FOCUS

June 2020

From TBRC to BDRC: 

A Brand New Buddhist Digital Library for All

In this issue of KF Focus, we invite Jann Ronis, executive director of the Buddhist Digital Resource Center (BDRC), KF’s long-term partner in the preservation of Buddhist texts, to share the exciting news about their new multilanguage website. 

BDRC Launches a New Website 

By Jann Ronis

Khyentse Foundation and BDRC have been partners for almost two decades. The heart connection between our two founders was established nearly 50 years ago. E. Gene Smith (1936-2010), the founder of Tibetan Buddhist Resource Center (TBRC), lived in New Delhi from 1965-1985. For much of that time, Gene’s palatial residence was a second home for Dilgo Khyentse Rinpoche and his retinue, which of course included Dzongsar Khyentse Rinpoche. Rinpoche has often recounted his fond childhood memories of Gene’s home. 

Image: Gene Smith (photo copyright © Digital Dharma Documentary)

Years later, soon after founding KF in 2001, Dzongsar Khyentse Rinpoche provided crucial funding for TBRC, the predecessor of BDRC. Just as essential was the leadership support volunteered by Cangioli Che in her role as a board member of TBRC/BDRC for more than a decade. One of Khyentse Foundation’s lasting contributions to Gene Smith’s organization was its encouragement to expand the mission to include all canonical traditions of Buddhism. In 2015 Tibetan Buddhist Resource Center changed its name to Buddhist Digital Resource Center and began to apply its successful approach to digital preservation and accessibility to Buddhist traditions outside of the Tibetan cultural realm. With a generous grant from KF, BDRC’s inaugural project was the digitization of the Fragile Palm Leaves Foundation library of Southeast Asian manuscripts collected by Professor Peter Skilling, an outstanding scholar, KF Fellow, and KF advisory board member.

Now BDRC is set to launch its new website. This website fulfils BDRC’s founding vision, to preserve all endangered traditions of the Buddhadharma and to create a digital resource that serves Buddhists who practice all three vehicles, or yanas. This brief article introduces some of the key features of the new website, including advanced tools for searching and viewing Buddhist texts, as well as an enlarged collection of works in Sanskrit, Chinese, Pali, and Tibetan.

Sneak peak of the new website:

With the launch of the new website, BDRC instantly becomes one of the foremost digital libraries of Southeast Asian Buddhist texts as well. Just as Gene Smith made it his mission to preserve the at-risk texts of the Tibetan tradition, BDRC’s current digitization priorities are to preserve texts in Southeast Asia that are in danger of damage due to poor storage conditions, neglect, and social disruption. To this end we recently began an ambitious project in Cambodia to digitize palm leaf manuscripts held in rural monasteries that survived the tumultuous twentieth century. Filling in the gaps of other preservation efforts in Cambodia, BDRC has so far digitized more than 320,000 folia of manuscripts in that country. These texts in the Khmer script include numerous Pali works as well as thousands of rare texts of the Cambodian Buddhist tradition. The Khmer collection complements the more than 2.1 million folia of Burmese texts digitized by BDRC at the Fragile Palm Leaves archive, which are available on the new website.

Recognizing Excellence

KF Announces 2020 Outstanding Translation Prize and Dissertation Award 

KF is delighted to announce that its 2020 Outstanding Translation Prize goes to Professor Richard Salomon’s translation of The Buddhist literature of Ancient Gandhāra: An Introduction with Selected Translations. The 2020 Outstanding PhD Dissertation Award is shared by Mingyuan Gao and Su-an Lin for Gao’s The Buddhist Concept of Vāsanā: From Abhidharma to Early Yogācāra and Lin’s Dependent-Arising, Two Truths and Logic in Bhāviveka’s Philosophy.

Professor Steven Goodman’s book on abhidharma to be published in July

The Buddhist Psychology of Awakening: An In-Depth Guide to Abhidharma, by long-time KF advisor and member of the KF Academic Committee Steven Goodman, will be published in July by Shambala Publications. Professor Goodman explains how the abhidharma can be applied to meditation practice through exercises of observation and reflection, making this the go-to manual for anyone interested in understanding how the mind really works.  Professor Goodman talks about the book. 

KF Scholarships application window opens

The application window is open for Buddhist Study Scholarships, Individual Practice Grants, Work as Practice, and PHD scholarships from June 15 through July 15, 2020. For details, visit the application page.