Printing of Traditional Tibetan Texts at the Derge Publishing House.

THDL Literature Collections

THDL's Literature section is a nexus for all issues revolving around literature in the field of Tibetan and Himalayan Studies. Use of it is open to all interested parties, regardless of involvement with any other part of THDL. The main foci of the literature section are cataloging of large collections, such as The Collected Tantras of the Ancients; digitization of texts either in the form of images or marked-up texts, as well as summary and analysis of texts within the realm of Tibetan and Himalayan Literature.

The Literature Collections encompass several projects focused on Tibetan and Himalayan Literature. The Nyingma Project, or the Samantabhadra Collection, was the initial impetus for the Literature Collections. It began as a project to catalog the many editions of Collected Tantras of the Ancients. These catalogs are directly connected to scanned images of the folios, kindly provided by Tibetan Buddhist Resource Center. Utlimately, these catalogs will be connected to digitized versions of the texts that can be searched and downloaded. This project, which now covers all Nyingma literature, is directed by David Germano at the University of Virginia. The Bönpo Project is focused on cataloging and digitizing collections of Bönpo literature. Its initial phase has been to catalog the important, Oral Traditions of Zhang Zhung. This project is directed by Anne Klein at Rice University. Another project associated with the THDL Literature Collections is the Shechen Monastery Text Input Project directed by Matthieu Ricard of Shechen Monastery. They have entered a number of important Tibetan texts, some of which are available for download in several formats from the Shechen Monastery Text Input page.

The THDL Literature Collections provides other resources for the study of Tibetan literature. In the Features box on the left, there are links to a bibliographic guide, which will help the user locate Tibetan texts using the THDL catalogs and other web resources. The oral commentaries project involves the archiving of audio and video recordings of oral commentaries on a broad variety of Tibetan literary genres, as well as lengthy commentaries on the great classics of Tibetan literature and readings by contemporary poets and novelists. The genres project involves multiple scholars who are compiling a large nested hierarchical guide to Tibetan literary genres, as well as providing on-line resources for the study of this topic.

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