Volunteers in Berkeley Bind Tibetan Books to Preserve a Culture : Buddhism: Private publishing project is putting together for the first time the collected works of 120 masters of the Nyingma school.

Faye Councel Polillo, 58, flew here from Maryland at her own cost to work without pay binding Tibetan Buddhist books she cannot read.

A mathematics teacher on sabbatical from a private preparatory school in Annapolis, Polillo is one of about 100 volunteers who have donated their labor to a mammoth 5-year-old private publishing project aimed at preserving ancient Tibetan scriptures and returning them to monasteries in that autonomous region of China.

The final project will involve 108 sets of 560 hand-sewn and hand-bound volumes of flowing Tibetan script. Printed on thick, glossy, acid-free paper and housed in satin-covered cardboard slipcases, the books are designed to last at least three centuries, said project director Sally Sorenson. She hopes to recruit 15 more volunteers to complete the binding by the end of this month.

“This is giving back to a people something they need,” said Polillo, in Dharma Publishing’s Berkeley warehouse, where the sweet smell of library paste permeates the air.

Sorenson said she was initially skeptical that an undertaking as large as this project could be carried out entirely by volunteers. But she has found that “people do it because it is good. Books are really a gift for us all,” she said.

The publishing feat is a project of Tarthang Tulku, 55, a lama in the Nyingma school, one of four major Tibetan Buddhist groups. The monk left Tibet for India in 1958, and arrived in the United States in 1968. Shortly afterward, he launched Dharma Publishing, a nonprofit, all-volunteer operation dedicated to preserving and translating Tibetan teachings.

The company’s first major project, publication of a 120-volume set of the Kanjur, Buddha’s teachings, and Tanjur, commentaries on his teachings, was hailed as a milestone in Buddhist text preservation.

The current Nyingma Canon project is more difficult, Sorenson said. Unlike the Kanjur and Tanjur, which are common to all Buddhist groups and had been previously published in a single edition, the texts now being bound represent the collected works of 120 masters of the Nyingma school dating from about AD 800. They have never been published together.

Tarthang gathered the scattered texts from the private libraries of lamas in exile in India, Bhutan, Sikim and Nepal, as well as from museums and libraries in Europe, the Commonwealth of Independent States, Japan and the United States.

The Nyingma Canon texts unlock “the full potential of human consciousness” and “disclose the nature of the universe,” but “cannot be comprehended without guidance, experience and explanations,” according to a description of their contents in a Dharma Press brochure. Sorenson said the texts are not accessible to the lay reader--even one who reads Tibetan very well.

Sales of posters and other Dharma Publishing books, plus income from courses and retreats offered at the Nyingma Institute--which Tarthang founded in 1973--have financed the project. The institute, a four-story estate in the Berkeley Hills, houses about 100 of the lama’s followers.

Dharma Publishing plans to distribute the Nyingma Canon to monasteries in Tibet and to Buddhist centers and research libraries around the world. Sorenson said some sets may be sold, but no sales price has been set. The Kanjur and Tanjur sold for $15,000 per set.

Lewis Lancaster, a professor of East Asian languages at UC Berkeley, said the Nyingma Canon is analogous to the Christian patristics, or writings of Augustine and other church fathers of the 3rd and 4th centuries.

Dharma Publishing is just one of many groups working to preserve Tibetan texts. “There has been a very heroic effort by Tibetans worldwide over the past 30 years to preserve their cultural heritage,” said Matthew Kapstein, a Buddhist specialist at Columbia University.

The Asian Classics Input Project, launched in 1988 with a start-up grant from the David and Lucile Packard Foundation, has put the Kanjur and Tanjur on computer disks and distributed 6,000 disks free to about 400 Asian scholars, monasteries and other parties in 40 countries, said New York-based project director Michael Roach.

He said the project was inspired by a UC Irvine project to put Greek literature onto computer disks. Roach’s project uses monks and others at Tibetan refugee camps in South India to do data entry. The project needs U.S. volunteers with backgrounds in Tibetan for proofreading work, as well as financial contributions, said assistant director Robert J. Taylor.

Other projects to preserve Tibetan materials are under way in Taiwan, Mongolia, Siberia, China and Tibet, Roach said.

The Library of Congress is also involved. It has published about 9,000 volumes of Tibetan materials that have been distributed to 18 colleges and universities around the country over the past 25 years, including UC Berkeley. The volumes were turned over to the United States by India in exchange for American wheat sent during an Indian famine in the 1940s, Lancaster said.

Polillo, the Dharma Press volunteer, said she was drawn to the publishing project in part because of a lifelong interest in the Dalai Lama and the plight of the Tibetans. “And Berkeley is a great place,” she added. Like many of the other volunteers, Polillo, who is not Buddhist, receives a room, vegetarian board and free evening Buddhism classes in exchange for her labor.

Eva Leong-Casey, 41, a San Francisco physical education teacher who studies Buddhism, has been devoting 40 hours a week to the bookbinding project for the past year. “It’s meaningful work,” she said. “It’s an opportunity to participate in something of value.”