Introduction

Introduction

The Rare Sanskrit Buddhist Manuscript Preservation Project was started in January 2009. In the year 2009, we completed scanning 200 Buddhist Sanskrit manuscripts In the year 2011, we started our second phase of scanning another 200 Rare Buddhist Sanskrit Manuscripts which was completed in June 2012. Given the success of that scanning project, we collaborated with Digital Buddhist Resource Center, Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA to continue this work to scan 200 manuscripts in 2018. So far, we digitized six hundred rare Nepalese manuscripts from local private collections as well as from different libraries, and plan to make those manuscripts available in DVDs and also uploading some manuscripts online free of cost for the benefit of researchers and scholars. This site contains previously unknown or undocumented manuscripts from Nepal.

These six hundred manuscripts scanned by the project have been sourced from private collections in the Kathmandu Valley, where the last surviving tradition of South Asian Mahayana, practiced by Buddhist Newars, still keeps and uses these texts. Several manuscripts are kept in the collection of individuals such as Dīpak and Puṣparāja Vajrācārya, and the late Ratnakājī Vajrācārya. Most of these manuscripts, however, are in the possession of one Newar Buddhist institution, Akṣeśvara Mahāvihāra, located in the western quarter of the old city of Patan. We would like to thank Venerable Master Hsing Yun and the University of the West for providing funds to do this project.

 

The project goals

The goal of our project is to make these valuable collections accessible to world without depriving their original owners of them, as so often was the case in the nineteenth and twentieth century. Hopefully this good work will continue, and other private and monastic collections, which are of such great importance for our understanding of Buddhism, can be opened up in the same way.