BDRC is pleased to announce three valuable additions to the archive which will be of enormous interest to students of Tibetan and Buddhist Studies. These have been generously provided by Jonathan Silk, Professor of Buddhist Studies at Leiden University, with an introduction to each. They constitute a unique "behind the scenes" point of view on the world of 19th and early 20th c. Buddhist Studies, and the incredible work of scholars at the time. What is special about all of these new items is that they are heavily annotated by early European scholars of Buddhism. While the personal archives o ..read more

The avatar of AI in the Tibetan community is Geshe Lobsang Monlam, PhD, founder and CEO of the Monlam Tibetan IT Research Center. Geshe Monlam's mission to revolutionize Tibetan language technology in order to break down barriers and share Buddhist knowledge resonates with many areas of BDRC's work. Geshe Monlam made a huge splash in November 2023 when he unveiled groundbreaking AI developments for Tibetan at an event in Dharamsala that was as well-staged and exciting as an Apple product launch. (View a video of the event in this Facebook video). The highlight was a highly-accurate machine ..read more

Buddhist Digital Resource Center (formerly Tibetan Buddhist Resource Center) mourns the passing of Tulku Thondup Rinpoche. He was a highly realized master who devoted his life to preserving and sharing the authentic Dharma in its two aspects, the realized Dharma and the scriptural Dharma. Rinpoche's transmission of the realized Dharma was inconceivable and only his peers can fully appreciate it. Rinpoche's great service to the preservation and dissemination of the scriptural Dharma has benefitted millions in Tibet and globally.  In addition to the skillful means of writing and translati ..read more

BDRC Founder E. Gene Smith (August 10, 1936–December 16, 2010). Photo from Digital Dharma: Recovering Wisdom, a photography book about Gene published by Wisdom Publications. Our founder Gene Smith was a legendary scholar and advocate for Tibetan Buddhist literary culture, and the library that he founded—the Buddhist Digital Resource Center—has become the largest online Buddhist library in the world, preserving and sharing Buddhist literature with readers and users all over the world. In many ways, Gene saw the future. He saw how technology could revolutionize Buddhist preservation and he s ..read more

The Buddhist Digital Resource Center is delighted to present our newly released BDRC Mobile App. The app allows users to view and search the entire BDRC library on their mobile phone, giving you access to 28 million pages of Buddhist literature via the slim iPhone or Android in your hands.  The Newly Released App is available from both the Apple Store and Google Play. We encourage you to browse and explore the millions of pages of Buddhist wisdom literature now at your fingertips.  The Buddhist Digital Resource Center is the largest online archive of Tibetan and Buddhist texts in ..read more

We are delighted to announce that the Buddhist Digital Resource Center has recently been awarded the 2023 Aming Tu Prize, given by the Dharma Drum Institute for Liberal Arts (DILA), for outstanding creative contribution to digital Buddhist studies. Our Executive Director Dr. Jann Ronis and our Chief Technology Officer Elie Roux will receive the prize next April at the award ceremony in Taipei.  Executive Director Dr. Jann Ronis said, "BDRC is flattered and humbled to receive the prestigious Aming Tu Prize. We offer our grateful thanks to all involved, including Ven. Huimin Bhikshu, Profe ..read more

This is the age of Artificial Intelligence (AI), which raises questions for all of us. How are we going to use AI? How can AI help us do our work better and faster? What is the future of AI? Here at the Buddhist Digital Resource Center, at the cutting edge of Buddhist Digital Humanities, these questions are especially relevant. And we are already answering some of them. Our developer Élie Roux's article below describes a novel approach to an old problem, the problem of cataloging. Can AI help our archive speed up the work of librarians and technicians with our backlog of millions of pages of ..read more

Geshe Monlam giving a talk about the Monlam Dictionary project, in Taiwan. Courtesy of Monlam IT. In 2022, Geshe Monlam and his team of more than 150 editors and staff published the Grand Monlam Tibetan Dictionary, containing Tibetan-language definitions for over 360,000 words. It was an unprecedented achievement. When printed in book form the current version of this evolving dictionary came to 223 volumes. Through a recent interview with Geshe Monlam, we learned that the man behind this terrific work is a modern day Renaissance man. Read on.  Around the years 2000-2002, the monks of ..read more

We have been busy at BDRC and we are delighted to share some new BDRC developments that we know will enhance our users' experience of the archive.  We recently added several thousand volumes of new e-texts to the archive adding up to over one million pages in total! These are machine generated e-texts that have been edited through a hybrid process involving both human corrections and artificial intelligence and have a very high accuracy level. The research potential of this new and growing e-text corpus is virtually unlimited. This is very much a group effort and we would like to give s ..read more

Tibetan pilgrims during the Kailash kora. By Jean-Marie Hullot from Wikimedia Commons. Why do Tibetan Buddhists go on pilgrimage? They go on pilgrimage for many reasons but mainly they go to accumulate merit, to grow spiritually, and to engage in a sacred, meritorious, and meaningful activity. They go for blessing and empowerment, and for purification and penance. They also go to grow in their understanding of the world, to travel and expand their knowledge and their horizons. And they go for pleasure, for novelty, for fun, and all the usual reasons that people undertake long and arduous jo ..read more