February 2010
February 12, 2010WELCOME METAL TIGER YEAR: LOSAR COMMUNIQUE NOW AVAILABLE
Rinpoche Records a Special New Year Address for Friends and Supporters of Khyentse Foundation.
Read on to download or listen online.
The February issue of the Communiqué spotlights the Tibetan Buddhist Resource Center, to which Khyentse Foundation has committed long-term support; an audio New Year address from Dzongsar Khyentse Rinpoche; a teaching from Thanissaro Bhikkhu and a special report from Bodhgaya.
As we enter the new year, Khyentse Foundation gratefully thanks all of our donors for your support during the past year.
Khyentse Foundation is never active in fundraising campaigns. We rely on our friends like you who are inspired by a genuine interest in the Foundation’s work.
To follow through with our current commitments and to realize Rinpoche's vision for the next few years, we need to continue to raise an average of US$1.3 million a year. The monthly donations matching funds program provides 35% of that income, and we are so grateful to everyone who has joined. We hope you will continue to support the Foundation at whatever level is comfortable. Whether it’s $10 per month or $100, please know that your regular contribution, which is doubled through the generosity of our Matching Funds sponsors, makes a significant difference to the Foundation’s financial capability to carry out our mission.
The Foundation has become influential in many spheres of Buddhist activity around the world. It's almost overwhelming for our patrons to keep abreast of all the projects, but if you read the Communiqué and browse through the KF website, you will grasp the powerful vision behind every aspect of the Foundation’s work
SPOTLIGHT ON THE TIBETAN BUDDHIST RESOURCE CENTER
Keeping the Tibetan Wisdom Heritage Alive
TBRC Digital Library Makes Major Progress in 2009. Read about the latest developments.
Khyentse Foundation is a major supporter of the Tibetan Buddhist Resource Center. TBRC’s goal is nothing less than to keep the Tibetan wisdom heritage alive. KF funds the heart of TBRC’s programs, including providing support for digitally preserving its own collection of more than 12,000 volumes of texts. Through the generosity of our sponsors, the Foundation has been supporting TBRC for three years and will continue its support to help complete the entire project by 2012.
2009 was a busy and productive year for TBRC. An experienced team has been assembled and is poised to complete the bulk of TBRC's work by 2012. The text scanning is done in Noida, India, and in TBRC’s New York offices; the formatting work is done at Parphing, Nepal, at the retreat center of Penor Rinpoche; and the cataloging, editing, and scholarly work is done in New York.
Preserving
The TBRC team surpassed most of the benchmarks they set last year. In fact, between January 1 and September 15, 2009, the organization scanned more than 4,000 volumes—a substantial increase over their projected output of 1,500 volumes for the entire year, thanks to an equipment grant from the Tsadra Foundation.
TBRC has approximately 6,000 unscanned volumes left in its own collection, and the team expects to complete the scanning of those volumes by 2012. However, through acquisitions, partnerships with other institutions, and their continuing commitment to seek out rare and important literature, the total number of volumes in the library will be far greater than 12,000 —how much greater is not yet known.
Organizing
TBRC has added three key staff members, bringing the total to eight full-time scholars and librarians entering detailed cataloging records in the Library. This is one of the largest single sources of original Tibetan cataloging of any library in the world. The staff has PhD level and masters’ degree level scholars and librarians. Organizing the breadth and depth of Tibetan literature is a monumental task and one that will create unprecedented access. The Tibetan literary heritage is immense and includes traditional medicine, astrology, astronomy, alche¬my, art, history, geography, biography, grammar, folk culture, poetics, and extensive philosophical and religious treatises.
Disseminating
TBRC would like to make the entire library available to all who can use it—scholars, researchers, students, translators, and lineage masters. Just as the preservation process accurately captures the source literature, the formatting process makes each text clear enough for paper printing. In this way, TBRC is creating digital woodblocks so that libraries can be reconstructed from digital scans. Formatting is labor intensive—each individual page is cleaned and prepared for batch printing. Given the total number of pages in the library, somewhere around 20 million, formatting every page would be nearly impossible. Therefore TBRC will select the most important texts from each tradition and format them for printing. Of course, masters of the different traditions can request specific texts to be formatted.
2009 Highlights
• TBRC established a relationship with the Asian Classics Input Project to incorporate into the Library texts preserved at the National Library of Mongolia. This treasure trove contains texts and collections that were thought missing or were simply unknown. • Implemented a strategy for including Unicode Tibetan texts in the Library. Unicode texts offers exciting possibilities for “quotation-level” searching.
• Embarked on a subject categorization project that will allow users to browse the Library according to a wealth of literary genres, topics, and keywords.
• TBRC is about to announce the second major release of the TBRC Library software (TBRC 2.0). This release will feature multi-language capabilities (initially English, Tibetan, and Chinese); full browse and search capabilities; faster response time; and clearer pathways to the literature.
KF Support for the TBRC Digital Library
“With the [TBRC] Digital Library, no future disaster, whether natural, political, or economic, will destroy these precious Buddhist texts again."
—Dzongsar Khyentse Rinpoche
Khyentse Foundation has committed $1.2 million to support the TBRC Digital Library over a 5-year period. More than $500,000 has been granted, and we are still raising funds to bring this project to fruition.
For more information, read “Patrons of Buddhism, Part XI; Gene Smith and TBRChttp://www.khyentsefoundation.org/communique/CommuniqueNovember07.html.” You can also visit the TBRC website http://www.TBRC.organd click About TBRC. Another interesting source of information is the TBRC bloghttp://blog.tbrc.org/.
“Gene, his colleagues and the team at TBRC have dedicated their lives to saving 1500 years of invaluable teachings – from the medical to the mystical . . . a chronicle of the advancements of mankind. In so doing, they have provided a model for how to salvage the priceless history and collected wisdom of any ancient culture. Their work is a living guidebook for literary and policy scholars, humanitarians, and technology system developers. This is an achievement that demands to be shared with the world.”
—Pat Gruber, a long-term patron of TBRC, calling for support for “Digital Dharma: One Man’s Mission to Save a Culture,” a documentary in the works on the life and work of Gene Smith.
UPDATE FROM TBRC
The following article is from the TBRC newsletter.
The Board of Directors of Tibetan Buddhist Resource Center (TBRC) is happy to announce that having successfully established a robust organization over the last ten years Gene Smith is now able to step back from the administrative duties as Executive Director and devote his time and energies to the critical scholarly work of TBRC.
We are also very pleased to announce with full confidence the election of Jeff Wallman as TBRC's new Executive Director and member of the board. Jeff is a long time colleague of Gene's and has all the skills and technological knowledge to succeed in this role. We are very pleased with the smooth transition and are delighted that this new alignment will ensure that TBRC can fully serve its various communities. Jeff will continue to serve as TBRC's Director of Technology.
The Board expresses its most sincere gratitude to Gene for his enormous contributions and welcomes his ongoing role as ’Founder and Senior Research Scholar' of TBRC.
—The TBRC Board of Directors
“This will be part of the enduring legacy of TBRC—a portal into the complex interconnections that make up the Tibetan worldview.”
—Jeff Wallman, TBRC Executive Director
“The ultimate destination for a user of the library is the meaning of the literature—what a particular text means. While TBRC provides multiple points of access to sources, it is the articulation and expression of the Tibetan worldview, and the translation into other tongues, which will take generations and generations and generations. The gift of TBRC is that this will be possible.“
—Jeff Wallman
NYINGMA SECT BESTOWS LIFETIME ACHIEVEMENT
AWARD ON GENE SMITH
Noa Jones Reports on a Special Ceremony Amidst the Color and Chaos of the Nyingma Monlam Festival in Bodhgaya
In January, 2010, our friend E. Gene Smith traveled to Bodhgaya, India, the site of Shakyamuni Buddha's enlightenment, at the request of an organization representing more than 300 Nyingma monasteries in Tibet, India, and Bhutan. The Nyingma Monlam Chenmo International Foundation unanimously nominated Gene to receive the first-ever Sambhota Award, a lifetime achievement award for his contributions to the preservation of the Buddhadharma. It was an unusually cold and foggy day, one of the last days of the Monlam festival.
Orgyen Tobgyal Rinpoche, the abbot of Chokling Monastery in Bir (and star of “The Cup”), introduced Gene to an audience of more than 13,000 monks and nuns. Rinpoche led Gene to each side of the monument, where different sanghas took a break from their pujas to hear Gene's life story. At each side, the monks greeted Gene’s story with huge applause. Under the Bodhi tree on the east side of the temple, Sechen Rabjam Rinpoche presented the award, a golden gong. A long line of rinpoches, tulkus, and khenpos presented katags to Gene— so many katags that only his face and hands were left uncovered. A number of monks approached Gene to offer him their thanks for the digital libraries that TBRC has donated to their monasteries. By the time Gene left the temple, the sun was shining.
Gene recently stepped down as executive director of the Tibetan Buddhist Resource Center (TBRC), which he founded in 1999, so that he can devote his time and energies to the critical scholarly work of TBRC. The center so far has scanned and digitally archived more than 4 million pages of Tibetan texts, with the aim of making them available throughout the world. Jeff Wallman is the new executive director.
Gene is known for his work with the Library of Congress. In 1968 he joined the New Delhi Field Office and initiated a campaign to reprint every Tibetan text he could find. Many of the texts were brought to him by Tibetan exiles from Sikkim, Bhutan, India, and Nepal. For the next two decades, he led a tireless effort to seek out every available text, rescuing numerous traditions from extinction. In 1985 he was transferred to Jakarta, Indonesia, where he continued his work in text preservation. In 1994 he was assigned to the Middle Eastern Office in Cairo. In 1997 he took early retirement from the U.S. Library of Congress.
“It is not an exaggeration at all for us to say it is because of Gene’s hard work and concerted efforts that we have access to many of the precious texts we are using today,” said Dzongsar Khyentse Rinpoche.
A complete report will appear in the May issue of Tricyle Magazine.
Read the Patron King article about Gene Smith on the KF website.
THE PRACTICE OF GIVING
Dana (Sanskrit and Pali) means "generosity" or "giving." In Buddhism, it also refers to the practice of cultivating generosity. Ultimately, the practice culminates in one of the Six Perfections, the Perfection of Giving, which can be characterized by unattached and unconditional generosity, giving and letting go. The following excerpts are from an inspiring essay on generosity, “No Strings Attached: The Buddha’s Culture of Generosity,” by Thanissaro Bhikkhu.
“It's well known that dana lies at the beginning of Buddhist practice. Dana, quite literally, has kept the Dhamma alive. If it weren't for the Indian tradition of giving to mendicants, the Buddha would never have had the opportunity to explore and find the path to Awakening. The monastic sangha wouldn't have had the time and opportunity to follow his way. Dana is the first teaching in the graduated discourse: the list of topics the Buddha used to lead listeners step-by-step to an appreciation of the four noble truths, and often from there to their own first taste of Awakening. When stating the basic principles of karma, he would begin with the statement, ‘There is what is given.’”
***
“[The] Buddha, in his introduction to the teaching on karma, began by saying that there is what is given…. Giving does give results both now and on into the future, and it is the result of the donor's free choice. However, … the Buddha took the principle of freedom one step further. When asked where a gift should be given, he stated simply, “Wherever the mind feels inspired.” In other words—aside from repaying one's debt to one's parents—there is no obligation to give. This means that the choice to give is an act of true freedom, and thus the perfect place to start the path to total release.”
***
”On retreats, dana could be discussed in a general way, in the context of the many Dhamma talks given on how best to integrate Dhamma practice in daily life. At the end of the retreat, a basket could be left out for donations, with a note that the teacher hasn't been paid to teach the retreat. That's all. No appeals for mercy. No flashcards. Sensitive retreatants will be able to put two and two together, and will feel glad, inspired, and gratified that they were trusted to do the math for themselves.” "No Strings Attached: The Buddha's Culture of Generosity," by Thanissaro Bhikkhu. Access to Insight, November 22, 2009.
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