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ABSTRACT
This paper focuses on the sacred text-production work of a Nyingma Buddhist group based in Berkeley, California. It unpacks their selective engagement with the tools afforded to them by digitisation and new media. Digitisation projects – appearing in growing numbers – offer a powerful resource for the re-assembly of Tibetan Buddhist textual collections scattered in the political upheaval of recent decades. Yet the meeting place between the digital and the sacred is sometimes contested in this context where sacred text is an embodiment of the Buddha’s speech. This paper argues that the choice to print ink-and-paper texts is more than a simple rehearsal of tradition and in fact demands alternative forms of engagement with the potential offered by media tools. It explores how the moral invectives contained within sacred Tibetan texts become reshaped through the prisms of contemporary media and the American sponsorship landscape.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1. In keeping with the practice of many scholars of Tibetan texts (Diemberger Citation2012; Diemberger and Hugh-Jones Citation2015; Schaeffer Citation2009; Smith Citation2001), as well as my interlocutors, I use the terms ‘sacred book’ or ‘sacred text’ to refer to those Tibetan writings that are considered embodiments of the Buddha’s speech. It is precisely this entanglement with the personhood of the Buddha that renders a book ‘sacred’ here, a designation also attributed to the vessels of the Buddha’s body (effigies) and mind (relics) (Diemberger Citation2012).
2. From the Sanskrit term pustaka, this format is based on the prototypic dried palm leaves used in India to house the Buddha’s words before paper was widely used.
3. See, for example, Germano and Heimer’s edited volume ‘Canons at the Boundaries: The Rnying ma Tantras and Shades of Gray Between the Early and Late Translations’.
4. It is this understanding of the book as relic, according to Barrett, that drove the very genesis of printing in seventh-century China in order to replicate Buddhist sutras and proliferate merit (Barrett Citation2008).
5. While block printing became widely used in Tibet in the fifteenth century (Diemberger, Ehrhard, and Kornicki Citation2016) there are instances of select-printed Tibetan texts as far back as the twelfth century, and the first known major Tibetan canonical collection was printed in 1411 under Ming imperial sponsorship (Schaeffer Citation2009, 9).
6. Schaeffer describes a tension between the need to preserve teaching traditions through written recordings and the threat writing posed to closely guarded oral traditions. It is a tension that appears shared by teachers across lineages, recurring in the margins of larger works (Schaeffer Citation2009, 2). However, as printing houses proliferated across Tibet from the fifteenth century onward, the expensive printing projects entangled with (often imperial) patronage to particular schools or lineages to generate new debates. For instance, widespread printing fuelled sectarian conflict over practices of editing and translating. Scholars now decried the textual corruption and rampant spread of errors by their rivals made possible by printing (Schaeffer Citation2009, 101).
7. While TNMC does produce quite a few books in English for the American public, very few of these are directly translated sutra material and are principally Tarthang Tulku’s own books. The small amount of sutra material that is made available through TNMC’s book shop are largely preliminary, accessible, or ‘first turning’ texts, such as a translation of the Dhammapada, or two different abridged versions of the Jataka stories. In other words, they are carefully chosen pieces for spiritual beginners.
8. I am aware of Ruegg’s critique that the use of the term ‘patron’ to translate the Tibetan yon bdag is insufficient and misleading. It fails to reflect the intertwined symmetry of the two parties in this relationship, both of whom give and receive in different ways and whose relative hierarchical position is not a constant (Ruegg Citation2014). While I am mindful of these critiques, I have continued to use the terms ‘patron’ and ‘donor’ here principally because the English baggage affixed to these terms is directly relevant to this particular context where fundraising structures for sacred text production have been purposefully turned towards the American donor public.
9. Namely, the ‘Great Spell of Unsullied Pure Light,’ which promised both longer life and fortunate rebirth for the one who proliferated it. This was, according to Barrett, an appealing prospect to the Empress who had cut a rather bloody and ruthless path to the throne.
10. Since the time of my fieldwork, this particular page has been removed from Tibetan Aid Project’s website and replaced with new but comparable fundraising initiatives.