The takeover of Tibet by Communist China in 1959 resulted in the destruction of a great amount of Tibet's written works. Traditional Tibetan methods could be used to re-instate what remains of those works but those methods - cutting wood blocks then printing multiple copies of texts by hand or hand-copying texts one by one - are very cumbersome, time-consuming, and difficult when accuracy and volume is required. Furthermore, the skills required for those methods are not widely available at this point in time. All of these factors result in the danger that many texts will no longer be reproduced.
The advent of computers as an alternative to traditional Tibetan methods of reproducing texts does allow for relatively easy preservation and reproduction of existing texts now before it is too late. However, to complete the work a great deal of editing of the texts is required and there is almost no-one alive now who is capable of doing that kind of work. In the Drukpa Kagyu lineage, except for Adeu Rinpoche and Je Khenpo of Bhutan, there is no longer any one else is qualified still living. If the work is not completed before they pass away, it simply cannot be completed properly.
Why bother to reproduce already existing texts?
Many of the existing texts are extremely fragile and illegible due to age and deterioration. If not reproduced soon they will become illegible or unusable altogether. Additionally, many of the editions that are available are not very good copies; they have many transcription errors in them. The only chance to reproduce these illegible and/or error-prone editions as high quality, error-free editions is to use the extraordinary skills and knowledge of great beings such as Adeu Rinpoche before they pass away. Once these beings pass away, the illegible and or error-prone texts can never be reliably re-instated.
Will the new copies supplant the originals?
Firstly, it is not our aim to make mere copies of the originals. Instead, since many of the originals have errors in them, our work is to input the originals and then correct them using a very thorough correction process to ensure that the final reproductions are as free of errors as possible. In taking this approach we recognise that there is a need to have the originals from which we did our work available for later comparison with the corrected edition that we will produce.
Secondly, it is not our aim merely to computerise these texts. It is our aim to preserve the texts in electronic format and to publish them both on paper in traditional Tibetan book format and electronically in new computer format.
