Buddhist Digital Resource Center (BDRC) is pleased to announce the development of the Sanskrit and Chinese Buddhist Library Network. The Sanskrit and Chinese Buddhist Library Network is supported by a grant from The Robert H. N. Ho Family Foundation. 
This historic initiative will revolutionize modes of engagement with Sanskrit and Chinese Buddhist materials.

The Sanskrit and Chinese Buddhist Library Network is part 
of BDRC's long-term program to develop the Buddhist Universal Digital Archive (BUDA), a multi-language effort which will consist of three interconnected programs: preservation, access, and collaborative networking.

In the past century, the mainstream studies of European and American Buddhist scholars have tended to use Sanskrit and Tibetan literature as the basic material, and to emphasize on the comparative study of Indian Buddhism and Tibetan Buddhism. The studies based on Chinese Buddhist literatures have not received enough attention. This approach has certain historical and social reasons, but mainly because the international distribution channels of Chinese Buddhist literature are very narrow. For example, some commonly used words in the international academic context such as "Guanyin 观音", "Fa 法", and "Chan 禅" are generally written as "Avalokiteshvara", "Dharma" and 'Zen", the first two words are in Sanskrit and the last word is in Japanese. In recent years, although many scholars have advocated the use of Chinese phonetic alphabet to express such vocabulary, but it is only limited to the scope of some Chinese Buddhist studies, and is not generally accepted in the fields of Indian, Tibetan, Japanese Buddhist Studies.

The launch of the Sanskrit and Chinese Buddhist Library Network is the first to place Chinese Buddhist literature in the same position as Sanskrit. With an online interactive platform that is not only fully searchable, but also proactively providing the linkage and data analysis between the Chinese and Sanskrit literature, at the same time connecting the existing Tibetan literature, the Sanskrit and Chinese Buddhist Library Network will promote the awareness and research of international scholars on the Chinese literature and Chinese Buddhism, and also promote Chinese language as one of the commonly used languages in the field of international Buddhist studies, and to enhance domestic and international multilingual, cross-regional Buddhist research.

The Buddhist Digital Resource Center is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization dedicated to seeking out, preserving, organizing, and disseminating Buddhist literature. Joining digital technology with scholarship, BDRC ensures that the ancient wisdom and cultural treasures of the Buddhist literary tradition are not lost, but are made available for future generations.

BDRC was founded as Tibetan Buddhist Resource Center in 1999 by E. Gene Smith (1936-2010). For the past seventeen years, we have sought out, digitized, cataloged and archived nearly 12 million pages of culturally significant works in Tibetan, Sanskrit and Mongolian languages, while developing cutting-edge technology for their lasting preservation and far-reaching accessibility.

As the result of this effort, we have raised the Tibetan literary corpus, once critically endangered, to a high level of preservation.

All our text and metadata resources are stored in a long-term preservation program at Harvard University Digital Repository Service. Our library has become the premier library resource serving an international community of academic scholars, religious leaders, Tibetan scholars, as well as translators, publishers and the interested public. TBRC's impact on the field of Tibetan studies in the past seventeen years is significant.

Now, at the request of our Board, as well as our partners and collaborators in the Buddhist studies field, we have expanded our mission to include the preservation and dissemination of the many Buddhist literary traditions that, due to shifting social and environmental factors, remain in a precarious position. A broadened preservation mandate for the Buddhist Digital Resource Center (BDRC) was thus established in order to bring the expertise and resources of its seventeen year history to bear in this most pressing preservation task. As of July, 2016, the official name of TBRC has been changed to BDRC to reflect our expanded mission.