Buddhist Digital Resource Center

A provocative and timely lecture about the reasons "Why Translators in Training Should Avoid AI Tools." This will be of interest to many of BDRCs users.
Next Wednesday, 28 January at 5pm Nepal Time.
More info and Zoom link below⬇️

🪵 Resilience in Print: Rebuilding Tibetan Libraries Block by Block
This fall, we kicked off a major project: the publication of a large collection of texts from the personal library of the late scholar, Gene Smith. All winter long, we’ll be featuring individual works from this incredible collection that represent vital chapters in the survival of Tibetan Buddhism. 📚

Today, we're sharing a text that serves as a tangible artifact from a crucial—but now largely forgotten—chapter of the Tibetan diaspora: the revival of traditional woodblock printing in the 1970s and 80s. 🏔️

Beyond the Printing Houses of Tibet

When we think of woodblock prints (made from hand-carved woodblocks), we often think of the ancient printing houses inside Tibet, like Derge or Narthang. However, when the Tibetan community first arrived in India, they faced a desperate shortage of the books required for monastic training.

To provide students with the texts needed for Geshe and Khenpo degrees, several of the largest monasteries in India undertook massive efforts to carve thousands of new pages of woodblocks by hand.

Painstaking Detail: The Blocks and the Paper

The effort went far beyond just carving the wood. The monks sought to recreate the entire experience of a traditional Tibetan book. Notably, the paper used for this text closely resembles traditional Tibetan handmade paper. This detail reveals the extraordinary lengths the community went to—not only carving their own blocks from scratch but also sourcing or manufacturing paper that honored the tactile and spiritual quality of their traditional textual heritage.

The Story of Sera Jé

The text we are featuring today—Tsongkhapa’s Golden Garland of Eloquence ལེགས་བཤད་གསེར་ཕྲེང—is a direct product of this movement. In their history of Sera Monastery, scholars Jose Cabezon and Penpa Dorjee describe how this labor of love began:

“Geshé Ngawang Lekden... convinced the Jé College that rather than pursuing other printing options, it should carve traditional woodblocks for its textbooks. It was something of a godsend that a traditional block carver had managed to escape Tibet and was living in nearby Camp Four. The Jé College provided him with years of work... [M]onks were allowed to borrow the blocks and print their own texts, but the blocks started to get damaged, and starting in the late 1970s all the texts were printed by the library staff and sold to monks. What little profit was made was used to carve more blocks.”

Honoring History in a Digital Age

Today, modern technology—desktop publishing, ebooks, and scans—has largely left the physical labor of woodblock carving in South Asia in the dust. Yet, it is essential to honor this history.

These xylographic editions contain unique treasures that modern reprints often omit: specially-commissioned colophons and dedicatory verses from the most prominent lamas of that era. These compositions are unique historical records of faith and dedication that exist only within these hand-inked pages.

The woodblock from this bygone era are now housed in massive cabinets—a testament to the "skill in means" and unwavering faith of the first generation of exile lamas.

A sign on the cabinet lists the titles of the dozens of texts that were painstakingly carved to ensure the tradition would flourish in a new land.

BDRC is proud to digitize these specific editions, preserving not just the words of Tsongkhapa, but the extraordinary history of the people who recreated them by hand in exile. ✨

🔗 Access the Digital Library

The Golden Garland of Eloquence and other texts from the Gene Smith collection can be viewed for free on BDRC’s digital library, BUDA.

Photo credits: Geshe Tenzin Tsewang and Geshe Khedup of Sera Jé

Check the comments for the direct link to this text! 👇

☸️ A Drikung Treasure Preserved: Songs of Jikten Sumgön Now Available Online

During the same week that we shared our post featuring His Holiness the Drikung Kyabgön Chetsang Rinpoche, we also published online a small but precious booklet of Drikung texts from India. The Songs of Realization of Lord Kyobpa Jikten Sumgön (རྗེ་སྐྱོབ་པ་འཇིག་རྟེན་གསུམ་གྱི་མགོན་པོའི་མགུར།) was originally printed in 1979 by Phyang Gonpa in Ladakh—45+ years ago.

Though it contains just 10 pages with only two songs of realization, this booklet is truly a treasure. What makes it special is not just the songs themselves, but the rich narratives that accompany them. Each song is preceded by a story from the oral tradition describing the circumstances of its original performance by Jikten Sumgön (1143-1217), the founder of the Drikung Kagyu School. The booklet even includes photographs of the sacred locations where these events took place.

We don't know the full circumstances of this publication—the editor doesn't identify himself or explain whether it was made to accompany teachings or at the behest of a lama or donor. But because of its small print run so long ago, these precious stories might have been forgotten or become extremely rare. Thanks to BDRC's mission to digitally preserve classic and at-risk Buddhist texts (even humble booklets like this one), it is now freely available worldwide to all.

A Story from the Oral Tradition

Here is the opening narrative to one of the songs, "A Song of Recollection":

"In the early part of the thirteenth century, when Jikten Sumgön was residing at Drikung Thil, one day he led about thirty attendant disciples for an outing to a charnel ground called Tachak Gang (Horsewhip Range) located high up on the mountain behind Drikung Thil. They sat on a grassy slope near the charnel ground and Jikten Sumgön said to the students, "Today everyone gathered here must demonstrate some kind of sign of spiritual accomplishment."

The close disciples each demonstrated various kinds of accomplishments. A few students manifested vajras and bells in midair; some offered myrobalan seemingly brought fresh from India; and some manifested flames blazing from the upper parts of their bodies and water flowing from the lower parts. Even the tea server, Popo Tashi, performed a miracle—he hung his wooden ladle, metal ladle, and cane upon the sunbeams.

Only the attendant Rinchen Drak lacked the confidence to demonstrate his spiritual accomplishments, and he died of shame. His body was carried to the charnel ground and when the tokdens (accomplished yogis) began the dismemberment, the cutting tools would not pe*****te the co**se. When this situation was reported to Jikten Sumgön, he went to the charnel ground and stuck his staff into the heart of attendant Rinchen Drak's co**se and spoke the following song of recollection.

After the song was completed, the tokdens carried out the dismemberment. Relics, which are inner supports, poured forth from the co**se—like slicing open a mustard seed pod—and were swept up with brooms. From then on, the name Horsewhip Range (pronounced Tachak Gang) was changed and it became widely known as Relic Broom Range (pronounced Tenchak Gang)."

We're grateful to our friend Sonam Topgyal in Dharamsala, who digitized this booklet with care and dedication for BDRC.

Preserving and sharing treasures like this is at the heart of BDRC's mission, and it's only possible with the support of our community. As a nonprofit organization, we work every day to digitally preserve and make freely available Buddhist texts in Tibetan and other classical languages. If you'd like to support this work or learn more about what we do, we invite you to visit: https://www.bdrc.io/donation/

🔗 View and download the complete booklet for free: http://purl.bdrc.io/resource/MW3KG571

☸️Buddhist Tools Build Bridges🌉 How Open-Source Innovation Connects Our Community

At BDRC, we don't just preserve Buddhist texts—we create innovative software tools that assist us in sharing Buddhist literature with the world. We release these tools as open source, and to our delight, others in our community quite often discover them and use them to build something meaningful for themselves and the field. Today we want to share an uplifting story about exactly that, one that involves H.H. Drikung Kyabgon Chetsang Rinpoche, the head of the Drikung Kagyu lineage and a longtime friend of Gene Smith and BDRC.

Recently, His Holiness wanted to compile specialized glossaries of terms used in the great texts of his tradition. When His Holiness was visiting the Drikung community at Urban Dharma North Carolina, a member of that community Nathan Koerschner—a data engineer—volunteered to create a dictionary app for this purpose. As Nathan began building the app, he realized he needed to sort glossary entries in proper Tibetan alphabetical order and was surprised to discover that major word processors didn't have a way to do this. These widely-used tools didn't understand this fundamental aspect of the Tibetan language.

That's when Nathan found BDRC's open-source Tibetan alphabetical sorting algorithm, which was developed by our CTO Élie Roux and released in 2021.

Using the BDRC algorithm, Nathan and collaborator Julian Camacho built the custom iOS dictionary app according to His Holiness's specifications. Since then, His Holiness has consistently used the dictionary app to expand his collections of terms and phrases—a skillful way of using technology to keep alive the understanding of some of the most profound aspects of Drikung Buddhist writings.

Nathan and Julian have now released their dictionary app on the App Store, making it freely available for anyone to create and share their own Tibetan glossaries.

This is just one example of how BDRC's work extends far beyond our millions of scanned manuscript pages. By developing and freely sharing specialized tools and expertise, we're helping to build infrastructure that serves the entire Buddhist community, from the most eminent scholars to everyday practitioners.

The support of our community makes all of this possible. Thank you for helping us preserve, protect, and advance access to Buddhist knowledge for generations to come.

📱 Download the Tibetan Dictionary app: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/tibetan-dictionary/id6499481248

📖 Learn more about our Tibetan sorting algorithm: https://www.bdrc.io/blog/2022/03/30/sorting-out-tibetan-alphabetical-order/?lang=bo

💻For developers who would like to use the algorithm themselves: https://buda-base.github.io/blog/posts/tibetan-alphabetical-order/