Biographies of Tibetan Buddhists masters: The Treasury of Lives website

Quoting Alex Gardner, Associate Director of the Shelley & Donald Rubin Foundation:

"The Treasury ( http://www.tibetanlineages.org/ ), a project of the Shelley & Donald Rubin Foundation, is a website of biographies of religious figures in Tibetan Buddhism. Each biography is linked with the Tibetan Buddhist Resource Center (TBRC) and Himalayan Art Resources (HAR). Independent scholars, professors, and graduate students, including Dan Martin, Cyrus Stearns, Sarah Jacoby, Ron Garry, and Gyurme Dorje, wrote the biographies and essays now on the site. Gene Smith and Jeff Watt have been invaluable advisors for the site at all stages. To grow into a truly valuable resource the site will need your participation.

The Treasury began three years ago when Donald Rubin, Matthieu Ricard, and Vivian Kurz, envisioned an online encyclopedia of the major traditions of Tibetan Buddhism, with separate pages for Nyingma, Sakya, Kagyu, and Gelug. One year ago we reimagined the project to be an integrated database of illustrated biographies presented in a way that permits innovative browsing and efficient searching.

The Treasury website is designed to associate each biography with five categories: tradition, community, historical period, geography, and natural landmark. Traditions are broadly conceived as having either institutional or doctrinal independence. Community includes both monastic institutions and clan structures. Geography includes both “traditional” and contemporary organizations of Tibetan space: one can browse via the Tibetan categories of U-Tsang, Kham and Amdo, within which are further divisions, or by contemporary provinces, prefectures, and counties. The category of Natural landmarks includes mountains, lakes, and caves with which religious figures are associated. All of these categories – known as “facets” in the terminology of the web – can be combined with each others to optimize browsing, so that user might, for example, browse for 13th century Kagyu lamas who were associated with Kailash, expand it to include Sakya, or narrow it to exclude all but Drigung Kagyu.

The Treasury uses both Extended Wylie and the phonetic system created for the Rubin Museum of Art: no diacritics, no umlauts, no acute accents. The site anticipates multiple phonetic rendering of names, acknowledging the lack of a single authoritative system, particularly useful for those times when the proper Wylie spelling is not known. Searches for Phagmodrupa or Phakmodrupa will both be directed to Pagmodrupa.

The Treasury database is borrowed from the Person records of TBRC, and the goal is to provide a biography of every known Tibetan religious figure, excluding those still living. We now have over 150 biographies, with about 75 more in the editing stage. Additional biographies will be provided by the community of users – by you. The Treasury’s general editor, Alex Gardner, will revise them for the basic style and upload them to the site. Features planned for the future include enabling users to suggest corrections and additions and to discuss controversies such as dates and affiliation.

The biographies are written for the North American undergraduate. Certain Tibetan stylistic flourishes common in the rnam thar genre are to be expected, but the biographies are not meant as hagiographies. Nor are they written in term-paper form; while they reflect awareness of scholarship, they contain no footnotes or in- line citations. A biography of Tibetan and other-language sources is given at the end of the essay, and each essay is signed by the author. The site is not copyrighted.

The Treasury is being launched now in Beta form; not all content is complete, and some basic elements of the site are either still in development or in need of further design. In addition to the “community” section, other features to come include mapping of teaching lineages, dynamic tours of lineage paintings, and additional sorting options. One reason for this soft launch is to ask for feedback on the basic site from the people who will use it.

The Foundation welcomes all comments and suggestions. We want to know whether you would use the site for your own research and teaching, whether you would contribute, and what would make the site stronger.

The Treasury of Lives is being created for an Internet flooded with information on Tibetan Buddhism; most living lamas have websites for their teaching and their home institutions, and many of these contain historical and biographical information. However, these sites all exist in isolation, furthering the erroneous view that Tibetan Buddhism is comprised of a number of exclusive “schools” or “orders” that had little to do with each other. The reality is far more interesting, and the Treasury of Lives is designed to better represent this fact. I look forward to your comments on the project, and I ask that each of you send biographies of the people whose lives you have researched, for the benefit of your colleagues and students in the fields of Tibetan and Buddhist Studies".