Tibetan Buddhism at the Digital Frontier

 Robert R. Chilton, Technical Director

The Asian Classics Input Project (ACIP), USA 

“The 1990s saw the emergence of a new and powerful, global communications technology, which has the potential to be more significant to the development of education, culture and health than the emergence of radio, film or television.  Today’s low cost personal computers (PCs), together with new storage media, emerging communication networks and an increasing range of commonly available peripheral equipment and software, now present a highly cost-efficient means to incorporate text, sound and images into an integrated, interactive, mass communications medium.”

– from a technical assessment by The Orient Foundation (U.K.)

This paper will focus on the potential interface between modern digital technology and traditional Tibetan Buddhist culture.  It will not deal with the many ways that modern scholarship on Buddhism is being affected by the digital revolution, although much could be said on this subject.[1]  Nor will it consider in detail how the new media technology is facilitating the spread of Tibetan Buddhist knowledge and practice among people living in societies that are not traditionally Tibetan Buddhist.  It will, in passing, address some issues that border on the field of development such as transfer of technical knowledge, sustainability and local capacity building via vocational training and employment opportunities. 

A critical juncture in time 

This is a critical time for Tibetan Buddhist culture.  Suffering under repressive regimes in the former Soviet Union, in Mongolia, and in Tibet under communist Chinese rule, the traditional culture was suppressed, often violently, for much of the 20^th century.  This heritage, which originated more than 2,500 years ago, is now at the brink of extinction.  Most of the cultural institutions, monasteries and libraries were closed or destroyed and countless books and works of art were lost during the past seventy years.  The surviving textual materials are scattered, uncatalogued and deteriorating.  The traditionally trained masters, often displaced from their traditional homelands, are ageing and dying before they can pass on their knowledge and skills to the next generation.  A relative handful of Tibetan refugees have struggled over the past forty years to re-establish their culture outside of Tibet and transmit it to succeeding generations.  In Mongolia, Siberia and elsewhere, the living classical culture is struggling to emerge from decades of political suppression and economic hardship and, in addition, faces the challenges of modernization. 

Against this backdrop, we come to the central question to be explored in this paper: How can the technology of the 21^st century “information age” be effectively utilized to help preserve and strengthen Tibetan Buddhist traditions of learning and practice?  And how can traditional Buddhist institutions selectively adopt and apply appropriate technologies to advance their core mission of training the next generation of master teachers?

Technology and Buddhism: some historical antecedents 

In considering these questions we should observe that, just as in the cases of previous technological innovation such as writing and printing, modern digital technologies have the potential both to aid and to dissipate the continuity and vigor of the Buddhist traditions.  However, aside from merely noting that modern technology has the power to distract people from the ultimate aims of Buddhism, discussion of the possible negative aspects of adopting technological innovations lies beyond the scope of this paper.  Nevertheless, it may be instructive to relate a story that is told in Tibet: 

Once there were two Buddhist monks who were progressing very well in their spiritual practices toward liberation and enlightenment.  Seeing this, a demon became jealous and decided to interfere with the monks, to hinder their progress.  Now these monks, in the course of their studies, were learning Sanskrit so that they could read the texts in that Indian language (from which the Buddhist scriptures in Tibet had been translated).  The demon created a magical pen that had the power of writing Sanskrit, including the difficult rules of euphonic combination, called samdhi, perfectly and with ease.  Upon finding this pen the monks were so enchanted by its powers, by what they could do with it, that they neglected their practice and were thus distracted from accomplishing their spiritual goals.[2]

This story clearly warns of the dangers of getting distracted by the potential of the technology itself and emphasizes the importance of maintaining a perspective that sees technology as merely a tool for accomplishing one’s real goals. 

We can see that the Buddhist tradition has embraced various technological innovations in the past.  Consider that approximately 2,000 years ago the Buddhist teachings began to be recorded in written form, marking a transition from what had been an exclusively oral tradition.[3]  About 1,000 years later, the adoption of various forms of printing sparked a revolution in the availability of Buddhist texts.[4]  Moreover, it might be argued that developments in Buddhist drawing, painting, sculpture and even architecture represent evolving “technologies” for capturing spiritual understanding and visionary experience in physical form—similar to the manner in which writing was (and is) used to capture spoken discourse.  Much more recently, the development of photography as well as techniques for recording sound and moving visual images, in short, the ability to capture information from a particular event in time and replay it at another time and place, has been revolutionary.  Still more revolutionary has been the development of broadcast communications, principally radio and television, which have enabled millions of people to hear and see events happening far away at the very moment when they are occurring. 

There is no denying that all of these technological innovations have had an extraordinary impact on human affairs.  Given the advanced state of analog technologies such as photography, audio recording, film and video recording, radio and television, we might ask what added benefits can be provided by digital technology.  To help answer this question, let us begin by looking at some of the distinctive characteristics of digital technology.

Some characteristics of digital technology 

Unlike analog materials, digital content can be rapidly transmitted over networks and duplicated onto inexpensive media without loss of information.  Digital materials can be interlinked in new interactive ways that transcend the limitations of the original media types and they can be searched and otherwise manipulated by automated processes far more easily than can analog materials.  Finally, and most significantly, the Internet enables multidirectional sharing and communication of digital resources independent of time or location; this stands in contrast to the one-way, locale- and time-specific characteristics of standard broadcast communication technologies such as radio and television.  Disseminating information over the Internet, via a continuously available web page, is an affordable and highly cost-effective way to reach a large audience compared to other modes of communication (audio and video tape, printed text and photos, radio, television, postal mail, conventional publishing and so on) and adds the capability of enhanced user interactivity. 

In the context of Tibetan Buddhism, digital technology enables preservation of endangered cultural materials and traditions—such as texts, artwork, recorded oral explanations, or videotaped demonstrations—in a form that is portable and compact.  Copies of digitized materials can be made quickly and easily at little expense, and with no loss of information from one copy to the next.  Huge quantities of digitized materials can be widely distributed at very low cost: an entire library of books that would fill several large rooms can be distributed in digital form via inexpensive compact discs, or transmitted over the Internet in a matter of minutes.  Digitized materials can be integrated in new ways by cross-linking text, images, sound recordings, and video.  For example, a text passage explaining how to perform a Buddhist ritual can be linked to both an oral explanation of the passage and either still or moving images that demonstrate the ritual.  Since digitized materials lend themselves to efficient searching and analysis, automated searches of digital text databases can be used to quickly and thoroughly locate specific passages or discussion on a given topic within a huge corpus of material.  Citation searches that would require weeks of tedious effort using manual methods can be performed in just a few minutes.

Types of digital resources 

What are the various types of digital resources?  In a very general way we can make a division into two categories:  character-based (text) and non-character-based (still images, audio and motion video).  Digital textual materials offer many advantages over printed books.  Electronic texts, catalogs, and dictionaries can be searched or indexed in an automated and robust fashion.  The availability of a large searchable corpus of digitized texts enables wide-ranging research across multiple works, efficient confirmation of citations and bibliographical references, automatic comparison of alternate editions of a work, and the use lexical analysis to draw more accurate conclusions about the authorship, geographical origin, and relative chronology of texts.  And since size (page count) is no longer a limiting factor in digital materials, reference works such as catalogs and encyclopedias in electronic form can be far more detailed and extensive than their printed counterparts. 

In contrast to character-based digital materials, non-textual materials such as images, audio, and motion video cannot be automatically searched and manipulated.  Consider the example of a digital image of a page from a rare book: the information it contains is not searchable unless further processing, such as optical character recognition, is applied.  And we can easily see how this limitation extends to digital images of artwork or digitized audio recordings of oral commentaries.  As a way to partially overcome this limitation, those who assemble large collections of digital images and audio/video resources typically create extensive and detailed catalogs of their materials; these character-based catalogs can then be searched, indexed and otherwise manipulated. 

Unlike traditional printed books, digitized materials need not be restricted to a sequential format.  As exemplified by the web pages of news organizations such as Reuters, BBC and CNN, digital text can be extensively annotated and linked with images, audio, video and other passages of text without disrupting the flow of the narrative. 

Early applications of digital technology within Tibetan Buddhist societies: creating and disseminating classical Tibetan digital resources 

Early efforts to apply digital technology to the work of preserving and disseminating Tibetan Buddhist culture began soon after the introduction of the personal computer.  As early as 1983, researchers from The Asian Classics Input Project (ACIP) created a Tibetan word processor for the IBM-PC computer and subsequently developed a methodology for digitizing Tibetan language materials.  This methodology has since been used to create a virtual library of classical Tibetan Buddhist literature totaling more than 150,000 pages.[5] 

There were a number of challenges facing ACIP when they began this work.  Because of the difficulties involved in deciphering the woodblock-printed texts, it became clear that the work would be best accomplished by fluent Tibetan-speakers.  Furthermore, because of the massive amount of the target literature to be input, and with only modest available funding, ACIP developed a scaleable and cost-effective methodology: training and employing Tibetan refugees in India to type the texts using low-cost personal computers. 

Due to both the lack of support for display of Tibetan script in early computers, and the need to produce digital materials in a universally useable format, the texts are entered in roman-letter transliteration.  In order to reduce errors during input, each text is typed by two data entry operators and then an automated comparison program is used to identify and correct any differences between the two typed versions.  As a happy by-product of this methodology, the data entry operators acquire a marketable skill since they gain experience in the use of computer equipment while learning to touch type on a standard (QWERTY) keyboard. 

In 1990, when ACIP began public distribution of the digitized texts to libraries, researchers and cultural institutions, the standard computer media was the 5.25-inch diskette, capable of holding up to 600 pages of text.  By 1993, when the text database had grown to a size where distribution on diskette was impractical, the CD-ROM drive had become standard equipment in personal computers.  ACIP’s 1993 CD-ROM release, entitled Woodblock to Laser, totaled some 70 megabytes of data, or 35,000 pages of text.  With the advent of the Internet, and especially the WorldWideWeb (in 1995), huge quantities of these digitized materials began to be widely distributed at virtually no cost.  

ACIP-trained cataloguers have been working since 1994 with library staff at the Institute of Oriental Studies (Russian Academy of Science) and the Oriental Library of the University of St. Petersburg to create comprehensive electronic catalogues of the important and extensive collections of Tibetan materials housed in St. Petersburg.  Each title in the collections is treated as a separate work in its own right, and complete cataloging information is given for each one.  Since the catalog is computerized, it is possible to include a level of detail not achieved in any previous printed catalogs.  Therefore, a total of twenty-two different details of each title are recorded, including the entire colophon—containing composition and printing information along with valuable information on the Tibetan teaching lineages and other historical information. 

Over 80,000 separate titles have been cataloged to date, with work projected to continue for another five years or more.  ACIP has made a commitment during this time to assist the Tibetan Collection of the Institute of Oriental Studies in setting up reproduction facilities that will allow the Institute to fulfill orders from interested persons for copies of texts they need to work with.  It is hoped that the existence of this reproduction facility, and the fees paid to the Institute by scholars for copies, will help defray the considerable cost of maintaining this precious treasure for future generations.  

In Ulan Bator, Mongolia, ACIP has recently started similar cataloguing projects in cooperation with the Mongolian State Library and the national monastery of Gandan Tekchen Ling.  The huge[6] and relatively inaccessible collections of Tibetan Buddhist literature housed in Mongolia are thought to contain many texts that exist nowhere else in the world. 

Although early use of the digital materials was limited to those with access to a personal computer, primarily researchers, translators and scholars in the industrialized nations, by 1996 Tibetan refugees had started a revolution in the availability of Tibetan literary materials by using the digital texts as the basis for computerized typesetting of printed textbooks.  As a result, the number of Tibetan titles being published each year by the relocated monasteries in South India has increased more than tenfold from what it had been before the introduction of digital technology (when the books had to be set by hand in metal type).  Beyond the increase in the number of titles available, the books typeset by computer are more legible and typically contain fewer typographical errors than previous editions.  Recognizing the significance of this new use of digital technology, and also the urgent need for providing opportunities in vocational training and employment to young Tibetans entering the workforce, Tibetan resettlement officials have allocated funds for the construction and equipping of new data entry centers in the refugee communities.[7] 

Up to the present, this has been the extent of benefit from digitization for people in the Tibetan cultural sphere; there are still significant barriers to their taking full advantage of the digital revolution such as the lack of access to networked computers and the lack of standardized support for computing in Tibetan.  As we shall see, these barriers are just now beginning to be overcome. 

Some relevant characteristics of Tibetan Buddhist societies 

As we ponder the question of how digital technology might be creatively applied to help alleviate the very real threats to the survival of Tibetan Buddhist civilization as a vital and living cultural tradition, we should take a moment to consider some of the relevant characteristics of traditional Tibetan Buddhist culture.[8] 

There can be little doubt as to the importance of this cultural heritage.  The vast majority of Tibetan Buddhist literature can be traced back to classical Indian sources, as exemplified in the Kangyur and Tengyur, two collections of more than 300 large volumes that were carefully translated into Tibetan, primarily from Sanskrit, by generations of scholars.  The ideas and cultural values contained in these texts have shaped Buddhist civilization throughout Asia for two and a half millennia.  Many of the original Sanskrit texts, including records of teachings by the historical Buddha (circa 500 b.c.e.), have since disappeared and now survive only in their Tibetan translation.  During the past thirteen centuries, native Tibetan and Mongolian authors have written tens of thousands of works based on these two classical collections and have thereby created an extraordinary body of knowledge that spans a wide range of topics including: logic and perceptual theory, epistemology, hermeneutics, medicine, astrology, ethics, psychology, metaphysics, poetry, rhetoric, government, meditation techniques, architecture and the arts.  Traditional systems of Tibetan Buddhist education are founded on intensive study and memorization of these classical materials. 

Moreover, the Tibetan Buddhist traditions have preserved unbroken lineages of practice and teaching that stretch back to the earliest beginnings of Buddhism.  For many hundreds of years, until the middle of the 20^th century, the monasteries of Tibet were active centers of intense philosophical study and debate, meditation, and the arts.  Each generation gained mastery of the essential spiritual knowledge through face-to-face giving from teacher to student. 

But the sad events of the past seventy years have come close to erasing Tibetan Buddhist culture from the face of the earth.  Beginning in the 1930s in the former Soviet Union and Mongolia, Tibetan Buddhist traditions were suppressed, the monasteries and libraries were destroyed, and the monks and lamas were either killed or forced into lay life.  Two decades later a similar fate befell Tibet with the result that over 100,000 Tibetan refugees now reside outside of Tibet. 

As we begin the 21^st century, the entire Tibetan Buddhist cultural sphere—which includes Kalmyk-Mongol lands bordering the western shore of the Caspian Sea, vast regions of the Siberian and Mongolian steppes, the Tibetan Plateau and much of the Himalayas—is facing a multitude of physical, political and economic challenges.  Both the surviving cultural materials, such as the books and artwork, and also the instruction lineages, which have passed unbroken from teacher to student for more than two thousand years, are severely endangered.  Communities in the region are separated from one another by both physical distance and political boundaries while refugees struggle to maintain their Tibetan Buddhist culture in their diaspora throughout South Asia and around the world.  Whether located in their traditional homelands or in refugee camps, all of these Tibetan Buddhist communities are currently cash-poor.  And because Tibetan Buddhist civilizations have historically had economies founded primarily on subsistence-based agriculture and livestock herding, they are having difficulty adapting to the modern global economy.  

So how are these characteristics—of being important, endangered, fragmented and widely spread, and cash-poor—relevant to the application of digital technology?  As shown in the examples given earlier, digital technology can be effectively used in the preservation and dissemination of endangered cultural materials.  Further, modern global communications eliminate many of the barriers of physical distance by enabling people in widely separated locations to access digital resources and interact with each other in the “virtual” time and space of the Internet.  And while the costs of new media technologies have been steeply falling over the past decade, the speed, capacity and functionality of information and communication technologies have increased dramatically.

Bridging the “digital divide” 

As information and communication technologies take on an ever-increasing role in human affairs, there is growing concern about the widening gap between the technological haves and have-nots.[9]  However, there is reason to believe that the “digital divide,” which is particularly evident in the societies of the Tibetan cultural sphere, may soon be bridged.  There are three major reasons for the fact of the digital divide in these communities.  Because of the lack of cash, on both a per capita and an aggregate basis, there has been very little investment in computer equipment and connectivity, especially when we take into account that the cost of computers, digital storage media and telecommunications was recently 3 to 20 times higher than at present.  Stemming from this lack of technology infrastructure investment, there has been little economic (or even political) incentive for the creation of standards for representing Tibetan-script materials within digital environments nor for the development and implementation of robust software applications for working in Tibetan.  Then, on the basis of these two circumstances, there has been scant opportunity or incentive for the creation of digital resources in Tibetan language.  Furthermore, due to the lack of an installed base of computers and other digital technologies, people living in Tibetan Buddhist societies have had little chance to develop technical expertise or experience, much less to find employment within a digital technology field. 

Let us take the example of a high school student in an English speaking country such as the United States who wishes to write a paper on a particular topic of American culture or history.  He or she can very likely use a computer with Internet access at home or, barring that, at a nearby school or library.  The menus and messages in both the computer operating system and the applications for word processing and web browsing will, naturally, be displayed in English.  The student will find a large number of websites containing information, in English, that can be used in writing the paper and he or she can also use the Internet to learn about (and even to obtain) sources of further information, such as titles in the collections of local or regional libraries or relevant books for sale at online booksellers—all in English. 

In contrast, consider the plight of a high school student in the Tibetan cultural sphere who wishes to write a paper on some aspect of Tibetan culture.  Even if he or she can find a computer to use, the menus and messages will not be displayed in Tibetan.  Gaining access to the Internet will likely pose another challenge, although the recent advent of “Internet cafes” is beginning to alleviate this particular obstacle.  The obstacle of language is seen again in both the lack of built-in support for Tibetan in current web browsers and the resulting dearth of Tibetan-language web pages.  Viewing any such sites requires the user to download and install special fonts—which are usually specific to a particular operating system: Windows, Macintosh, Linux, and so on and, furthermore, are mutually incompatible.[10]  With only a few websites to choose from, there is little chance that the student will find information of the type being sought.  Thus we can see why some Tibetans consider the lack of computer support for Tibetan language one of the greatest threats to the continuity of Tibetan culture, especially among the youth. 

But all this is about to change.  With the recent steep plunge in the costs of computer equipment and connectivity, many of the monasteries, schools, and other institutions in the Tibetan cultural sphere are beginning to connect into the global information network.  And with the establishment of the Unicode (ISO-10646) standard[11] for representing all of the world’s languages within a single character-encoding scheme, we can anticipate widespread support for Tibetan script within computer environments, including word processors and web browsers.[12]  The increasing number of computers tied into the Internet in Tibetan-speaking regions, in combination with built-in support for using Tibetan on those computers, will undoubtedly stimulate both the creation and utilization of digital resources related to Tibetan Buddhist culture. 

Dramatically increased capabilities of modern digital technology 

The universal adoption of the CD-ROM drive as standard equipment in personal computers, coupled with the fact that a well-equipped multimedia computer now sells for approximately US$2000 has brought about entirely new possibilities for creating, distributing and viewing digitized cultural materials.[13]  A single inexpensive CD can provide durable and universally accessible storage for up to 100,000 pages of multilingual text, 40 hours of voice, 10 hours of music, 100 high-resolution full color photographic images, or 45 minutes of full-screen film or video.[14]  At the same time we have witnessed stunning advances in the bandwidth[15] of connections between individual workstations and the Internet; whereas a connection speed of 14.4kbps was previously the standard transmission rate over copper telephone wires, data transmission speeds near 56kbps are now common.  So-called “broadband” connections such as ISDN and especially cable, satellite and DSL services provide transmission speeds that are typically about twenty times faster than 56kbps dial-up connections, at reasonable cost.[16]

Requirements for creation of useful and stable Tibetan-language digital resources: standards and standardized support 

A number of factors need to be in place before digital technology can be effectively applied to the task of recording and providing useful access to classical Buddhist materials within the Tibetan cultural sphere.  First, universal standards for the various media types (texts, images, sound, motion video) must have been established and adhered to so that the digitized cultural materials can be stored, used and re-transmitted without the danger of corruption, incompatibility or near-term obsolescence.  Second, following on the adoption of standards, support for those standards in operating systems and applications programs must be implemented.[17]  Third, computers that incorporate standardized support for all relevant media types, along with Internet connections of sufficient capability, must be installed in Tibetan-speaking communities.  Fourth and finally, people in the local population must be trained in how to manage and use the new technology. 

Standardized support for digitized images, sound, and motion video is now well established across multiple operating systems, largely due to the pervasive influence of the Internet in general and the WorldWideWeb in particular.  Uncompressed TIFF (Tagged Image File Format) and compressed JPEG/JFIF[18] are widely supported de facto standards for digital images.  A number of standards for digital sound and motion video have become widely adopted and supported within computer environments, starting with the “Red Book” audio standard used for common audio (music) compact discs.  Several non-proprietary standards for audio/video have been established by the Moving Picture Experts Group (MPEG)[19] such as the MPEG-2 video compression format used for standard DVD video.[20]  The wildly popular MP3 format for compressed digital audio is officially known as MPEG Audio Layer 3.[21] 

Meanwhile, the lack of a standard way to represent Tibetan-script materials electronically has been a major obstacle to the spread of computerization within the Tibetan cultural sphere.  It has also been a persistent irritant to researchers in the field of Tibetan Studies who have argued about the relative merits of one proprietary system over another without reaching any resolution.  Non-Tibetan researchers and academics have generally favored using one or another system of transliteration into roman letters[22] whereas most Tibetan users have preferred to use one of the proprietary software programs that display Tibetan materials directly in native script using special fonts.[23]  Because each of these different Tibetan programs have their own way of representing Tibetan in the computer, people working with Tibetan-script materials are often unable to share their work with others, and even basic written communication in Tibetan—such as via email—is problematic.  With the exception of electronic documents that represent Tibetan using plain-text roman letters (as in the ACIP system), digital Tibetan material cannot easily be ported between operating system platforms[24] and interoperability of Tibetan data stored in different formats, even on a single platform, is virtually unknown.[25]   

The Unicode standard for representing multilingual text in digital environments finally solves the problem of how to share Tibetan-script materials between different applications and different operating system platforms.  This fact was recognized during a recent conference,[26] attended by many of the major producers of both digital Tibetan texts and Tibetan-script computer software, where the participants agreed to adopt Unicode as the standard format for interchange of Tibetan materials.[27]  This decision represents a departure from past practice of using roman-letter transliteration as the common import/export format for Tibetan materials.  It also provides a framework within which individual users can continue to work in their current computer environments—most of which do not yet support display of Unicode Tibetan and hence must employ one or another proprietary scheme for displaying Tibetan script—while ensuring that their work can be shared with others and can be used in future computer environments that support Unicode Tibetan. 

Beyond Unicode, a second significant development is seen in the area of standards that define the general format of documents.  To the extent that the Internet allows users in different locations, using different computer equipment and having different interests to share digital resources, it is essential that standardized formats are defined and adhered to.  For example, when multiple independent institutions engage in the cataloguing of Tibetan materials, their work will be most useful to the wider community if they follow a common cataloguing format since standardized catalogue records can be accessed through a variety of means and can be easily unified.[28]  The 1990s saw the establishment of a number of important formatting standards.  Most prominent among these has been HTML (HyperText Markup Language).  Although HTML is merely one instance of SGML (Standard Generalized Markup Language), as the driving force behind the WorldWideWeb it has revolutionized the Internet and the manner in which we now access and share information.  A further instance of SGML, called XML (eXtensible Markup Language), builds upon the success of HTML while going beyond its limitations.  Especially important for our purposes is XML’s ability to explicitly define both the structure and the content of the data, enabling the data to stand independent of any particular application or context.  And because it fully incorporates Unicode, XML represents the first truly practical standard for the preservation and dissemination of marked up Tibetan-script materials in a durable, portable and interoperable digital form.

Support for the creation, display, and processing of Unicode Tibetan materials 

Although we might assume that worldwide adoption of the Unicode standard necessarily entails that Tibetan (and all other scripts) will be supported in computer environments, in fact the definition of the character set for Tibetan script in Unicode is only one essential ingredient in the recipe for standardized support for Tibetan.  The other ingredients include rendering (displaying the Unicode characters in Tibetan script), keyboarding (defining how to create the various letters and letter combinations when typing) and string ordering (used when sorting words in dictionary order).  Ancillary ingredients include converters from legacy Tibetan script formats to Unicode, lexicons for use by automated spell-checkers, and so on. 

The Dzongkha Development Commission in Bhutan and The Orient Foundation (U.K.) have been working for a number of years to specify and develop all of the various tools that are required to support Unicode-based computing in Tibetan-script languages such as Dzongkha, the national language of Bhutan.[29]  Wherever possible these Unicode components are defined within the framework of open international standards so that they can be readily implemented across a variety of operating systems and platforms.  Dzongkha-specific tools for rendering, keyboarding, string ordering, and conversion of legacy data are now nearing completion.  With these essential components in place we can reasonably hope to see standardized support for Unicode Tibetan within the next year or so. 

Once Unicode support for Tibetan is widely implemented we can anticipate some immediate benefits.  At present, proprietary (and incompatible) font-encoded formats are the most suitable formats for publishing printed Tibetan books but they are the least suitable formats for searching, indexing, interchanging data, manipulating information in databases and spreadsheets, and so forth.  Roman transliteration, although an excellent basis for searching, interchange and other generic processing, must be converted to Tibetan script prior to publishing.  After the data is converted from roman letters to Tibetan letters, care must be taken that any corrections made during proofreading of the Tibetan-script version are subsequently reflected in the roman-letter version, a step that is often overlooked.  Furthermore, most formatting information that is added during the process of laying out the text for publishing cannot readily be mirrored in the roman-letter version.  In contrast, support for Unicode Tibetan will mean that all text data used during computer typesetting of books for publishing will be immediately available in a format suitable for integration into a searchable text database, and vice versa.  In short, Unicode support will enable all digital Tibetan materials to be directly readable, searchable and printable in Tibetan script, with any corrections or added formatting applied to the digital text itself rather than to a derivative version.[30] 

The Tibetan Knowledge Consortium and The Classical Tibetan Knowledge Program 

Responding to the urgent need for securing and revitalizing Tibetan Buddhist culture, four of the leading Tibetan cultural conservancy organizations joined together in February 2001 to form the Tibetan Knowledge Consortium.[31]  Over the past two decades the individual consortium members have developed relationships with the prominent lineage holders and have established cultural documentation programs with more than forty monasteries, libraries and other institutions throughout the Tibetan cultural sphere.  In collaboration with its affiliates and partners in Asia, the consortium is now leading an initiative to collect, conserve, integrate and provide universal access to the extant literary and living cultural traditions of Tibet’s endangered classical heritage.  This initiative, entitled The Classical Tibetan Knowledge Program (CTKP), utilizes the above-mentioned international standards and recent advances in digital technology to implement far-reaching programs on a relatively modest budget. 

As a necessary foundation for undertaking the mission of the CTKP, networked multimedia computers, digitizing equipment, digital storage media and other new media technologies are being installed at 30 major libraries and monasteries in the Tibetan cultural areas.  Locally based librarians and other community members are trained in management of these facilities and utilization of the digital resources.  Training and employment opportunities are also provided in the key tasks of digitizing Tibetan Buddhist cultural materials via: 

·        Creating comprehensive electronic catalogues of surviving Tibetan literature.

·        Inputting the contents of traditional woodblock printed texts to create a searchable digital library of classical Tibetan texts.

·        Using digital technology to create annotated critical editions and refined English translations of key Tibetan works.

·        Recording and digitizing oral commentaries given by senior lineage holders and master teachers.

·        Producing visual documentary records relating to religious instruction and rituals, medicine and the arts, using digital video technology. 

Once standardized support for Tibetan is widely available, the digitized cultural materials will be collected together, integrated and cross-linked within an online multimedia repository that can be accessed via the Internet from anywhere in the world.[32]  In this way, digital technology enables endangered texts and instruction lineages to be recorded and re-transmitted across the barriers of time and physical distance at very low cost.  

Other significant features of this initiative: 

·        Priorities for cultural preservation are determined in consultation with senior lineage holders.

·        Monasteries and other traditional institutions are offered guidance and technical assistance in using digital technology to further their overall mission of transmitting knowledge and skills from one generation to the next.

·        Technical knowledge is transferred to the local communities so that program management and development can be devolved to indigenous institutions in the regional area.

·        Portals to the online resource repository enable Tibetan Buddhist groups and Tibetan cultural organizations worldwide to make their own digital resources available to others on the CTKP website.

·        A comprehensive online directory of worldwide Tibetan cultural materials, maintained by the consortium, can be used to locate sought-after resources.

·        Local educators are trained in the authoring of sophisticated multimedia instructional modules.

·        A database system for cataloguing Tibetan cultural materials is being developed using non-proprietary standards-based tools for multilingual computing.[33]

·        Infrastructure development and training programs promote enhanced communication (via email), dissemination of cultural information (via upload to, and download from, the website) and the growth of “information communities” (such as mail lists, chat rooms electronic bulletin boards and news groups) among people and institutions throughout the Tibetan cultural sphere.

·        Digital resources in English translation, made available to the general public, can help people everywhere gain a deeper understanding and appreciation for the philosophical, artistic and cultural traditions of Tibetan Buddhist civilization.

·        Essential source materials in digital form, made available to international scholars, researchers, libraries and academic institutions, serve as the basis for contemporary scholarly research, analysis and the preparation of authoritative translations and instructional materials.

Typical applications of digitized Tibetan Buddhist materials 

We have already seen some examples of how the availability of these digital resources, along with the tools and infrastructure needed to support interactive computing in Tibetan, will help stimulate revitalization of traditional Tibetan Buddhist culture within the indigenous societies.  Digitized audio and visual recordings of the living instruction lineages serve as the basis for study, teaching, and the preparation of multimedia instructional modules while digitized texts are used as the basis for invigorated book publishing in Tibetan communities across South Asia. 

Furthermore, taking Tibetan literary materials as an example, the availability of the books in digital format (whether as scanned images or typed input), assures that teachers and students will have access to needed texts.  Teachers can select and extract passages from a huge corpus of material and can, on demand, print just the desired pages in the exact quantities needed, such as for teaching a class.  Because a digital library is highly compact and portable (it can fit on just a few CDs) and because individual texts can be easily transmitted via electronic means, teachers will rarely lack a text they need—whether as the basis for expanded oral explanation or for conducting a particular Buddhist practice or ritual.  We can imagine a scenario where a lama travels to a particular place in order to give a teaching and then learns at the last minute that the scheduled teaching has been changed and he will need a book that he did not bring along with him.  Or perhaps a statue needs to be consecrated or a particular ritual needs to be performed and the lama lacks the required texts in printed form.  It is easy to see how the availability of texts in digital form, either on CD or via the Internet, might be very helpful in such circumstances. 

The existence of comprehensive and searchable texts and reference works will facilitate the creation of thorough and accurate translations of Tibetan Buddhist books into other languages.  These translations, in turn, will not only help to bring the seminal Buddhist values of non-violence, wisdom, compassion and ethical self-restraint into the wider world but will also be useful to Tibetans who wish to teach Buddhism in languages other than Tibetan.

Facilitating access to the cultural resources is essential but not sufficient 

Essential though it may be, access to digitized books and other cultural resources is not sufficient to save the living culture.[34]  The living culture is embodied in the people and especially in the highly trained masters.  To fully appreciate this point we need to recognize what it means to be a master, to possess true mastery of a particular body of knowledge or technique.  Let us consider the example of mastery in the field of music.  Although both masters and students might benefit from the availability of sheet music, merely preserving the musical scores cannot, by itself, preserve the living tradition of musical mastery.  Similarly, preserving the musical instruments, the concert halls, and even the recordings of masterful performances is not sufficient to preserve the living tradition.  Mastery is gained in the context of the interaction between teachers and students, in a disciplined manner, over the course of many years.  The existence of schools and training academies is thus a principal requirement for the continuity of these living traditions of mastery.  Whether we are speaking about master artists or musicians, masters of the martial arts, or meditation masters—their knowledge, experience and personal development can never be fully captured in words, or even on film or videotape.  Mastery is lived experience and as such can only be transmitted from teacher to student through direct instruction and training. 

Thus, in order to truly maintain the continuity of this 2,500-year-old tradition, the monasteries and other training institutions must be supported both materially and technically.  Whatever attempts are made to advance Tibetan Buddhist culture must therefore incorporate the goal of ensuring that there continue to be qualified master teachers (lamas) in the world who are able to correctly teach the ancient wisdom that is recorded in the books.  Without qualified teachers, the books themselves are practically useless, no matter how perfectly they are preserved.  The true goal of the books, in conjunction with the oral instruction lineages, is to produce a special kind of person: ethical, mindful, wise, compassionate, skilful, logical—in short, a person who possesses mastery of these inner arts. 

Sustaining a fragile tradition 

We have seen that the need for support of traditional Tibetan Buddhist culture is urgently felt and can be addressed in certain ways through the creative application of digital technology.  At the same time, whatever support is given should lead to the creation of sustainable infrastructure, programs and services.  In particular, there must be investment in training the indigenous people of the Tibetan cultural sphere, to build local capacity for carrying forward these important cultural revitalization activities.  The CTKP, for example, has specific plans within its overall program for devolving development and management of its programs and facilities to the regional communities and institutions. 

Channels must be established that enable technical, financial and material support to flow into the monasteries and other cultural institutions within Tibetan Buddhist societies.  Members of the Tibetan Knowledge Consortium have been successful in obtaining material support in the form of donations of new and used computer equipment and computer software from corporate sponsors.  Private foundations and individual donors have contributed generously to the monasteries to support housing, scholarship and food funds, and also sanitation, water and health projects.  As these channels become well established, fund raising and administration can be devolved to the local institutions themselves. 

The availability of digital Tibetan Buddhist resources can also play an important role in building self-sufficiency within the monasteries and other classical Tibetan institutions.  Beyond the obvious merit for both teachers and students, the teaching of Tibetan Buddhism in languages other than Tibetan—facilitated by digital resources and reference materials that support translation activities—will enable a wider audience to appreciate the importance of the monasteries and other traditional institutions where the teachers receive their training.  As people learn about the monasteries, mainly through direct contact with the skilled teachers who come from them, they can begin to recognize these institutions as the “fertile ground for growing masters of the inner arts” and, thereupon, take an interest in their continued existence.  Also, to the extent that the digital resources are seen as useful or valuable in the modern academies of the industrialized nations, it is feasible to charge subscription fees along with access and copy fees.  These fees can then be used to help support the digital preservation work in particular as well as the overall programs of the classical Tibetan institutions that perpetuate the living cultural tradition.