The Buddhist Digital Resource Center Celebrates 25 Years of Preserving Buddhist Literature

“I started Khyentse Foundation and when we discovered [Gene Smith] was … digitizing Tibetan texts, we were so excited and we really sort of postponed all of our other missions and said that this is something that we have to support.” — Dzongsar Khyentse Rinpoche, interview for Digital Dharma: One Man’s Mission to Save a Culture (2012)

This is how Dzongsar Khyentse Rinpoche described the early days of Khyentse Foundation’s patronage of the organization that polymath E. Gene Smith (1936–2010) founded in 1999. With Rinpoche’s wholehearted support, Gene’s project became an international effort to preserve Buddhist texts and share them with the world. Their enduring gift to humanity is the world’s largest digital library of Buddhist literature, which celebrated its 25th anniversary in September 2024.

The palpable enthusiasm in Rinpoche’s words and his embrace of Gene’s mission have continued for a quarter century and played a major role in the evolution of the well-respected online home for Buddhist literature. Through the years, Khyentse Foundation has supported the Buddhist Digital Resource Center (or BDRC, formerly the Tibetan Buddhist Resource Center or TBRC) to partner with local communities and digitally preserve Buddhist manuscripts. This community undertaking has resulted in more than 30 million digitized pages of Buddhist texts, many of them rare or endangered, made freely available to the world.

BDRC marked its milestone anniversary with an inspiring event at the Rubin Museum of Art (RMA) in New York City on September 20, 2024. While Rinpoche was not able to travel to the US at that time, he was ably represented by a group of KF volunteers and enthusiastic local sangha. Titled “Buddhist Wisdom from Palm Leaf to Pixel,” the event narrated and embodied the transmission of Buddhist wisdom and knowledge from East to West, between cultures and across time, from the traditional to the avant-garde.

The evening began with the debut performance of a Tibetan Buddhist poem, “Between Birth and Death and Death and Rebirth”—a new, musical interpretation of Karma Lingpa’s Root Verses on the Six Bardos devised by multimedia artist, musician, and creative pioneer Laurie Anderson in collaboration with translators Benjamin Bogin and Dominique Townsend. The three each read verses from the poem, with accompaniment by Anderson on the violin. As a dedicated Buddhist practitioner and groundbreaking leader in the use of technology in the arts, Anderson was the ideal person to help celebrate BDRC’s work to preserve Buddhist literature through technology.

Two leading Buddhist scholars then took the stage. Professor Leonard van der Kuijp, a founding director of TBRC, spoke about the organization’s history and Gene Smith’s legacy. Professor Donald Lopez then gave the keynote address, describing how the translation of Buddhist texts has altered cultures over the centuries and around the globe, focusing on Tibetan texts and Gene’s legendary efforts to bring about that transformation. Both spoke movingly of their personal relationship with Gene, whom they first met as young scholars undertaking research in Asia almost 50 years ago.

Actor and writer Michael Imperioli followed with a reading that dramatized the transformative power of the dharma through translation and the arts. A longtime student of Garchen Rinpoche, he serves on the board of the nonprofit The Pureland Project and recently recorded the audiobook of Dzongsar Khyentse Rinpoche’s Living is Dying. His nuanced and powerful reading of poems by Gendün Chöphel and the final verses from the 10th chapter of Shantideva’s The Way of the Bodhisattva drew hushed appreciation and awe from the crowd.

It is auspicious that both BDRC and the RMA are celebrating anniversaries and embarking on transformative reinventions this fall. When the Rubin Museum opened its doors 20 years ago Gene Smith played a pivotal role in shaping its vision and scholarship, and BDRC was headquartered at the neighboring Rubin Foundation for a decade, with both institutions dedicated to public access and contemporary forms of engagement with Buddhist culture. On October 6, the Rubin closed its physical location in New York and transformed into a global museum without walls.

As the event on September 20 drew to a close, BDRC’s Executive Director Jann Ronis shared his vision for a sustainable future for the organization. He used a Bodhi Tree analogy to describe the Buddhist ecosystem and spoke of how BDRC’s archive of the entire Buddhist tradition forms part of the trunk, providing sustenance and support for the teachings, translations, and publications which form the branches and leaves. In order for the tree to flourish the trunk must remain strong, and to continue preserving the irreplaceable Buddhist manuscript traditions, it is essential to secure the Buddhist Digital Resource Center itself.

“The Bodhi Tree ecosystem is as fragile, contingent, and frankly endangered as most of the natural ecosystems in the world. BDRC does so much to preserve rare and at-risk texts and now is the time to make a formal effort to preserve BDRC itself,” Jann said, explaining that BDRC’s Board of Directors is building an endowment fund to support core operational costs and keep BDRC sustainable for another 25, 50, or even 108 years.

“With a stable and robust BDRC, the world will benefit from more translations, more insights into Buddhist history and thought, future generations of Buddhist teachers trained in the monasteries and nunneries of Asia, and the cultural and linguistic sustainability of Tibetan and Himalayan communities.” — Jann Ronis

The texts in the archive offer solutions to personal, social, and global challenges and are an invaluable resource for people around the world. Countless teachings contained in the manuscripts have yet to be translated into modern languages for the benefit of practitioners. At the same time numerous rare texts, often endangered by climate or political instability, remain to be scanned. While BDRC meets this challenge by digitizing and publishing over one million additional pages every year in Tibetan, Mongolian, Khmer, Burmese, etc., expertise and infrastructure are required to maintain the digital archive and provide librarian services.

Global access to Buddhist wisdom is what Gene Smith and Dzongsar Khyentse Rinpoche had in mind when Gene began digitizing Tibetan texts. Funding for Buddhist causes and projects is less available than in the past, so Khyentse Foundation’s support is integral to BDRC’s ongoing mission to preserve and promote Buddha’s wisdom as literature and to make it accessible to the world. BDRC will continue celebrating its anniversary all year, and hopes to hold a further event with Dzongsar Khyentse Rinpoche in attendance as the guest of honor.

For full details of how to support BDRC’s mission to preserve and share the dharma, please visit BDRC.

Featured image above: BDRC’s Executive Director Jann Ronis shared his vision for a sustainable future for the next 25, 50, or even 108 years.

All photos from the 25th anniversary event by Filip Wolak.