Overview of various Tibetan calendars and astrological systems.

The China Historical Christian Database (CHCD) quantifies and visualizes the place of Christianity in modern China (1550-1950). It provides users the tools to discover where every Christian church, school, hospital, orphanage, publishing house, and the like were located in China, and it documents who worked inside those buildings, both foreign and Chinese. Collectively, this information creates spatial maps and generates relational networks that reveal where, when, and how Western ideas, technologies, and practices entered China. Simultaneously, it uncovers how and through whom Chinese ideas, technologies, and practices were conveyed to the West. This project breaks new ground in providing quantifiable data about modern Sino-Western relations. Its intuitive interface generates visualizations, lists, and maps for use by the general public, students and teachers in secondary education and colleges, in the US and globally, with English and Chinese navigation. Advanced DH users have open access to its data for elaboration. BU’s digital infrastructure guarantees long-term sustainability, and CHCD’s international collaborations in the USA, Asia, and Europe help promote historical understanding between China and the rest of the world. The CHCD is hosted by the Center for Global Christianity and Mission at Boston University.

The Chinese Religious Text Authority aims to connect bibliographic information across collections, archives, and private libraries in order to map out detailed webs of relationships among producers, publishers, and distributors of religious texts. In this first phase of the project, we focus on a corpus of pre-1949 Chinese Religious texts included in major reprint collections. The data generated from this open-access, international, collaborative project has the potential to reveal formerly undiscovered associations. CRTA was founded in December 2018. We are grateful to Simon Wiles for help with the technical infrastructure and hosting the wiki. CRTA has received and is grateful for support from FROGBEAR, and the University of Colorado.

Khyentse Foundation is pleased to announce the official launch of the Kumarajiva Project (note: website is currently only in Chinese). KF’s latest translation effort focuses primarily on translating into Chinese all the texts in the Tibetan Buddhist canon that are not currently available in the Chinese canon. After a successful pilot project and several years of extensive research and planning, the Kumarajiva Project is now prepared to dive into the immense task of translating more than 130,000 pages of Tibetan texts into Chinese.  Watch Dzongsar Khyentse Rinpoche introduce the project. The Kumarajiva Project is known in Chinese as 圓滿法藏-佛典漢譯計畫, the transliteration of which is “Yu’an Man Fa-Zang.” The Chinese name translates roughly to “enriching the treasury of the dharma” or “making the treasury more perfect than it already is.” The “treasury” refers to the Chinese Buddhist canons. Also, there are numerous texts from other Buddhist canons that are not available in Chinese. The vision of the Kumarajiva Project is to make all Buddhist texts available in Chinese, starting by translating the texts that are available in Tibetan but not in Chinese.

The Tibetan Oral History and Archive Project (TOHAP) is a digital online web archive of oral history interviews in Tibetan and Chinese with accompanying written transcripts (in English) that documents the social and political history of modern Tibet. The interview tapes can be listened to simultaneous with reading the transcripts. The translations were made in a literal style to retain a flavor of the original Tibetan. The TOHAP collection includes a large corpus of interviews from common folks and Drepung monastery monks speaking about their lives, and Tibetan and Chinese officials speaking about modern Tibetan history. An interactive glossary is available to explain Tibetan terms that appear in the transcripts. As of April 2019, the portion of the TOHAP Collection that is available on line consists of 403 tapes (361 from the Political/History collection, 35 from the common folk collection and 7 from the Drepung collection). These come from interviews with 125 interviewees. This comprises on line approximately 500 hours of recordings and about 11,000 pages of transcripts. Future installments will add the small remainder of the Political collection and more tapes and transcripts from the Common Folk and Drepung Collections over the next few years. These interviews were collected by Professor Melvyn C. Goldstein and his assistants/colleagues during a series of research projects on modern Tibet history and society that were funded by the National Geographic Society (1980-81), National Endowment for the Humanities (RO-20261-82, RO-20886-85, RO-21860-89, RO-22251-91, RO-22754-94) and during a large Tibetan Oral History Project funded by the Henry Luce Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities (RZ-20585-00, RZ-50326-05, RZ-50845-08). Professor Goldstein is the John Reynolds Harkness Professor of Anthropology and Co-Director of the Center for Research on Tibet at Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland, Ohio. He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences. Knowledge of the social and political history of Tibet during the second half of the Twentieth Century has been limited by the absence of the voices of everyday Tibetans and officials from the traditional Tibetan government. The Tibetan Oral History and Archive Project was undertaken by Professor Goldstein to collect and preserve these voices and with it a record of the diversity of life as it was lived in Tibet in the traditional and socialist eras. The ensuing Oral History Archive consists of interviews with almost 700 Tibetans (and a few Chinese) living in the Tibet Autonomous Region of China and in exile in India and the West about their lives and modern history. This archive, the largest of its type in the world, contains three collections: the Common Folk Oral History collection, the Political or Historical Collection and the Drepung Monastery Collection.  The Common Folk Collection consists of recorded interviews in Tibet and India with over 600 Tibetans from all strata about their lives during the traditional society and the socialist period through the Cultural Revolution. Its files begin with the code: OR… The Political Collection consists of recorded interviews with former Tibetan government officials who played important roles in Tibet's history. The topics discussed include historical events in both the traditional and socialist periods. Its files begin with the code: H… The Drepung Monastery Collection consists of recorded interviews on monastic social and economic life with roughly 100 monks who were members of Drepung monastery in the traditional era. Drepung monastery is located 5 miles outside of Lhasa and was Tibet's largest monastery, housing about 10,000 monks in 1959 at the end of the traditional era. Its files begin with the code:  M…

Welcome to The Meridian Trust. Browse our content. We offer quality teachings, retreats dialogues and workshops from all Tibetan Buddhist traditions. Shared for free, for all who wish to follow the path. The Meridian Trust creates, curates and shares an extensive collection of Tibetan Buddhist film resources. Our aim is to be a channel, a line, through which Tibetan Buddhist wisdom can flow. Founded in 1985, we hold and share a wealth of material – from the transmissions and teachings of the great Venerable Masters of Tibet, from the late 1970s to the present, with hundreds of hours of teachings, retreats, workshops and talks by those at the forefront of Tibetan Buddhism today. Our resources are available cost-free, in line with Buddhist tradition. We aim to bring this Tibetan Buddhist wisdom to a wider audience, via our new website and translation work. We want to be a hub, through which knowledge flows, across schools. Via partnerships, we wish to bring the message of clear Buddhist thought and action to a new audience who, in these complex times, are seeking tools and views that may help them to live more meaningful and more contented lives.

A collection of Dharma treasures compiled under direction of the late Khenchen Appey Rinpoche.

It is our great pleasure to publish the database of the Toyo Bunko Manuscript Kanjur. The Tibetan research group of the Toyo Bunko launched the project in collaboration with the Open Philology project, an ERC-funded effort based at Leiden University (project 741884), and the project Buddhist Kanjur Collections in Tibet’s Southern and Western Borderlands based at the University of Vienna. Our sincere thanks are due to Prof. Jonathan Silk of Leiden University, Prof. Helmut Tauscher, Dr. Markus Viehbeck, and Dr. Bruno Lainé of the University of Vienna for their participation in the project. We gratefully acknowledge the Taishō Univeristy for permitting us to reproduce the catalogue of the Toyo Bunko Manuscript Kanjur published by Prof. SAITO Kōjun in 1977. We also thank Dr. NAKAMURA Satoru for constructing the website and IJŪIN Shiori for compiling the detailed catalogue of the dKon brtsegs (Ratnakūṭa) section, the data of which are integrated into each item page. The images of the six volumes (vols. 51–56) of the dKon brtsegs (Ratnakūṭa) section are accessible here and will also be seen through the website of the Resources for Kanjur & Tanjur Studies (rKTs), Vienna (see Link). We will continue the project and publish other sections of the Manuscript Kanjur.

CMS,Netcommons,Maple

Tsadra Foundation supports the work of students, practitioners, translators, and researchers of Tibetan Buddhism through the development of digital resources. In taking advantage of contemporary tools in the digital humanities, Tsadra Foundation aims to be at the forefront of providing tools for the study and practice of Buddhism. Here you can find a number of resources for access to digital Tibetan texts and detailed catalogs of information for translators, researchers, and students. You can also visit an extensive list of online tools and resources.

CyberSangha is a way to connect with Tenzin Wangyal Rinpoche, the ancient Tibetan teachings, and fellow students around the world through regular live broadcasts that can be easily viewed on Rinpoche’s Facebook page. All broadcasts are free and open to all. You don’t need a Facebook account to view them. The name CyberSangha reflects Rinpoche’s deep, personal commitment to offer free access to his teachings for anyone in the world who might benefit from them. Buddhism speaks of Three Jewels: the Buddha; the Dharma, or Buddhist teachings; and the Sangha — the community of meditation practitioners who follow the teachings and put them into practice. In particular, CyberSangha refers to the international online community of individuals who are following Rinpoche’s Facebook Live broadcasts and are seeking nourishment from the mutual support of others. Look on Twitter and Instagram for the presence of CyberSangha there, as well. Rinpoche’s teachings present a doorway to connecting with your best self, a sense of openness, awareness, and warmth that allows you to live to your highest potential. His broadcasts are meant to be accessible to anyone, including those who have never tried meditation, practitioners with years of meditation experience, and those with any or no religious or spiritual affiliation. Offered regularly since 2009, Rinpoche’s live broadcasts include not only teachings and guided meditations, but also interfaith dialogues, conversations between scientific and spiritual leaders, and Tibetan poetry readings, as well as glimpses of Rinpoche’s life and travels. A worldwide team of volunteers provides simultaneous translation of the Facebook Live broadcasts into multiple languages, and a Facebook discussion group permits exchanges between members of CyberSangha. Recordings of each broadcast are accessible in multiple languages via the CyberSangha archives as well as language-specific YouTube channels. Learn more about our international team of volunteers. CyberSangha® provides a variety of educational services including teaching self-development through service, learning, and civic engagement; providing training and study of spiritual growth; offering leadership and development programs; and providing online classes, seminars, workshops, and training for individuals related to meditation, wellness and resilience.​

Welcome to Opuscula Buddhologica et Tibetologica on the WordPress! Some of you who know me may think: “Oh no, not again!” This would be a justified reaction because I have several blogs (https://www.blogger.com), which are hardly consistently and continually maintained. Some entries there may be of some academic value but they were never meant to be academically valuable. They were meant to be mere hobbies and sandboxes. I play there whenever I can. But of course the nicest thing would be if work itself can be enjoyed as a hobby. As an academic, one might say that the best holiday would be when one can study and write petty academic works undisturbed by the hustle and bustle of bureaucratic works and other non-academic obligations. What one often ends up doing is stealing, whenever one can, a few moments between various commitments and obligations, and grabbing an academic book and taking down a few random notes (zin bris, brjed tho or brjed byang). But soon one would realize that these notes are like “drawings on the surface of water” (chu’i ri mo). Even if one had etched one’s notes on paper, which one believes is more tangible and durable, it is not easy to trace them again, for one is often on one’s way without any paper. Of course, I know that some people are so systematic and consistent that they can easily trace anything from anywhere. I respect and envy them! So blogs are solutions for people like myself. (a) One can easily write anything on blogs and easily access one’s writings. (b) One can easily delete, add, or change them whenever one wants. (c) It is surprisingly durable and tangible. (d) One can instantaneously share ideas with the interested readership. While none of my previous blogs were meant to be “academic,” this particular blog, lays some claim to being “academic.” I hasten to concede that all my academic writings are hypothetical and are prone to deletions or corrections. While I take full responsibility for the petty little things that I write here, I cannot be sure of their reliability. As my German professor is wont to advise, we cannot fully trust anybody’s work particularly not one’s own. These blog articles will be mostly very terse for they will often be written based on a few random notes and completed in just in one sitting. They would be imperfect. But they would provide me with a feeling of an instant success and fulfillment. If an article grows beyond its scope, I may close down it down and publish it elsewhere in a printed form. Last but not least, I sincerely apologize in advance to all those whose mother tongue is English and to those who write in perfect and elegant English. English is not my mother tongue, and even if it were, I am not so sure if I would have acquired the necessary talent to write in English with mastery, clarity, and beauty. I can only call on readership’s leniency with all the imperfections that bound these short blog articles.

This website is a pedagogical tool designed to bring more diverse voices into our conversations about Buddhism and wellbeing. It is a resource and conversation-starter for teaching and research projects related to Buddhism, religious and medical pluralism, and the intersections between religion and healthcare. Explore our projects below…

Brill’s Encyclopedia of Buddhism is the first comprehensive academic reference work devoted to the plurality of Buddhist traditions across Asia, offering readers a balanced and detailed treatment of this complex phenomenon in six thematically arranged volumes: literature and languages (I, publ. 2015), lives (II, publ. 2019), thought (III, forthcoming 2022), history (IV, forthcoming 2023), life and practice (V, forthcoming 2025), index and remaining issues (VI, forthcoming 2026). Each volume contains substantial original essays by many of the world’s foremost scholars, essays which not only cover basic information and well-known issues but which also venture into areas as yet untouched by modern scholarship. An essential tool for anyone interested in Buddhism. An online resource will provide easy access to the encyclopedia’s ever-growing corpus of information. The online edition of volume 2 (Lives, publ. 2019) will be added in (mid-)2021, with further volumes following after their original publication in print. Brill’s Encyclopedia of Buddhism is under the general editorial control of Jonathan Silk (Leiden University, editor-in-chief), Richard Bowring (University of Cambridge) and Vincent Eltschinger (École Pratique des Hautes Études, Paris). In addition, each volume has a dedicated board of specialist editors.

The Index Buddhicus is the first classified comprehensive bibliography of Buddhist Studies. It describes secondary material ranging from articles, papers and chapters appearing in journals, proceedings and collections, through reference works, monographs, editions and theses, to digital resources. All entries are linked to an elaborate index of both proper names and thematic, and cross referenced to related material. The Index is available as an online resource.

An academic website of Michael Stanley-Baker focused on Buddhist and Daoist medical sources in China.

MARKUS - is a reading and text analysis platform with a wide range of functionality Markus was selected as a runner up in the category Best Tool or Suite of TOOLS in the DH2016 awards

Welcome to the largest freely available archive of online books about religion, mythology, folklore and the esoteric on the Internet. The site is dedicated to religious tolerance and scholarship, and has the largest readership of any similar site on the web.

Until relatively recent times the Bon religion of Tibet was poorly understood by the majority of Tibetans and Westerners alike. Although our general knowledge has advanced greatly in the past few decades thanks to the work of a few pioneering scholars, misconceptions still abound, and many areas of this fascinating religion remain obscure. While most of the secondary literature on Bon has dealt with the history, philosophy and meditative systems of the religion, the domain of ritual is still substantially unexplored. Some of the most important contributions to this subject that have so far been published are presented here. [link] Understandably, students of Bon ritual have tended to favour the literary component: after all, where the rituals in question are obsolete, this is the only option available to the researcher, except in the rather unusual cases where the surviving texts are supplemented with illustrations. But ritual, by definition, includes an important performative element. In addition to the various accoutrements and effigies that feature in any performance, there are gestures, processions and interactions that are generally described in only the vaguest terms in the liturgical sources, where they are mentioned at all. Some of the most interesting aspects of ritual performances have no place whatsoever in the sources. These would include a lama’s idiosyncratic interpretation of text prescriptions, his exchanges with the other participants (such as his assistant and his patrons), the occurrence of errors (an assistant pouring red dye onto an effigy what should remain uncoloured), and solicited or spontaneous commentaries on procedures. If the text is just one – albeit an essential – component of a ritual, observing an actual performance can be a hopelessly confusing experience. Behind the noise, the chaotic activity and the protracted chanting it is often far from clear what is going on. One of the main purposes of this site is to render Bonpo rituals more accessible by combining the textual and performative dimensions. A detailed explanation of how this works is given [here], but the general idea can be explained in simple terms as follows: The site hosts several dozen Bonpo ritual texts. The texts are presented in facsimile form as well as romanised transliteration, and, in many cases, with a full English translation and notes. The performative aspect is represented by video recordings of a number of rituals, to which access can be had via links on the site’s pages. The videos are subtitled in English, and range in duration from approximately ten minutes to eight hours. Each ritual is also covered by an article that is divided into two main parts: 1. a general discussion of that category of rituals; and 2. a detailed description of a particular performance. The articles are illustrated with photographs, diagrams and tables, and contain numerous links. The links are of two kinds: 1. to texts; and 2. to video footage. The links will take you to precisely that point in the text or the video that is relevant to the part of the performance that is being described. (It is also possible, of course, to see the texts or watch the videos in their entirety.) The transcriptions of the texts also contain links that will take you to the point in the video where any given passage is being recited. This will enable you to see exactly what is going on when the lama is reading that section of the text. We hope, in time, to establish reciprocal links. This means that it will be possible to go from a point in a video to the corresponding point in a text (assuming that a text is being used at that moment) or to the description furnished in the accompanying article. While this website is dedicated mainly to ritual it also offers resources that are relevant to other areas of the Bon religion. These resources include: paintings (tsaklis and thangkas); texts not directly connected to ritual (such as biographies and canonical works); Tibetan periodicals and other publications related to Bon; scholarly contributions to Bon studies in Tibetan and in European languages.

A global non-profit initiative to translate the Buddha’s words into modern languages, and to make them available to everyone.

Site devoted to the Altaic linguistics. Contains texts in various ancient and modern altaic languages: Turcic, Mongolian, Manchu-Tungus, Korean, Japanese. You can find here bibiliographies on altaic linguistics and links to dictionaries of the Altaic Languages.

The Digital Analysis System for Humanities develops digital tools to meet the demands of humanities research, assisting scholars in upgrading the quality of their research. We hope to integrate researchers, research data, and research tools to broaden the scope of research and cut down research time. The Platform provides a comprehensive research environment with cloud computing services, offering all the data and tools scholars require. Researchers can upload texts and authority files, or use others’ open texts and authority files available on the platform. Authority terms possess both manual and automatic text tagging functions, and can be hierarchically categorized. Once text tagging is complete, you can calculate authority term and N-gram statistics, or conduct term co-occurrence analysis, and then present results through data visualization methods such as statistical charts, word clouds, social analysis graphs, and maps. Furthermore, the platform provides functionality for similar-passage comparison, Boolean search, word proximity search, and statistical filtering, enabling researchers to easily carry out textual analysis.

Promoting the exchange of knowledge and ideas, Tibetan language use and literacy, and sharing of resources.