A Mountainous Task

In an unheated warehouse, a van-sized printing press groans and spits out sheets of paper covered in what--to the uninitiated--looks like chicken scratching. The characters, however, are the elegant spikes and lilting curlicues of the Tibetan language. And here they are part of one of the great publishing feats in history, one that inches forward page by page.

In 1971 a refugee lama from Tibet with a donated desktop press founded Dharma Publishing with the dream of saving some of the holy literature of his homeland. A quarter of a century later, it continues to crank out a library worth of Tibetan literature, an immense body of religious writings as well as other scraps of the country’s cultural patrimony that were not destroyed when China invaded the remote Himalayan country in 1959.

Dharma Publishing is finishing the last 50 volumes of a massive 755-volume set that includes 36,000 texts by 1,500 authors--a millennium of thought meant to last for centuries. Each set weights 6,000 pounds. Only 108 sets are being produced.

The centerpiece of this vast undertaking is the first comprehensive printing of Tibetan Buddhist scriptures, which fill 128 of the atlas-sized volumes.

Some of the complete sets are being sold for $51,000 per set to research libraries around the world. But that price helps underwrite the volunteer-based effort to compile them--and to supply Buddhist monasteries in Tibet and refugee centers outside the country with free books.

“Tibetan civilization is so tenuous, the thought was that we should collect an entire Tibetan library of culture,” said Sylvia Gretchen, the research editor at Dharma Publishing. “We want to ensure that in 300 years there would still exist all the Tibetan texts.”

Tibetan society is legendary for being suffused with religion. The country’s written language was created to disseminate Buddha’s teachings, which were introduced to Tibet--from India--in the 7th century. Tucked away from the rest of the world for most of its history behind the forbidding Himalayas, and with a dry climate well-suited to the preservation of delicate works of art and scholarship, Tibet became a treasure trove of Buddhist thought. Chanting mantras, turning prayer wheels and walking around small devotional shrines called stupas were part of daily life for centuries in the kingdom, where a quarter of the male population long lived in monasteries.

That isolation ended when Chinese tanks rolled through the country in 1959, razing an estimated 7,000 monasteries and destroying about 80% of the books and art that had accumulated over 12 centuries. Fleeing lamas, part of a human exodus of more than 100,000 people, carried out whatever texts they could, some trucking out bark-printed holy works rather than food for their long journeys.

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One of these lamas was Tarthang Tulku, who started trying to collect these scattered works in India in the 1960s, tapping other refugees and libraries around the world. In 1969, he founded a Buddhist meditation center in Berkeley and then later the Nyingma Institute, which offers classes and retreats and has helped introduce the eastern religion to non-Asian Americans.

Although the precise number of Buddhists in the United States is not known, a 1991 survey by the City University of New York estimated that there are at least 800,000. Sylvia Gretchen is one. She was an undergraduate studying the Tibetan language at UC Berkeley in the late 1960s when Tarthang Tulku spoke to a class and so inspired her (“He had this tremendous vision,” she recalled) that she left school to help the lama with his mission.

Dharma Publishing (Dharma refers to the teaching of the Buddha) faced some daunting challenges: Volunteers had to track down and index fragments of texts dispersed around the world and design a modern typeface to replace the traditional hand-craved wood block method of printing.

Two years ago, for example, a set of texts from the 11th century that the publishing house had been searching for since day one finally turned up--in a private collection in India. “This kind of discovery makes what we do worthwhile,” said editor Gretchen. “Everybody said it was gone, lost, it no longer existed on Earth.”

By 1981, the nonprofit outfit had produced a 128-volume set of the teachings of Buddha known as the Kanjur, along with commentary called the Tanjur, the first full edition of each of the two works and an index.

In both instances, the press turned out 108 copies, starting the massive effort to compile that number of complete Tibetan works.

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By 1993, Dharma completed the second major phase: an even larger collection called the Great Treasures of Ancient Teachings, the equivalent of 2,000 standard volumes, encompassing everything from history to travel literature to medicine. Again, 108 copies were made.

“These teachings,” Tarthang Tulku wrote, “demonstrate that peace, harmony and compassion are not distant dreams, but attainable goals that can be put into practice, realized and transmitted to others.”

While only a fraction of these volumes have been translated into English (still more than 100 titles), Dharma Publishing prints a wide variety of works--from children’s books to meditation guides--in a number of Western languages.

“What was being transmitted was more than just words,” Gretchen explained. “It was the expression of consciousness, deeper compassion and wisdom of what being human was, guides to your own conscious and potential. This was like lifelong graduate school to put it in Western terms.”

Much of the translation work has been done at a sprawling prayer retreat built by American volunteers 100 miles north of San Francisco on a bluff above the Pacific. The temple complex, called Odiyan, opened briefly to the public last fall but is normally reserved for meditation and scholarship.

The printing, binding and gold gilt-edging--the process expected to be completed next year with the final 50 volumes--are done in Berkeley. But that’s only part of the huge undertaking: The material still must be sent back to Tibet--by the ton. In January, for example, 42,000 of Dharma Publishing’s books and 70,000 color prints of religious art were given away to thousands of Tibetan lamas who made a pilgrimage to Bodh Gaya, a village in northern India where the first Buddha is said to have attained enlightenment under a tree.

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Although Dharma Publishing has not had any political trouble getting permission to send its books back to Tibet, the narrow, winding roads leading into the mountainous country have made it difficult to truck in more than a fraction of the printed work, most of which remains in Berkeley.

Dharma Publishing also is trying to introduce its work to a broader audience in the West, opening its book- and art-lined gallery--attached to the printing facility--to the public and sponsoring a traveling show, which stops in June and July at the Los Angeles Public Library.

Francis Cook, a professor of religion at UC Riverside, said that Tibetan Buddhism, unlike its more accessible Zen cousin, is famous for its labyrinth-like nature, and he lauds Dharma Publishing for undertaking such a mammoth preservation project.

“It’s so elaborate, so complex, even just the art itself is a lifetime study. It’s so spectacular,” he said. “There’s a real danger that this incredibly rich tradition could become extinct in a generation or two. It’s a literature that ought to be preserved. It’s extremely important that it not be lost.”

But for all the works’ complexity, as Gretchen walks through the gallery, past some of the 400 art works that Dharma Publishing has reproduced, she stressed the simplicity of the truths of Tibetan Buddhism: Life is an endless cycle of struggle that can be transcended through compassion and the realization of the transitory nature of reality.

“There is new knowledge here. It’s not just esoteric,” she said. “It’s something we can take right now and apply in our lives and make them better.”