important collections of Buddhist literature. With support from our local partners and generous sponsors, BDRC is able to digitize those collections and make them freely available in our online archive.
BDRC, with the generous support of the Khyentse Foundation, has been working with the Fragile Palm Leaves Foundation since 2016 to preserve their massive collection of palm leaf Buddhist manuscripts.
Your generosity during BDRC's end-of-year appeal raised well over $15,000 to help support the ongoing development of our new online education platform—which has just launched its first courses! Thank you for helping make this possible!
BDRC has been diligently seeking new collections of important Buddhist texts for preservation and archiving. The results of this work are coming to fruition as BDRC launches a new digitization initiative: the Nepalese Buddhist Sanskrit Manuscript Scanning Initiative.
After 17 years at the Buddhist Digital Resource Center, BDRC's Executive Director Jeff Wallman is stepping down. It is our priority to find the best individual to lead BDRC and the qualities and qualifications we seek in our next Executive Director are described in the announcement below.
BDRC has recently opened a new office in Munich, Germany, which will serve as the central hub for all of BDRC's European activities and operations.
The Fragile Palm Leaves collection includes over one hundred Kammavācā manuscripts, dating from the later 18th century through the early 20th century.
It may be a new year but it's not too late to reflect on what happened in 2017. The last 12 months was a busy time for BDRC, and we reached a number of significant milestones.
BDRC was visited by Khenpo Sodargye, one of the most eminent contemporary Buddhist teachers.
In collaboration with Buddhist Research and Resources Center of Zhejiang University, BDRC is thrilled to announce two significant product offerings: the launch of BDRC's online library for users in China and the release of its free mobile app, "BDRC Lib."
We are pleased to announce the addition of two new members to BDRC's Board of Directors: James Robson, of Harvard University, and D. Christian Lammerts, of Rutgers University. The knowledge and expertise of these two new members will vitally benefit BDRC as we develop our programs in East Asia and Southeast Asia.
We are pleased to announce the expansion of our institutional mission to include the preservation of texts in languages beyond Tibetan, including Sanskrit, Pali and Chinese.
We were honored and pleased to host Venerable Khenchen Konchog Gyaltsen Rinpoche at TBRC this week.
David Weinberger's talk, "The Future of Digital Libraries," surrounded importance of digital libraries as spaces in which the identities and values of communities can be expressed through data.
Khenpo Karma Jamyang Gyaltsen visited TBRC on Friday afternoon, touring the TBRC office and joining us for lunch. Khenpo la took time to visit TBRC before giving a talk at Harvard University later in the afternoon; it was an honor for us to host him.
We are thrilled to announce that TBRC Board President Leonard W.J. van der Kuijp has been awarded a 2016 Guggenheim Fellowship for his outstanding scholarship and contributions to the field of Religious studies.
During his time in the United States, Kyabgön Phakchok Rinpoche visited TBRC, touring our Cambridge office and discussing TBRC's work and mission with staff amongst the manuscripts in our library.
Please join us in our end-of-year push to raise $18,651 for a much-needed scanning equipment for our Cambridge office and our fieldwork in India!
Using scans from the TBRC archive, a new project in Chengdu, China, the Ragya Grant Kanjur Republication Initiative (RGKRI), is printing 1,000 copies of the Ragya Kanjur and distributing them to monasteries across Tibetan cultural areas of China.
Beloved Buddhist monk, scientist, photographer, author, and humanitarian Matthieu Ricard made time on Friday to visit the TBRC office, sharing stories, memories, and tea with TBRC staff.
Her Eminence Mindrolling Jetsün Khandro Rinpoche visited TBRC last week, touring the Cambridge office and discussing TBRC's work with staff and TBRC Executive Director Jeff Wallman.
We are pleased to announce the arrival of the TBRC exhibition space on the Google Cultural Institute (GCI) platform, online and via mobile device. The TBRC partnership with GCI will allow people worldwide to intimately explore and interact with high-resolution images from select manuscripts in our digital archive.
In collaboration with monks from Ragya Monastery in eastern Tibet, TBRC has digitally preserved an extremely rare woodblock printing of the Tibetan Buddhist canon: the Ragya Kangyur.
On Thursday, March 26 2015, the Tibetan Buddhist Resource Center had the great honor of hosting His Holiness Gyalwang Karmapa in our office for lunch.
With the gracious support of The Library of Congress Asian Division Tibetan Collection in Washington D.C., and in cooperation with the University of Virginia (UVA), TBRC is making available for download a digital version of the Tibetan Kangyur from the Rockhill collection at the Library of Congress.
Our new campaign, Unlock the Backlog, gives friends of TBRC the opportunity to discover unseen texts, wear wisdom in the form of a beautiful treasure pendant, and donate directly to support the dissemination of little-seen manuscripts.
A delegation of researchers from SOAS, University of London, visited TBRC for two weeks this autumn to learn about the inner-workings of the TBRC's data management, search mechanism, and the new eText collection.
After working with Gene for many years, and since his death, continuing his vision, I am amazed at where are today.
Last week, the Wikipedia fundraising campaign inspired us to copy their year-end effort. And why not? TBRC has millions of pages of Tibetan texts that are readily available to individuals – TBRC is a huge public resource of Tibetan texts .
An article about Gene Smith's life story was published in a prestigious Chinese Magazine called "Xin Zhi" in November 2014.
Negation and Verb Stems Classification
With Dr. Nathan Hill, University of London, School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS)
It is with great sadness I announce that our beloved friend Peter Gruber (1929-2014) passed away on Saturday October 18, 2014. Peter passed away peacefully at his home with his beloved wife Patricia by his side.
Lama Migmar Tseten has kindly offered to share his personal recollections of Dezhung Rinpoche and Gene Smith. This is a unique opportunity to hear, in an informal setting, about two extraordinary people who established the vision that is TBRC.
Leveraging Computerized Tools for Navigating an Uncharted Tibetan Buddhist Philosophical Corpus
Demo and discussion with Dorji Wangchuk & Orna Almogi
The following are entry points into the Tibetan eText Repository.
Browse eTexts /
Global Search eTexts /
Advanced Search eTexts /
Intra-Work search
Work that led up to the recent release of the Lineage records in the TBRC Library goes back ten years. This project to record Lineages from Tibetan gsan yig literature started with work that was done by Ralf and Jowita Kramer within a project originally devised by Jan-Ulrich Sobisch.
As part of our ongoing work in the Research Department, we are building a database of Lineage records in the TBRC Library.
We are systematically researching and tracking tulku lines (skye brgyud) to build successive multi-generational networks of incarnation relations amongst Person records in the TBRC Library.
I am over thrilled to announce a historic partnership between Tibetan Buddhist Resource Center and Harvard University. The Harvard Library and Harvard Digital Repository Services will support the long-term preservation of our entire digital collection. Please see the article in Harvard Magazine.
TBRC has just released on its online library, enhancements for Tibetan language searching.
We are pleased to announce the first in a series of phonetic name imports into the TBRC Library. This first import is of over 1700 new phonetic Tulku Titles, corresponding to Person records.
Though the oral precepts of the Nyingma were introduced from the time of the imperial period, it was not until Minling Terchen Rigzin Gyurme Dorje (1646-1714) and his younger brother Minling Lochen Dharmashri (1654-1718) wrote a series of commentaries on these teachings that the kama (bka' ma) or collection of oral transmissions were created.
We're happy to share this interview by Marco Werman, host of PRI's The World.
Here, he talks with New York Times reporter Andrew Jacobs about TBRC's founder Gene Smith.
If you are a major donor seeking to understand the incredibly rich opportunities that we have and the extraordinary impact potential of our organization – please read and reflect upon this quote of Jeff Wallman, TBRC's Executive Director, to the magazine "Buddhadharma: The Practitioners Quarterly" about the bright outlook of TBRC's future on Harvard Square in Cambridge.
We are thrilled to post this article about TBRC and Tibetan text-preservation in China, which ran in the New York Times on February 15, 2014.
A terrific conversation covering all things TBRC – from great insights about Gene Smith, to how the TBRC Library is essential today.
Read about a major milestone in technological innovation of the Tibetan language as the open source software suite LibreOffice's latest update supports an important feature of Tibetan: very long paragraphs.
BDRC is proud to announce an exciting project that will contribute a powerful new app and millions of pages of primary materials to Tibetan Studies. This cutting-edge, cross-platform desktop tool for optical character recognition (OCR) of Tibetan scripts will 'unlock' the writing embedded in scans of manuscripts.
Do you wonder about the sources of the texts BDRC digitizes and puts online? Although we seek out undocumented texts ourselves, we also aim to amplify manuscripts that local partners have recovered, edited, and published. Here are two inspiring examples of community preservation work that was crucial to the revitalized religious traditions in Tibet.
BDRC is well known for digitization work with libraries and local partners, but did you know that our method of digital preservation involves much more than scanning? We also work alongside librarians to make improvements to library management and lending systems.
The BDRC archive has doubled the number of contemporary women writers and figures represented; an important step towards equality and full representation of Tibetan women in the global knowledge commons.
BDRC is pleased to announce three valuable additions to the archive which will be of enormous interest to students of Tibetan and Buddhist Studies. These have been generously provided by Jonathan Silk, Professor of Buddhist Studies at Leiden University, with an introduction to each. They constitute a very unique "behind the scenes" point of view on the world of 19th and early 20th c. Buddhist Studies, and the incredible work of scholars at the time.
BDRC recently published online the Matho Fragments, an extremely rare collection of ancient manuscripts—these are in fact the oldest manuscripts ever discovered in Ladakh. The Matho fragments were interred in a stupa dating from the 12th century.
BDRC recently published online the Matho Fragments, an extremely rare collection of ancient manuscripts—these are in fact the oldest manuscripts ever discovered in Ladakh. The Matho fragments are Tibetan Buddhist manuscripts and fragments that had been interred in a set of stupas, religious earthen reliquaries, including the "King's stupa," dating from the 12th century.
In addition to the skillful means of writing and translating, Tulku Thondup Rinpoche also sustained the scriptural Dharma in these dark times through his long term support for BDRC. Rinpoche was a founding board member–he joined in 1999 at the inception of the organization–and helped guide the organization as a director for nearly 20 years.
We honor our founder Gene Smith and we strive to uphold his vision. The Buddhist Digital Resource Center preserves Buddhist literature for the world.
The Buddhist Digital Resource Center is delighted to present our newly released BDRC Mobile App. The app allows users to view and search the entire BDRC library on their mobile phone, giving you access to 28 million pages of Buddhist literature via the slim iPhone or Android in your hands. The Newly Released App is available from both the Apple Store and Google Play.
The Aming Tu Prize recognizes our archival platform, the Buddhist Digital Archives (BUDA), for both its practical benefits to researchers and its technological breakthroughs.
One of the most interesting genres of Tibetan Buddhist literature is the lamyig text, the travel guide, or more appropriately the pilgrimage guide (a subset of lamyig, called the neyig). These travel and pilgrimage guides are not only the most accessible and useful of texts to a wide variety of readers, but they contain history, geography, biography, philosophy, religion, art and anthropology, and more.
Much like Gene Smith, Jann preferred to work on the ground, preserving the texts and making direct contributions to the field of Buddhism that will be felt for generations.
We are happy to announce the creation of an exciting new tool to crop and process manuscript images using AI, which up until now has been a laborious and manual process. Called the Segment and Crop Anything Model (SCAM), we have made the tool freely available to the public.
Given a large collection of 1.4 million scanned images of 5,000 text volumes and a catalog of 84,000 text titles, how can AI help us map the titles to their corresponding images? This article is an account of a successful project that used AI with humans in the loop to map these titles to their corresponding images by detecting library stamps on scanned images. We lay out our methodology and the various technical and non-technical challenges that arose in the process.
Through a recent interview with Geshe Monlam, of the amazing Grand Monlam Tibetan Dictionary, we learned that the man behind this terrific work is a modern day Renaissance man. Read on.
Our Executive Director Dr. Jann Ronis gave a book talk at the U.S. Library of Congress on Friday, March 31st. Dr. Ronis presented the Gene Smith photography book "Digital Dharma: Recovering Wisdom," and spoke about Gene Smith and his organization's Buddhist digital preservation as well as innovations and technologies for Buddhist digital humanities for the future.
The greatest Tibetan dictionary, the Monlam Grand Tibetan Dictionary, is now available on BUDA where it can be used to look up the meaning of every word in our vast e-text archive.
We are delighted to announce that BDRC Senior Librarian Kelsang Lhamo has published "The White Lotus Biography of Jamyang Gene Smith," her long-awaited Tibetan language biography of our founder Gene Smith.
སྤྱིར་བོད་ཀྱི་ས་མིང་ལ་རིགས་མང་ཞིང་རྒྱ་ཆེ་ལ་ཞིབ་འཇུག་བྱེད་པར་ཡང་མ་མཐར་ས་ཁམས་རིག་པ་དང་། ལོ་རྒྱུས་རིག་པ། སྐད་བརྡ་རིག་པ་སོགས་ཆེད་ལས་སྣ་ཚོགས་ཀྱི་རྣམ་བཤད་བྱེད་ཕྱོགས་ཕུན་སུམ་ཚོགས་པ་ཞིག་ཡོད་པ་གོར་མ་ཆགས་མོད།
Dafna Yachin is the indomitable director of Digital Dharma, the documentary, and now co-author of Digital Dharma: Recovering Wisdom, the companion photo book. Her deep friendship with our founder Gene Smith (1936-2010), who became her mentor, is what drove the first project.
On Tuesday, Jan 17th, BDRC launched our first-ever public event series with a book talk by Charles Manson about Buddhist master Karma Pakshi, advisor to the Mongol Khans and the founder of the Karmapa lineage.
The Dakinis' Great Dharma Treasury, or མཁའ་འགྲོའི་ཆོས་མཛོད་ཆེན་མོ། as this small library of 53 volumes of texts by and about Tibetan women is known, showcases the overlooked brilliance of Buddhist female masters from Tibet through the centuries.
On Tuesday, November 1, friends and supporters of the Buddhist Digital Resource Center gathered together in New York City to celebrate the publication of a beautiful photography book, on Gene Smith, called Digital Dharma: Recovering Wisdom.
This rare manuscript copy of Bod Khepa's Collected Works showcases the kind of work that BDRC does, seeking and making available these rare collections from masters whose works would be lost or inaccessible otherwise.
BDRC is proud to announce a new collaboration on a scholarly project: The Authors and Translators Identification Initiative. The goal of ATII is the creation of an open source collaborative database of authors, translators and other figures involved in the creation of Indic Buddhist texts and Buddhist canons – including particularly the Tibetan and Chinese ones.
The Buddhist Digital Resource Center is at the 16th Seminar of the International Association for Tibetan Studies—the IATS conference currently underway at Charles University in Prague in the Czech Republic! The majority of the text-based papers presented at the conference were enabled by BDRC's archive.
Mingyur Rinpoche spent two hours with BDRC staff, board members and friends discussing BDRC's essential work and the importance of textual preservation for the living Buddhist lineages.
We made a major new addition to BDRC's geo-data for Buddhist sites in the Inner Asian world, thanks to generous data sharing by the "Documentation of Mongolian Monasteries" project and Dr. Isabelle Charleux. Over time these new sites will become even more dynamic as we begin to link them with texts written or printed at these sites.
At the Library of Congress, she gave life to the Tibetan Collection, shaping and defining it into one of the most valuable collections at the Library. Because of her, what began as unidentified texts collecting dust deep in storage is now a treasure that draws researchers from all over the world.
As part of the University of Vienna-Tibetan Manuscripts Project and the Resources for Kanjur and Tanjur Studies project, Helmut Tauscher, Bruno Lainé and Markus Viehbeck have documented, and made accessible, valuable manuscripts from the western and southern Himalayas, including rare editions of the Kangyur and Tengyur.
BDRC is pleased to announce that we have successfully added Tibetan Collation Rules to the CLDR. This step will bring Tibetan closer to being fully supported on websites and smartphones, and will improve the digital experience of Tibetans worldwide. This effort is part of BDRC's practice of contributing back to the Buddhist communities in Asia who produced the precious texts we bring online. This post will also dive into the historical origins of the rules we have implemented.
On February 1, 2022, our old library website at tbrc.org will go offline and our new library website at the Buddhist Digital Archives will become the sole gateway into our extensive digital archive. BUDA, the result of years of effort and innovation, unifies the diverse array of Buddhist texts in our library on a single platform.
Dr. Petra Kieffer-Pülz is a scholar of Pali literature who has been studying a monastic boundary dispute in Sri Lanka for the past five years. Monastic boundaries, called sīmā, are crucial because a proper sīmā is absolutely necessary for ordaining new monks. The sīmā is, therefore, one of the preconditions for the continued existence of the sangha.
Our library platform, the Buddhist Digital Archives, is a vast ocean of Dharma texts. Please enjoy browsing a selection of our collections on BUDA. These collections are groups of texts that are part of the same preservation project, the same library, or come from a single BDRC institutional partner.
The Buddhist Digital Resource Center was rece...
One of our priorities in developing BUDA was to create a great reading room experience for our users, many of whom are practitioners, researchers and translators who spend a great deal of time poring over these Buddhist materials.
The site was down. That's how Chris Tomlinson first became connected with Gene Smith and the Tibetan Buddhist Resource Center in 2000. She would spend the next two decades as a key technologist for BDRC, helping share the Dharma globally and transforming the way people access Buddhist literature.
Our new website includes improvements to both the user interface and the architecture of the data. In this post we will introduce one of the changes to our data architecture and how this change will affect your searches.
Long-time friends of BDRC will know of Peter Gruber: founder of the Gruber Foundation Science Prizes, friend of Gene Smith, and a major benefactor of Buddhism in America who played an important role in bringing Buddhist teachings to the West.
While we have partnerships around the world, today we want to highlight and celebrate our partnerships with major institutions in India, which is in many ways the birthplace of TBRC/BDRC. Recently we have released online hundreds of volumes of significant works provided to BDRC by our long-time partners.
Search is how most of our users interact with our library and database. As fast and intuitive as the search on BUDA is, we continue to refine and improve it in order to offer our users the most seamless search experience. So we are happy to share the news that BUDA's search has been updated with three useful new features, developed based on feedback from our users.
A major update to BDRC's search engine was released in 2014 and today we are releasing a second major improvement to the search engine.
BDRC's Executive Director Dr. Jann Ronis and technical lead Élie Roux present an online demo of our new website and library platform, the Buddhist Digital Archives (BUDA), providing tips and tricks for the new user.
For close to 25 years now, a leading resource in Tibetan Studies has been Dan Martin's Tibetan Histories: A Bibliography of Tibetan-Language Historical Works, Serindia Publications (London 1997). BDRC is proud to be able to now make this resource available for download.
Even as BDRC builds on Gene's legacy and expands its holdings from Tibetan into Sanskrit, Nepalese, Chinese, Khmer, Pali and Burmese, the heart of our ever-expanding library remains our Tibetan texts.
Tibetan texts can be tricky to work with. Publication information is often missing or unstandardized, with some works lacking titles entirely while others have author information buried in the colophon. That's why BDRC has expert librarians with the specialized knowledge needed to catalog these challenging works.
With generous support from Khyentse Foundation, the Buddhist Digital Resource Center invites applications for a fellowship in Southeast Asian manuscripts, to begin 1 January 2021.
During 20 years of seeking out and preserving Buddhist texts, BDRC has found some remarkable collections. The monastic library of Vatt Phum Thmei in Cambodia is one such collection. The roughly 2,500 bundles of palm-leaf manuscripts are a treasure trove of thousands of years of Cambodian cultural knowledge.
With libraries and archives closed around the world, the value of BDRC's online platform has gained new significance as the most comprehensive collection of Buddhist writings in classical Asian languages.
BDRC is pleased to announce the Fragile Palm Leaves Digitization Project. This vital project is made possible by the gracious funding support of the Khyentse Foundation.
Buddhist Digital Resource Center (BDRC) is pleased to announce the development of the Sanskrit and Chinese Buddhist Library Network.
Following Gene's founding vision, BDRC doesn't solely focus on the preservation of strictly religious texts, but rather seeks out texts that reflect the full richness of Buddhist culture— including, for example, Medical and Astrological works in the Tibetan language.
Today we're featuring new acquisitions of texts from the Kagyu School of Tibetan Buddhism. BDRC founder Gene Smith championed Kagyu literary heritage and had fruitful relations with many Kagyu lamas.
BDRC has an excellent collection of Nyingma texts as a result of its close connections with Nyingma lamas. For decades, BDRC's founder, Gene Smith, was both a student and friend of H.H. Dilgo Khyentse (1910-1991), who was the head of the Nyingma School of Tibetan Buddhism from 1987-1991.
With support from the BDRC community and our generous funding partners, BDRC has been expanding its collection of Tibetan texts through new digitization efforts in Tibet and Mongolia, as well as through our long-term operations in India
Join the BDRC team and help us preserve and share Buddhist literary heritage!
We're seeking three technology and design experts—a UI developer, a UX expert, and a graphic designer—to help us finish our next-generation archival platform, the Buddhist Universal Digital Archive (BUDA).
The Buddhist Digital Resource Center's Board of Directors has selected Jann Ronis to lead BDRC as its new Executive Director.
With support from Khyentse Foundation, the Asian Classics Input Project and the Buddhist Digital Resource Center have partnered to digitize, catalog, and make accessible all Tibetan manuscripts and xylographs held at the National Library of Mongolia in Ulaanbaatar.
BDRC collaborates with many partners in Asia who are right at the source of important collections of Buddhist literature. With support from our local partners and generous sponsors, BDRC is able to digitize those collections and make them freely available in our online archive.
BDRC, with the generous support of the Khyentse Foundation, has been working with the Fragile Palm Leaves Foundation since 2016 to preserve their massive collection of palm leaf Buddhist manuscripts.
Your generosity during BDRC's end-of-year appeal raised well over $15,000 to help support the ongoing development of our new online education platform—which has just launched its first courses! Thank you for helping make this possible!
BDRC has been diligently seeking new collections of important Buddhist texts for preservation and archiving. The results of this work are coming to fruition as BDRC launches a new digitization initiative: the Nepalese Buddhist Sanskrit Manuscript Scanning Initiative.
After 17 years at the Buddhist Digital Resource Center, BDRC's Executive Director Jeff Wallman is stepping down. It is our priority to find the best individual to lead BDRC and the qualities and qualifications we seek in our next Executive Director are described in the announcement below.
BDRC has recently opened a new office in Munich, Germany, which will serve as the central hub for all of BDRC's European activities and operations.
The Fragile Palm Leaves collection includes over one hundred Kammavācā manuscripts, dating from the later 18th century through the early 20th century.
It may be a new year but it's not too late to reflect on what happened in 2017. The last 12 months was a busy time for BDRC, and we reached a number of significant milestones.
BDRC was visited by Khenpo Sodargye, one of the most eminent contemporary Buddhist teachers.
In collaboration with Buddhist Research and Resources Center of Zhejiang University, BDRC is thrilled to announce two significant product offerings: the launch of BDRC's online library for users in China and the release of its free mobile app, "BDRC Lib."
We are pleased to announce the addition of two new members to BDRC's Board of Directors: James Robson, of Harvard University, and D. Christian Lammerts, of Rutgers University. The knowledge and expertise of these two new members will vitally benefit BDRC as we develop our programs in East Asia and Southeast Asia.
We are pleased to announce the expansion of our institutional mission to include the preservation of texts in languages beyond Tibetan, including Sanskrit, Pali and Chinese.
We were honored and pleased to host Venerable Khenchen Konchog Gyaltsen Rinpoche at TBRC this week.
David Weinberger's talk, "The Future of Digital Libraries," surrounded importance of digital libraries as spaces in which the identities and values of communities can be expressed through data.
Khenpo Karma Jamyang Gyaltsen visited TBRC on Friday afternoon, touring the TBRC office and joining us for lunch. Khenpo la took time to visit TBRC before giving a talk at Harvard University later in the afternoon; it was an honor for us to host him.
We are thrilled to announce that TBRC Board President Leonard W.J. van der Kuijp has been awarded a 2016 Guggenheim Fellowship for his outstanding scholarship and contributions to the field of Religious studies.
During his time in the United States, Kyabgön Phakchok Rinpoche visited TBRC, touring our Cambridge office and discussing TBRC's work and mission with staff amongst the manuscripts in our library.
Please join us in our end-of-year push to raise $18,651 for a much-needed scanning equipment for our Cambridge office and our fieldwork in India!
Using scans from the TBRC archive, a new project in Chengdu, China, the Ragya Grant Kanjur Republication Initiative (RGKRI), is printing 1,000 copies of the Ragya Kanjur and distributing them to monasteries across Tibetan cultural areas of China.
Beloved Buddhist monk, scientist, photographer, author, and humanitarian Matthieu Ricard made time on Friday to visit the TBRC office, sharing stories, memories, and tea with TBRC staff.
Her Eminence Mindrolling Jetsün Khandro Rinpoche visited TBRC last week, touring the Cambridge office and discussing TBRC's work with staff and TBRC Executive Director Jeff Wallman.
We are pleased to announce the arrival of the TBRC exhibition space on the Google Cultural Institute (GCI) platform, online and via mobile device. The TBRC partnership with GCI will allow people worldwide to intimately explore and interact with high-resolution images from select manuscripts in our digital archive.
In collaboration with monks from Ragya Monastery in eastern Tibet, TBRC has digitally preserved an extremely rare woodblock printing of the Tibetan Buddhist canon: the Ragya Kangyur.
On Thursday, March 26 2015, the Tibetan Buddhist Resource Center had the great honor of hosting His Holiness Gyalwang Karmapa in our office for lunch.
With the gracious support of The Library of Congress Asian Division Tibetan Collection in Washington D.C., and in cooperation with the University of Virginia (UVA), TBRC is making available for download a digital version of the Tibetan Kangyur from the Rockhill collection at the Library of Congress.
Our new campaign, Unlock the Backlog, gives friends of TBRC the opportunity to discover unseen texts, wear wisdom in the form of a beautiful treasure pendant, and donate directly to support the dissemination of little-seen manuscripts.
A delegation of researchers from SOAS, University of London, visited TBRC for two weeks this autumn to learn about the inner-workings of the TBRC's data management, search mechanism, and the new eText collection.
After working with Gene for many years, and since his death, continuing his vision, I am amazed at where are today.
Last week, the Wikipedia fundraising campaign inspired us to copy their year-end effort. And why not? TBRC has millions of pages of Tibetan texts that are readily available to individuals – TBRC is a huge public resource of Tibetan texts .
An article about Gene Smith's life story was published in a prestigious Chinese Magazine called "Xin Zhi" in November 2014.
Negation and Verb Stems Classification
With Dr. Nathan Hill, University of London, School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS)
It is with great sadness I announce that our beloved friend Peter Gruber (1929-2014) passed away on Saturday October 18, 2014. Peter passed away peacefully at his home with his beloved wife Patricia by his side.
Lama Migmar Tseten has kindly offered to share his personal recollections of Dezhung Rinpoche and Gene Smith. This is a unique opportunity to hear, in an informal setting, about two extraordinary people who established the vision that is TBRC.
Leveraging Computerized Tools for Navigating an Uncharted Tibetan Buddhist Philosophical Corpus
Demo and discussion with Dorji Wangchuk & Orna Almogi
The following are entry points into the Tibetan eText Repository.
Browse eTexts /
Global Search eTexts /
Advanced Search eTexts /
Intra-Work search
Work that led up to the recent release of the Lineage records in the TBRC Library goes back ten years. This project to record Lineages from Tibetan gsan yig literature started with work that was done by Ralf and Jowita Kramer within a project originally devised by Jan-Ulrich Sobisch.
As part of our ongoing work in the Research Department, we are building a database of Lineage records in the TBRC Library.
We are systematically researching and tracking tulku lines (skye brgyud) to build successive multi-generational networks of incarnation relations amongst Person records in the TBRC Library.
I am over thrilled to announce a historic partnership between Tibetan Buddhist Resource Center and Harvard University. The Harvard Library and Harvard Digital Repository Services will support the long-term preservation of our entire digital collection. Please see the article in Harvard Magazine.
TBRC has just released on its online library, enhancements for Tibetan language searching.
We are pleased to announce the first in a series of phonetic name imports into the TBRC Library. This first import is of over 1700 new phonetic Tulku Titles, corresponding to Person records.
Though the oral precepts of the Nyingma were introduced from the time of the imperial period, it was not until Minling Terchen Rigzin Gyurme Dorje (1646-1714) and his younger brother Minling Lochen Dharmashri (1654-1718) wrote a series of commentaries on these teachings that the kama (bka' ma) or collection of oral transmissions were created.
We're happy to share this interview by Marco Werman, host of PRI's The World.
Here, he talks with New York Times reporter Andrew Jacobs about TBRC's founder Gene Smith.
If you are a major donor seeking to understand the incredibly rich opportunities that we have and the extraordinary impact potential of our organization – please read and reflect upon this quote of Jeff Wallman, TBRC's Executive Director, to the magazine "Buddhadharma: The Practitioners Quarterly" about the bright outlook of TBRC's future on Harvard Square in Cambridge.
We are thrilled to post this article about TBRC and Tibetan text-preservation in China, which ran in the New York Times on February 15, 2014.
A terrific conversation covering all things TBRC – from great insights about Gene Smith, to how the TBRC Library is essential today.
