Sera Monastery (photo: McKay Savage via Flickr, CC-BY license)
A collection of more than three hundred Tibetan scriptures, housed at Sera Monastery in Lhasa, has been digitally preserved and published, thanks to funding from the monastery and Jokhang Temple. Fourteen specialists worked on the preservation project. Most of the manuscripts cover obscure subject matter and were collected from monasteries and libraries throughout Tibet.
While some pieces in the collection had been previously preserved, others were badly damaged owing to “human activity and natural disasters.” Some were illegible, leading the team to discuss ways in which the missing text could be supplanted, and sometimes leading to consultations with high lamas for advice. According to today’s piece in the Global Times, “The center’s work has not only provided valuable materials for monks, Tibetologists and religious scholars, but also made the texts available for a wider range of readers.”
