ACIP Press Release

The sacred Buddhist images of Tibet and China are becoming well known in the West; but there is a whole body of extraordinary spiritual art that has never been shown in America or elsewhere. While mainstream Buddhist art was approaching its violent end in Tibet and China, a quiet revolution in sacred woodcarving was taking place in smaller Buddhist hermitages to the north, in Mongolia and the forests of Siberia.

The Asian Classics Input Project is pleased to announce the release of A Thousand Books of Wisdom, an unprecedented collection of over 50,000 pages of sacred woodblock art and manuscripts including hundreds of never-before released images from the Buddhist hermitages of Mongolia and Siberia.

These images include special seals that were carved in stone and wood over the last 300 years, and stamped onto woodblock manuscripts that found their way into the personal collections of the Russian tsars. After the Russian Revolution, these manuscripts were hidden away in storerooms in St Petersburg, and left essentially untouched during the entire history of the Soviet Union.

Members of the Input Project, a collaboration of dedicated Tibetan refugee monks and young Americans from the Greenwich Village area of New York City, have spent the last 5 years combing more than 60,000 books in the woodblock collections of the Russian tsars to assemble this new CD-ROM. The CD works in any IBM-compatible home computer, and includes special software for viewing and searching the images and books.

For the scholar, the CD-ROM includes the complete text of over 1,000 source books from the ancient Buddhist canon and later commentaries; extensive research tools and catalogs; and Tibetan and Sanskrit language aids for studying the original texts. The books are accessed from the screen through a highly innovative menu system that breaks down the entire sacred literature of Tibet into standard subject categories.

The work of typing these thousands of pages into the computer has been accomplished by hundreds of dedicated Tibetan monks and nuns, and at special training centers for rural Tibetan refugee women, in refugee camps all over India, with support from a group of American corporations and foundations.


All ACIP materials are supplied without charge as a public service; however the Project depends on the generosity of our users and supporters to continue this work. To request the Release IV CD-ROM or to make a donation, please contact:

Dr. Robert J. Taylor, Assistant Director
ACIP Washington DC Area Office
11911 Marmary Road
Gaithersburg, Maryland 20878-1839 USA
telephone +1 301 948-5569; fax +1 301 349-2623
e-mail:info@asianclassics.org

A donation of $20 or more will help us considerably in defraying the cost of materials and shipping. A deluxe package, which includes a printed 800-page user manual and catalog together with the CD-ROM, is available upon request for donations of $75 or more. (The user manual and catalog is also included in electronic format on the regular CD-ROM.) All released materials are also available for free download from the ACIP website at http://www.asianclassics.org.


The Asian Classics Input Project

February 1, 1999

Carvings from the Realm of Enlightenment

Celebrating ACIP Release IV: A Thousand Books of Wisdom

On the evening of April 5th, the Asian Classics Input Project will host "Carvings from the Realm of Enlightenment," a reception to celebrate the release of its new CD-ROM, A Thousand Books of Wisdom. The reception will feature a presentation by project director Geshe Michael Roach and demonstration of the new release including display of Tibetan woodblock seals and other graphics images from the CD. Scholars, students, and anyone interested in Asian Buddhist religion and culture is welcome to attend.

This new CD-ROM contains a virtual library of over 1,000 Tibetan Buddhist texts, nearly 500 woodblock carvings of lamas, deities, and other sacred images from Buddhist hermitages in Siberia and Mongolia, and the newest catalog of more than 50,000 rare and endangered Tibetan manuscripts held at the Russian Academy of Sciences in St. Petersburg. The CD-ROM can be used on virtually any computer, and also includes a specially designed Windows program for searching, viewing, and printing the Tibetan texts and graphics images.

When the communist invaders swept through Tibet in the 1950's and '60's, most of the libraries were destroyed, and many profound volumes of Indo-Tibetan literature were lost forever. Thirty years later, the Asian Classics Input Project was started for the purpose of preserving this endangered Indo-Tibetan religious and classical literature, and making it available to native scholars and practitioners living in refugee communities in India, and to others all over the world. Young Americans from the Greenwich Village area of New York City have been working with the Tibetan refugees themselves to preserve the precious manuscripts and images in digital form on the CD-ROM; and over the years scores of lost monastic textbooks and other priceless texts have been reprinted using this ACIP database.


The evening will be invitation only, for more information send requests to mb77@is8.nyu.edu

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