Lost Textual Treasures

Most Tibetan texts are very old and, if copies can be found at all, they are usually in a state of decay. Tibetan texts are published in "pecha format," on  long, rectangular pages, unbound and printed on both sides. The front of one page and back of the next are usually read together, as in the picture at left. Pechas are often printed on rice paper or other poor quality materials, and are inadequately maintained due to a lack of facilities and poor economic conditions. The few texts which have been saved since the upheavals of the last few decades were themselves prepared in India using inexpensive non-acid-free paper or handmade rice paper. The print on the front of the page is often visible on the back side of the page, making it very difficult to read the text on either side. Yet, even this quality of printing is very difficult to obtain; many important texts exist only in traditional "woodblock" form.

In woodblock printing, each page of text is painstakingly mirrored and carved on solid, thick wood panels that are then covered with ink and used to imprint pages. This method allows multiple copies of texts to be printed by hand. The alternative is to copy each text by hand. Despite the development of metal-based and other methods of mechanical typography in China centuries prior to Gutenberg, woodblocks continued to be used after that time in China and other Asian cultures where the thousands of ligatures required by the alphabetic system made metal design impractical. Only in recent years have modern printing technologies been developed for use with such alphabets, but due to lack of resources, woodblock printing remains the traditional method of preserving and publishing texts in Tibet.

Unfortunately, because of the changing times and situation, there are very few people who do the work of wood carving and printing. It is time consuming, low paying, and very hard work. The craft is dying for these reasons and also because there is little interest in producing texts in a format that cannot readily be edited. To address this problem, Nitartha is creating digital Tibetan texts .

Another component of the Tibetan textual tradition is the existence of an oral commentarial tradition.  Since the very beginning of formal education in India, teachers have used the oral medium to explain and comment on the basic teachings and practices of the tradition. Today oral commentaries serve both as a explanation of texts which are essential to fully understanding texts, and as independent sources of information not available in written texts.  Thus, without oral explanation from those familiar with the traditions in which the texts are written, the meaning  of the text remains partially inaccessible.

Thus a more subtle problem exists, even for the few physically-intact Tibetan documents: Tibetan literature remains nearly inaccessible to those untrained in traditional Tibetan educational systems. In addition to the traditional reliance on oral commentary, texts use extensive abbreviations (necessitated by the difficulties of printing), lack sectioning and references, and are obscured by oblique styles. In such cases, simply preserving the historical documents as ancient texts is not enough; we must try to preserve some of the key elements of the culture in which these texts were created and through which they can be understood by today's students. Otherwise the texts may too easily can become mere historical curiosities.

Nitartha international has launched a series of projects to insure that the information contained in the Tibetan texts, the educational systems in which the texts are studied, as well as the original texts themselves, are preserved for future generations. To meet these needs, Nitartha international works with renowned scholars of Tibetan studies who are tasked with restoring and editing Tibetan texts to make them more accessible to modern readers, with the aim of publishing these texts in modern formats.