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BUDA: BDRC's
Archival Platform
BDRC's Buddhist Digital Archives (BUDA) provides digital research tools and provides access to millions of pages of Buddhist texts contributed by BDRC and its many partners. Read the user guide here.
BUDA : BDRC's
Archival Platform
BDRC's Buddhist Digital Archives (BUDA) provides access to more than 17 million pages of Buddhist texts and offers digital tools to support research.
Programs
Our team of scholars, technologists, librarians, and project experts enact BDRC's mission with a passion for preserving and sharing Buddhist cultural heritage.
News
News
01 December 2022
Women's Works in the BDRC Archive
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.
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15 November 2022
New Photo Book Celebrates Gene Smith's Life and Legacy
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.
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30 August 2022
The Collected Works of Bod Khepa: The "Lost" Writings of One of Tibet's Greatest Scholars of Poetry and Medicine
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.
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09 July 2022
Tibetologists Gather in Prague from Around the World
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.
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23 June 2022
Meeting Mingyur Rinpoche
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.
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25 May 2022
Discovering Inner Asian Monasteries
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...
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15 April 2022
The Nation's Librarian of Tibetan Books: How Susan Meinheit's Career Took Her From Washington D.C. to Lhasa and Back Again
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.
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29 March 2022
What the Buddhist Digital Archives Offers Scholars: A Case Study in Pali Literature
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. Texts made available by BUDA allowed Dr. Kieffer-Pülz to study previously unsurfaced material that shed new light on this dispute.
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21 January 2022
The Authors and Translators Identification Initiative
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...
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14 January 2022
Innovation in 2022: BDRC Marks a Milestone With Its New Website
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...
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29 December 2021
HH Sakya Trizin Graces BDRC with a Visit
The Buddhist Digital Resource Center was recently honored, on November 30, with a personal visit from His Holiness the 42nd Sakya Trizin, Ratna Vajra Rinpoche, the head of the Sakya tradition of Tibetan Buddhism. Our Executive Director Jann Ronis and our expert librarians gave Sakya Trizin Rinpoche...
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23 December 2021
Dharma Jewels Online: The BDRC Collections
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.
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29 October 2021
Sorting Out Tibetan Alphabetical Order
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.
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07 October 2021
Tips & Tricks for Your BUDA Search
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.
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21 September 2021
Seeking Buddhist Manuscripts in the Himalayas: The Tibetan Manuscripts Project of Vienna
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.
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31 August 2021
Shining the Light of Dharma: How BDRC's Longest-Serving Techie Helped Bring Buddhist Texts Online
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.
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20 August 2021
Illuminating BUDA: How to Improve Your Searches
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.
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28 June 2021
Lotsawa: The Eyes of the World
For many, translations of Buddhist texts are their first or main way of studying the Dharma. Translators rely on BDRC, and many readers of Buddhist texts rely on translators.
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06 May 2021
The Dao of Peter
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.
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19 March 2021
Indian Partners and Their Collections
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.
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03 March 2021
Search Me!
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...
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26 January 2021
Tibetan Search Enhancements: Part 2
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.
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13 January 2021
BUDA Demo Now Online
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.
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17 December 2020
Tibetan Treasures from the National Library of Mongolia
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.
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02 November 2020
An Introduction to BDRC's Librarians
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.
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08 October 2020
Job Posting: BDRC Seeks Fellow in Southeast Asian Manuscripts
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.
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26 August 2020
The BUDA Network: Creating a Web of Buddhist Resources
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.
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25 May 2019
The Kagyu Tradition
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.
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17 May 2019
The Nyingma Tradition
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.
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10 May 2019
Rare Bön Texts From the BDRC Archive
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
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07 March 2019
We're Hiring!
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).
05 October 2018
BDRC Board Selects Jann Ronis as New Executive Director
The Buddhist Digital Resource Center's Board of Directors has selected Jann Ronis to lead BDRC as its new Executive Director.
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11 September 2018
Digitizing the National Library of Mongolia
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.
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13 August 2018
Dispatch From the Field: Nepal
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.
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28 June 2018
BDRC In Thailand
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.
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30 April 2018
Support BDRC's Spring Appeal
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!
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05 April 2018
The Nepalese Buddhist Sanskrit Manuscript Scanning Initiative
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.
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26 March 2018
Buddhist Digital Resource Center seeks Executive Director
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.
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19 March 2018
BDRC Opens Office in Europe
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.
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12 February 2018
The Gilt Manuscripts of the Fragile Palm Leaves Collection
The Fragile Palm Leaves collection includes over one hundred Kammavācā manuscripts, dating from the later 18th century through the early 20th century.
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08 January 2018
2017: Year in Review
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.
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27 November 2017
Khenpo Sodargye Visits BDRC
BDRC was visited by Khenpo Sodargye, one of the most eminent contemporary Buddhist teachers.
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17 November 2017
Meet BDRC's New Mobile App and Online Library for China
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."
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27 March 2017
Announcing the Fragile Palm Leaves Digitization Project
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.
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20 March 2017
Announcing Expanded BDRC Board of Directors
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.
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01 March 2017
Introducing Buddhist Digital Resource Center (BDRC)
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.
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20 May 2016
Venerable Khenchen Konchog Gyaltsen Rinpoche Visits TBRC
We were honored and pleased to host Venerable Khenchen Konchog Gyaltsen Rinpoche at TBRC this week.
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17 May 2016
David Weinberger on the Future of Digital Libraries
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.
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18 April 2016
Khenpo Karma Jamyang Gyaltsen Visits TBRC
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.
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13 April 2016
TBRC Board President Wins Prestigious Guggenheim Fellowship
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.
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21 March 2016
Kyabgön Phakchok Rinpoche Visits TBRC
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.
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07 December 2015
Help TBRC Keep Scanning Tibetan Texts!
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!
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18 November 2015
The Digital Woodblock – Reprinting the Ragya Kanjur from TBRC Scans
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.
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28 October 2015
Matthieu Ricard Visits TBRC
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.
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08 August 2015
Mindrolling Jetsün Khandro Rinpoche Visits TBRC
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.
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06 June 2015
TBRC Brings Tibetan Manuscripts onto the Google Cultural Institute
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.
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23 April 2015
The Hunt for the Ragya Kangyur
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.
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07 April 2015
His Holiness Gyalwang Karmapa Visits TBRC
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.
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06 March 2015
The Library of Congress Rockhill Kangyur Release
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.
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20 February 2015
Diving into the Backlog, Bringing Wisdom to Light
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.
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29 January 2015
TBRC launches collaboration with SOAS to improve access to Tibetan digital texts
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.
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19 December 2014
Gene's Vision for TBRC
After working with Gene for many years, and since his death, continuing his vision, I am amazed at where are today.
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16 December 2014
Running Out of Disk Space as We Approach 10 Million Pages
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 .
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15 December 2014
Article about Gene's Life Story Published in Prestigious Chinese Magazine
An article about Gene Smith's life story was published in a prestigious Chinese Magazine called "Xin Zhi" in November 2014.
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29 October 2014
TBRC Talks: A Rule Based Tagger for Classical Tibetan, Tuesday 11/4
Negation and Verb Stems Classification
With Dr. Nathan Hill, University of London, School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS)
29 October 2014
Peter Gruber, In Memoriam
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.
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17 October 2014
Remembering Dezhung Rinpoche and Gene Smith
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.
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08 October 2014
TBRC Talks: Scholars and Scribes Friday, 10/10
Leveraging Computerized Tools for Navigating an Uncharted Tibetan Buddhist Philosophical Corpus
Demo and discussion with Dorji Wangchuk & Orna Almogi
24 September 2014
How to Use the Tibetan eText Repository
The following are entry points into the Tibetan eText Repository.
Browse eTexts /
Global Search eTexts /
Advanced Search eTexts /
Intra-Work search
15 September 2014
Lineage Transmission Research: The Backstory
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.
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09 September 2014
The Lineage Transmission Knowledge Model
As part of our ongoing work in the Research Department, we are building a database of Lineage records in the TBRC Library.
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28 August 2014
Tibetan Tulku Lines and Networks
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.
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07 June 2014
TBRC – Harvard Partnership to Support the Long-Term Preservation of Tibetan Texts
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.
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02 May 2014
Tibetan Search Enhancements
TBRC has just released on its online library, enhancements for Tibetan language searching.
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20 March 2014
TBRC Phonetic Tulku Titles
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.
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12 March 2014
The Nyingma Kama Collections
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.
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05 March 2014
TBRC on Public Radio International
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.
20 February 2014
The impact of donations
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...
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16 February 2014
TBRC in the NY Times!
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.
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13 February 2014
Talk with Prof. John Dunne
A terrific conversation covering all things TBRC – from great insights about Gene Smith, to how the TBRC Library is essential today.
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Our international team carries out BDRC's mission with ingenuity and dedication, using its skills to make BDRC the online home for Buddhist literature.
Partners
Khyentse Foundation
Khyentse Foundation is a nonprofit organization founded in 2001 by Dzongsar Khyentse Rinpoche to support all traditions of Buddhist study and practice. Since 2001, the foundation has supported individuals and institutions in more than 30 countries and has directly affected the lives of people around the world. Khyentse Foundation activities include major text preservation and translation projects, support for traditional monastic colleges in Asia, a worldwide scholarship and awards program, academic development of Buddhist studies in major universities, training and development for Buddhist leaders and teachers, Buddhist education for children, support for individual study and retreats, and more.
Khyentse Foundation
The Robert H.N. Ho Family Foundation
The Robert H. N. Ho Family Foundation is an independent philanthropic organization based in Hong Kong. The Foundation's dual mission is to foster appreciation of Chinese arts and culture to advance global learning and to cultivate a deeper understanding of Buddhism in the context of contemporary life.
BDRC's Sanskrit and Chinese Digital Library Network program is supported by a grant from the Robert H. N. Ho Family Foundation.
The Robert H.N. Ho Family Foundation
A Khmer Buddhist Foundation
A Khmer Buddhist Foundation is a nonprofit organization dedicated to advancing the lives of the Khmer people and preserving their rich traditions and culture.
A Khmer Buddhist Foundation
Locations
Cambridge, MA
USA
Ulaanbaatar
Mongolia
Hangzhou
China
New Delhi
India
Bangkok
Thailand
Phnom Penh
Cambodia
Cambridge, MA
USA
Ulaanbaatar
Mongolia
Hangzhou
China
New Delhi
India
Bangkok
Thailand
Phnom Penh
Cambodia