Digital Dharma (Recovering Wisdom)

This powerful photography collection captures an incredible journey of cultural preservation. Join E. Gene Smith as he travels to remote monasteries in South Asia delivering the digitized version of twenty thousand volumes of ancient Tibetan texts—volumes that had been faced with almost certain extinction fifty years earlier.

This is the epic story of an international rescue effort to preserve a culture’s literary history.

Originally a Mormon from Utah, E. Gene Smith became the unlikely mastermind behind an international effort to rescue, preserve, digitize, and provide free access to the vast Tibetan Buddhist canon, many volumes of which had been lost or destroyed during China’s Cultural Revolution.  

Digital Dharma is a stunning visual experience offering a behind-the-scenes look into this unprecedented mission. Through hundreds of photographs taken during Smith’s trip to deliver drives containing the digitized volumes to remote monasteries in South Asia, you’ll gain extraordinary and intimate access to life inside Buddhist monasteries, to the rituals of Tibetan Buddhism, and to the insights of some of the world’s leading lamas and lineage holders. Throughout the journey, you’ll meet monks, local publishers, scholars, and dignitaries involved in the preservation movement to which Smith dedicated his life. With the accompanying historical and cultural background, you’ll develop a deeper and more personal understanding of Tibetan Buddhism and of the achievement of preserving and disseminating its sacred canon.