Mercy has a Human Heart: E. G.

Ellis Gene Smith (1936 –2010) was a scholar of Tibetology, specifically Tibetan literature and history. He was born in 1936, in Ogden, Utah, to a Mormon family that traced its lineage to Hyrum Smith, the elder brother of Mormonism’s founder, Joseph Smith. After attending a series of colleges, Mr. Smith settled in at the University of Washington, where he studied Mongolian and Turkish, earning a bachelor’s degree in Far Eastern studies in 1959. Around that time, as he began work on a doctorate at the university, he started studying Tibetan with a visiting lama, Deshung Rinpoche, and was entranced. Further study was hindered, however, by the lack of available texts. “We had no Tibetan books,” Mr. Smith told The New York Times in 2002. “Deshung said: ‘Go and find them. Find the important books and get them published.’ ”

After advanced study in Sanskrit and Pali at Leiden University in the Netherlands, Mr. Smith went to India in 1965, spending several years studying with exiled Tibetan lamas. He joined the Library of Congress field office in New Delhi in 1968, eventually becoming field director there. Mr. Smith acquired as many Tibetan books as he could for the library, seeking out Tibetan refugees in India, Nepal and Bhutan and earning their trust. Most of the books he collected were either hand-lettered manuscripts or had been printed in the traditional manner, using carved wood blocks. (Tibet had no printing presses.) Often, a book he obtained was the only known copy in the world.

In India, Mr. Smith began printing new copies of thousands of Tibetan books. He was aided, serendipitously, by a United States program, Public Law 480, which let developing countries buy American agricultural commodities in local currency. The United States would take that currency and invest it in local humanitarian projects. As Mr. Smith noted, nothing in the law expressly forbade using the money to republish great works of literature. And so, book by book, he brought much of the Tibetan canon to light. His publishing project, which lasted two and a half decades, furnished books to libraries and Tibetan speakers around the globe, greatly augmenting the store upon which scholars could draw.

“Without his vision, many of us in the field would not be doing what we’re doing,” Leonard van der Kuijp, a professor of Tibetan and Himalayan studies at Harvard, said. In later years, after the Library of Congress sent Mr. Smith to Indonesia and then to Egypt, he continued collecting and publishing Tibetan texts through intermediaries. He retired in 1996 and three years later founded the center, where he served as executive director.

He was the author of several published catalogs of Tibetan literature and a volume of essays, “Among Tibetan Texts: History and Literature of the Himalayan Plateau” (Wisdom Publications, 2001). “Digital Dharma,” a documentary film about Mr. Smith and his work, is currently in production. Interviewers often asked Mr. Smith what propelled his quest. His answer was simple: “Karma, I guess.”

Mr. Smith, a scholar who became so enamored of Tibetan culture that he converted to Buddhism as a young man, was renowned for his seemingly limitless knowledge of Tibetan literature and his equally limitless fervor for saving it.

The center has begun to digitize its collection, making the texts accessible (in the Tibetan language and script) to anyone with Internet access. Almost 14,000 volumes — more than seven million pages — are available on its Web site, tbrc.org, which receives more than 3,000 visitors daily. in 2001. Though Mr. Smith had neither an academic affiliation nor a doctorate, wherever in the world he happened to be living — in New Delhi, where he acquired Tibetan literature for the Library of Congress; Cambridge, Mass., where he started the resource center in his house, sleeping amid towers of Tibetan books; or New York — his home became a magnet for students, scholars, religious leaders and exiles who sought his expertise on Tibet’s rich but little-known literary canon.
“The value of Tibetan literature is two things,” David Germano, a professor of Tibetan studies at the University of Virginia, said last week in a telephone interview. “First of all, it’s one of the four great languages in which the Buddhist canon was preserved.” (The others are Chinese, Sanskrit and Pali, an extinct language of India.)

“In addition to the scriptural canon,” he said, “there were histories, stories, autobiography, poetry, ritual writing, narrative, epics — pretty much any kind of literary output you could imagine. So the second value of the Tibetan canon is it’s one of the greatest in the world.” The canon was imperiled after China invaded and occupied Tibet in the 1950s. Though fleeing refugees managed to smuggle some books out, the Chinese destroyed a great many others. “With the close of the Cultural Revolution, you essentially lost much of the Tibetan Buddhist literature,” Professor Germano said. “It was lost to the war; it was lost to the destruction of the monasteries, libraries and collections of books in Tibet that were systematically sought out and burned during the Cultural Revolution.”

In 1999, Smith founded the Tibetan Buddhist Resource Center (TBRC), together with Leonard van der Kuijp of Harvard University and friends to digitize the 12,000 volume corpus of Tibetan literature.[6] This digital library is the largest collection of Tibetan literature outside of Tibet. TBRC continues to acquire, preserve, organize and make available Tibetan texts.

In 2001, Wisdom Publications published Among Tibetan Texts, a collection of essays that Smith wrote back in his Delhi times, as introductions to Library of Congress reprints of Tibetan texts. As introductions to Tibetan literature, culture and history, these had circulated since the early 1980s amongst students and researchers, and had acquired a sort of cult status.

He is the subject of the award-winning documentary Digital Dharma. Variety called the film "an affectionate tribute to the late E. Gene Smith, the scholar, librarian and ex-Mormon who waged a 50-year struggle to save the endangered texts of Tibetan Buddhism." It received a theatrical release and was invited to qualify for Academy Award consideration by the International Documentary Association through the 2012 DocuWeeks program.“ ~ Sources: New York Times, Wikipedia

Mangaram: "Smith must have been a reincarnation or so, looking at the karmic connections he had with so many Tibetans and what he accomplished."

"Smith went to Leiden in the Netherlands to study more Sanskrit. Then he decided to go to India to meet the Tibetans who had just fled there from China. During that time, there were not so many flights to India, one had to go by boat. He finally managed to get on an oil tanker to Delhi but got stuck in Egypt because of the war with Pakistan for 2 months. Finally he managed to get to Bombay, after which he went to Kathmandu. After staying there for a bit, teaching English to rich Nepali kids, he went to India."

"Smith was advised not to go to Dharamsala, since then the Indian government would suspect him to be involved with the CIA. So all the Rinpoches and lamas with texts came to him in Delhi. Then he started working for the Library of Congress and they printed many texts. Once, there was a flood in Delhi and the basement were the texts were stores flooded, so they had to print them again."

"I worked in his house and organised all the books. When he moved to Indonesia and later to Egypt, to new York and then to Boston, every time I helped to arrange the bookshelves, since I knew where the books had to be placed. And he was not happy if something was misplaced."

"I often met Dilgo Khyentse rinpoche in Gene Smith's house in Delhi. He said several times I was a monk in my previous life. Dzongsar Khyentse and Rabjam Rinpoches, who were about the same age, always traveled with Dilgo Khyentse rinpoche. Back in the days they were in their teens and in Delhi their favourite thing to do was to go to the cinema and watch movies"

During the last part of Gene Smith's life and after his passing, Mangaram worked for the TBRC, heading the main branch in India, where almost all of the major collections of the Tibetan canon and collected works have been scanned under his supervision, working with a team of around ten people. The pechas were scanned and then manually cleaned from any noise, meaning black spots and so on.

Most of the work concerning the Tibetan texts has now been done, and his team will soon be reduced to a few people who can be called upon for any remaining jobs. The BDRC will now focus more on other canons, like the Chinese and Pali canons and so the work will move to other countries. Also, most of the major monasteries these days like Shechen, Mindroling and Dzongsar, have upgraded their publication methods from the traditional woodblock printing to digital methods, which can be shared in digital format straight away without the need of scanning them...

Saturday, September 9, 2017

E. G.

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