If information wants to be free, spiritual information wants to be liberating. Just ask these Tibetan Buddhists.
In Arthur C. Clarke's famous short story "The Nine Billion Names of God," a Tibetan monastery uses a huge mainframe to process a coded list of all the possible names of God. The Americans working on the project think the lamas are crazy, but when the last line of code spits out, the stars begin to wink out in the night sky, ushering in the end of the world. I read Clarke's tale as a kid, and though I later found out his theology was off (in no real sense do Buddhists believe in God), his tale has always stuck with me.
So I'm not altogether surprised when a young Tibetan in maroon robes ushers me into the Computer Center at Sera Mey, a Gelukpa Buddhist monastery in southern India. Ten young, novice monks hunch in front of fading monitors attached to decrepit XTs, with piles of unbound Tibetan manuscripts at their sides - these are 3-by-20-inch woodblock prints, unwrapped from their yellow cloth and ready to be transliterated into English characters. Not only are these texts holy, but some are extremely rare, having been smuggled out of Chinese-occupied Tibet and rescued from oblivion. The monks' eyes flit between the gnarled curves of the Tibetan script (imagine graceful Klingon) and fuzzy green alphanumeric characters. It's a striking image: the electronically illuminated manuscripts of the Information Age. But does it mean that we've come full circle, only to enter a new Dark Age?
A monk leads me along an unpaved road to meet Michael Roach, the project's American director. Past the simple, low-slung houses, I see tractors puttering along rolling farmland that only two decades ago was thick jungle. A pack of young, exuberant monks crowds into a temple courtyard nearby. Sera Mey is currently hosting the ritual philosophical debates peculiar to Tibetan monasticism: monks have come from all over India for the contest. When the mostly young men debate, they bark out their arguments, lunge forward, clap their hands and yell "Tsa!" to make their point. It looks like they're hashing out baseball stats, not Buddhist logic.
Upstairs in the temple, a number of monks are trying to get their new HP LaserJet to work. Michael Roach introduces himself. A Princeton grad, Roach has been a Buddhist for over two decades, and despite his blue eyes and pink cheeks, he seems made for saffron robes. Between overseeing the Asian Classics Input Project and preparing for that evening's debates, he's pretty busy, but he warmly invites my questions. He tells me that the project was initiated six years ago by the Venerable Khen Rinpoche Geshe Lobsang Tharchin, former abbot for Sera Mey and now the head lama at a Mongolian monastery in New Jersey. After releasing three sets of floppy disks, the Asian Classics Input Project recently put out its first CD-ROM, Woodblock to Laser, which includes a half-million words of Buddhist philosophy, as well as catalogs, some nifty search software, and eleven woodblock images of Buddhist masters scanned from a celebrated copy of the Prajnaparamita (Sutra of wisdom). Unlike similar CD-ROM projects, such as a recent edition of the complete Pali Tipitaka Buddhist canon that costs hundreds of dollars, the project's material is essentially free – the offices ask for a US$15 donation, but they'll even waive that. ("Some of the practitioners ordering Woodblock to Laser don't even have CD-ROM players," Robert Taylor, the assistant project director, told me later. "They just want to place the discs on their altars.")
Roach himself was drawn to Buddhism after his mother, father, and brother died in rapid succession. "I wanted to know why that happened, and where they all went," he says matter-of-factly. He went to Dharamsala, the Dalai Lama's residence-in-exile in India but returned to New Jersey to study with Geshe Tharchin. Roach became intrigued with computers a few years later, when he and a programmer designed the first Tibetan fonts. When his partner abruptly quit, he was forced to sink or swim. "I literally didn't know how to turn the machine on. I went to a computer store and they laughed at me." Nowadays, Roach works with beautiful PostScript Tibetan fonts that have been designed by others, and he can concentrate on content.
The Asian Classics Input Project's priority are the 4,500 texts in the Kangyur and Tengyur - canonical collections of Tibetan translations of early Buddhist Sanskrit classics - and a body of related commentaries. Since Muslims destroyed nearly all of the Sanskrit originals after invading northern India in 1192, these Tibetan collections are a treasure trove for scholars and practicing Buddhists. The project is transcribing Tibetan commentaries as well. The texts themselves range in length from more than twelve woodblock volumes to one word, om. Because the hand-carved characters aren't uniform, scanning isn't yet technologically feasible. At the current rate of 1,000 woodblock pages a month, Roach says, "We will be done in, uh, about 40 years."
Besides inputting the texts, Roach and his colleagues had to get their hands on them in the first place. When the Chinese invaded Tibet in 1959, the Communists looked upon the monastic tradition as a corrupt theocracy exploiting the peasant proletariat. "When the Soviets destroyed Buddhism they collected the books," Roach says with a touch of irony. "The Chinese burned them." The library of the original Sera Mey monastery, containing thousands of texts, was destroyed by artillery fire.
A small percentage of monks managed to escape into India, where they were crowded into the steaming refugee camps of Buxaduar. While hundreds of their fellows died from tuberculosis and other ills, teams of monks reprinted entire texts from memory: after etching flat stones, they'd mix charcoal and cow's urine for ink, printing onto cheap Indian paper. Many of these manuscripts are now crumbling, so the Asian Classics Input Project has begun importing the wisdom into a new medium. Meanwhile, according to Roach, an underground network inside Tibet continues to recover the thousands of manuscripts lost or hidden in 1959. After digging them out of caves or rubble, Tibetans will sneak them out by train through Hong Kong, or cross directly into Nepal after bribing the Chinese border guards with whiskey, nylons, and cigarettes. Roach picks up a desktop-published copy of the Commentary on Valid Perception, the book that he and the other monks are to debate this evening. "This manuscript was smuggled out in a laundry bag."
The Asian Classics Input Project presses the CD-ROMs in the West, a necessary concession given the primitive resources at Sera Mey – the ancient machines aren't networked and have no hard disks or modems. The work itself is plodding. Each text must be entered twice, then goes through numerous spelling checks and computerized edits. "Our biggest problem is to get the older monks to do the final proofread," Roach says. "The number of monks or scholars capable of checking the material is very small."
Roach has also had to figure out a way to encourage the inputters to be productive. Many of the young monks were placed at Sera Mey at a very young age, usually by their parents, and their aptitude and commitment vary widely. They're no more thrilled by data entry than your average teen at boarding school. But by offering financial incentives to both the individual monks and the monastery bursar, along with providing valuable computer training, the project has been able to motivate the monks to input a tremendous number of texts, exceeding 30,000 pages to date. "Our kids are all the rejects from the monastery," Roach explains. "They're the violent kids, the kids who are very stupid, the kids who can't study at all. We wanted it that way. Otherwise they're wandering around the monastery getting in trouble." Roach laughs good-naturedly.
Of course, now the kids get in trouble with computers – doodling with ASCII characters or playing games the Indian computer repair men slip them on disk. One teenage novice I spoke to was especially fond of Pac Man. He also admitted to sneaking out to laymen's homes at night to watch the MTV Asia programs beamed down from STAR TV's pan-Asian satellites (see "Dish-Wallahs," Wired 1.2, page 75).
But, despite the distractions of the Information Age, the Asian Classics Input Project remains on track and has recently trained monks at five other monasteries to input text. Most of the project's money has been provided by private funders and by Roach's paychecks from the Andin International diamond and jewelry corporation, a successful Israeli-owned outfit previously located in New York's diamond district. Roach helps run the company's worldwide diamond purchasing operations, though between the diamond trade's shady business environment and materialistic customers, you'd think a monk would avoid it like the plague. "It's a very difficult business," Roach admits. "It's like a mafia." Then he smiles gently, the irony of the situation by no means lost on him. It turns out he was led to the trade by a powerful, and secret, experience he had while meditating. "In our tradition," he says, "diamonds have a very important meaning, a very secret meaning." One of the most famous texts in Woodblock to Laser is the Tibetan version of the Vajrachchedikasutra, the Diamond Sutra famous throughout Chinese Buddhism.
By working in the world, Roach helps support the poor monks at Sera Mey and can better ensure that the Asian Classics Input Project can spread the dharma – the Buddha's law, or teachings – without strings attached. "We give everything away. We've given away 10,000 discs now to 50 countries – we just had our first order from Africa." When someone associated with the University of New Mexico took the liberty of posting the CD-ROM data on the Internet, the monks at Sera Mey were overjoyed. "It's very exciting, the idea of nobody owning it now. Once it's on the Internet, how can you stop it?" Roach smiles and shrugs.
Part of the project's agreement with the monasteries that house the new input centers is that it can spread the digital version of anything it inputs free of charge, while the monasteries retain publishing rights. After all, the Net (where all the material will wind up) is the perfect place to release valuable texts without going through the financial hassle and exclusivity of printed volumes. There's a globe full of Buddhists, along with scholars who can't find publishers, who just want to get the stuff out there. If information wants to be free, spiritual information wants to be liberating.
Though some older monks were initially resistant to the Asian Classics Input Project's contribution to this digital wave of change, Roach says now they're thrilled. "The dharma is like medicine to the mind," Roach says. "The more it spreads, the happier they are." A venerated lay Tibetan master named Gelek Rinpoche, based in Michigan, even wrote a classical stotra, or eulogy, in praise of Geshe Lobsang Tharchin and the CD-ROM.
Of course, the Asian Classics Input Project isn't spreading everything. Though the monks did input some tantric texts – Buddhism's esoteric doctrines and rituals – the project didn't want to make them public. At first, the monks were going to encrypt them on the CD-ROM. Now the project will send you the tantras on floppy, but only if you've received the proper transmissions – not the electronic kind, but the guru-to-initiate kind.
When the first Sanskrit Buddhist texts were translated into the simple shepherd's tongue of Tibet, more than a millennium had passed since Shakyamuni Buddha sat beneath the bodhi tree. Though Tibetan religious thought was by no means static, the philosopher-monks made considerable effort to keep their dharma crystal clear. Isolated in the snowy wastes of the Roof of the World, they thought of themselves not as altering or improving Buddhist thought, but as clarifying it for changing generations. Their primary orientation remained towards the past: their lineage, the early masters, the texts of the Buddha.
But if Buddhist philosophy is to survive and thrive in the 21st century, the dharma must be reformatted for the future. For his part, Roach is looking forward to a world without books: one of cyberspace and multimedia. Because of enormous Chinese pressure against Buddhist traditions, Tibetan rituals and chants have been dying out, and he wants to capture them on CD-ROM. The Asian Classics Input Project has already experimented with animating the complex visualizations used in many ritual practices. "A Tibetan text will take ten pages to describe what one angel looks like," Roach says. "But if you had a master direct the animation of it, you could just see the whole thing."
When Roach talks about the intersection of Buddhism and digital media, he gets a visionary glint in his eye reminiscent of VR designers and Net-heads speculating about the future. I'm not surprised when he admits he devoured science fiction in the '70s before embarking on the rigorous and demanding path of traditional Gelukpa monastic study. Roach is especially excited by the prospect of creating hypertext environments for Buddhist scripture, and points out that Tibetan commentaries already anticipate the nests and links of hypertext. "The greatest piece of Tibetan literature is Jey Tsongkhapa's Lam Rim Chenmo (Greater steps of the path), which is a big piece of plagiarism. It's a long string of quotations taken from many ancient texts. Most Tibetan commentaries are like an onion skin. You start with the newer commentaries and peel your way backward.
"Correct authorship means transmitting what was already transmitted – but in a different order, or a different format. So the future of authorship in this tradition will rest with those who design the roadways through huge databases. If you have a hundred thousand pages online, it becomes overwhelming. What do you do with it? You need an interactive system."
In a recent Asian Classics Input Project publication, Roach designed a simple hypertext mock-up on paper, which draws from widely scattered sources to demonstrate the intimate relationship between morality and the concept of emptiness, the tricky and pivotal notion that all things have no intrinsic "self-nature." By selecting different keywords from the various citations, the user gets a feel for the complex web of Buddhist philosophy. The interactive, probing nature of hypertext surfing is ideally suited for the logical, dialectical approach to enlightened understanding that the Tibetan monastic tradition prizes. "Ultimately, this system will be in VR cyberspace. You'll put on a helmet and come out two hours later, and you'll be much more educated. Of course, most of the projects being discussed for virtual reality are for pleasure and entertainment. That's why people are spending millions of dollars – they see what's coming. But if you can try to get a little niche of spiritual virtual reality, that would be wonderful. There will never be very many people interested in these things. But the people who are will be able to learn it much faster, and in a much more powerful way."
For a brief demonstration of his own digital enhancement, Roach whips out a Midwest Micro laptop to show how he uses the Asian Classics Input Project's data and the sophisticated logical operations of the search program to prepare for the topic of the evening's debates: drachompay sem tama, "the mind at the penultimate moment before achieving nirvana." By tradition, books or notes aren't allowed at debates, so a powerful grasp of the material is
a must. Memory is prized in Roach's order – he's spent much of the last twenty years memorizing thousands of lines of philosophical
texts. He types in a few words, hits Return, and the machine spits out a juicy passage. In a few hours, he'll use the data in a philosophical ritual centuries old, one of the core intellectual and spiritual practices of a culture that never cared much for technological change.
Excerpts From In Praise of the ACIP CD-ROM: Woodblock to Laser
Great friend of mankind,
Your intellect (Lo) is deep and vast
Born of the hundred thousand
Good and wonderful (sang) deeds
You've accomplished.
I bow down and salute you,
King of scholars,
For your surpassing (Tharchin)
And courageous efforts
To share the precious knowledge
Of our snowy land
Throughout the countries of the world.
The light of the disk
Is endless
Like the light of the disks
Of the sky,
Sun and moon;
The generosity of your gift
Is endless
We are attracted to it
And caught,
Like fish in a net;
The lands of the globe
Are endless
Where the goodness
Of your contribution
Will spread;
The people you reach
Are endless,
And what you do
Is of ultimate value.
...
A hundred thousand
Mirrors of the disk
Hold the great classics
Of authors
Beyond counting.
No longer
Do we need
To wander aimlessly
In the pages of catalogs
Beyond counting.
...
With a single push
Of our finger
On a button
We pull up the shining gems
Of citations,
Of text and commentary,
Whatever we seek;
This is something
Fantastic,
Beyond dreams.
...
But you went further,
And spread the disk
All throughout
The entire world;
A feat
More amazing still!
I throw to you
A thousand petalled blooms
Of congratulations,
And I rejoice
In the kind deed you have done,
Which I know
Will satisfy the wishes
Of people throughout the world.
May your good activities
Spread to wherever
The earth spreads,
And there too
May the praises
Of your deeds be sung.
November 8, 1993 (translated by Michael Roach)
Other Digital Dharma Resources
The Electronic Buddhist Archives, a subdirectory of the Australian National University's amazing Coombspapers social science databank, provides access to a mother lode of papers, bibliographies, and texts - both originals and translations. DharmaNet International is another organization that wants to "cultivate and nourish a global online sangha" (Sanskrit for "the Buddhist community") through a beefy electronic journal named GASSHO, a variety of electronic text and database archives, and a global net of BBSes that stretch from Berkeley to Singapore (major hubs include Body Dharma in Oakland, California, (+1 (510) 836 4717) and Access To Insight in Massachusetts (+1 (508) 433 5847).Their Dharma Electronic Files Archive contains a number of texts in English translation. GIFs of tantric deities have popped up on BodhiNet, another dharma BBS (dial the BBS Tiger Team, at +1 (510) 268 0102); mailing lists exist for both scholars and practitioners. And some character built a DharmaDebateHall on LambdaMOO. The latest issue of Tricycle, one of America's leading Buddhist magazines, is devoted to digital dharma. Even the Dalai Lama's central Tibetan administration in Dharamsala has an e-mail address (tcrc@unv.ernet.in).
