We continue to refine and improve our library website to allow you to browse, read, and study the vast storehouse of Dharma literature in our archives. We know that reading the Dharma in the original Tibetan or Sanskrit or Pali can be challenging, but there is no reason why searching for it can't be a breeze!

Among the key improvements is our new Citation Tool, which allows researchers to cite the sources in our library with one click.

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.

To that end, we created shortcuts that will improve the text-reading experience for all our users, and especially for readers of palm leaf and pecha style texts.

We urge you to open the scan of a text and test the following shortcuts:

N: next image
P: previous image
Page down: next image
Page up: previous image
Home: go back to the left of the image, not changing the vertical position
End: go to the right of the image, not changing the vertical position
+: zoom in
-: zoom out
Arrow (left, up, right, down): move within the page
Space: move right in horizontal images, move down in vertical images
Esc: close the viewer and bring the user back to BUDA
R: for reading view
V: for volume
Backspace: bring user back to reading view

For Mac users:
Home: Fn + left arrow
End: Fn + right arrow
Page up: Fn + up arrow
Page down: Fn + down arrow

English phonetics, drawn from the Treasury of Lives resource, have been added to a selection of person and place names in addition to our usual Tibetan and Wylie transliteration. In the future, we hope to have English phonetics for all of our Person and Place records.

For users who want more guidance over basic search, our BUDA user guide can be accessed here. Please enjoy searching the Buddhist Digital Archives.