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cellspacing="0"><tbody><tr><td>&nbsp;</td></tr><tr><td><img src="Samambaia_files/spacer.gif" alt="" border="0" height="10" width="1"></td></tr><tr> <td class="green-bold">Letter from... New York</td></tr><tr><td class="green">&nbsp;</td></tr><tr> <td class="green">Cynthia Haven</td></tr><tr> <td><img src="Samambaia_files/spacer.gif" alt="" border="0" height="10" width="1"><span class="green">March 12, 2004</span></td></tr><tr> <td>&nbsp;</td></tr><tr><td>&nbsp;</td></tr><tr> <td><p>Arriving at the chrome-and-glass doors on Fifth Avenue, take an elevator to the seventh floor. Turn left, and you head into a chic but predictable office corridor lined with modern art. Turn right, however, and you immediately enter another realm: over 500 tangkas -radiant, exquisite, and seemingly from another planet -greet every step of your passage towards the small office occupied by </p> <p>E. Gene Smith, a one-man society for the preservation of Tibetan literature.</p> <p>Smith, a Utah-born Mormon, traces his descent from Hyrum Smith, brother of the prophet Joseph Smith, who was slain with his brothers by an anti-Mormon mob in Illinois in 1844. This mild-mannered Smith is a rebel of a different kind: when a Tibetan lama, the scholar Deshung Rinpoche, came to teach at the University of Washington in 1960, Smith converted to Buddhism and studied Tibetan - linguistically an endangered species since the Chinese takeover of Tibet in the 1950s. A few years after Smith began studying the Tibetan canon, the lama suggested that he leave for India, to find and publish the most important works of Tibetan literature before they were lost forever.</p> <p>The lama's charge has been Smith's life work. He became an indefatigable collector, eventually gathering well over 12,000 books of poetry, medicine, history, biography, and, principally, Buddhist religious texts, including hundreds of books long missing and presumed destroyed. His collection, spanning ten centuries, is said to be the biggest in the West, if not the world. Some of the titles: the funeral rites of Kublai Khan, on Tibetan wood blocks, printed sometime between 1294 and 1304. A complete set of the biographies of all the Dalai Lamas, from the fourteenth century to the twentieth. Or the tales of Gesar, King of Ling.</p> <p>Gesar, a derivation of &quot;Alexander&quot; or &quot;Caesar&quot;, is Tibet's great legendary conqueror -after conquering &quot;Ingling&quot; (England) and &quot;Jarling&quot; (Germany), he even conquers Hell. Tibetans are still having visions of the exploits of Gesar, and writing them down.</p> <p>Until 2001, this astonishing collection was housed in Smith's six-room duplex in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Stacks and stacks of Tibetan books covered surfaces and floors in every room but the kitchen. (He slept on a bed sandwiched between bookshelves.) &quot;I have no kids&quot;, the genial collector had told a reporter. &quot;I didn't have to send them to college. So really, all the money went into books.&quot;</p> <p>But the moment came when Smith had reached his limits. After forty years of collecting, he needed an angel. Fortunately, he found two. His cause has been taken up by Shelley and Donald Rubin. At the site of the old Barney's Department Store, a New York City landmark that occupies three blocks, the Rubins are founding perhaps the largest museum of Himalayan art in the West. </p> <p>The six floors of gallery space will open to the public in May. The Rubin Museum of Art will house Smith's Tibetan Buddhist Resource Center (TBRC) under its aegis.</p> <p>The Rubins, too, are people with a passion: they began collecting Himalayan art twenty years ago, and have now amassed a very comprehensive collection spanning nine centuries. On Fifth Avenue, the TBRC were high-class squatters alongside the Rubin business offices to the left of the elevator -it was just one of their transitional headquarters en route to the museum site. Smith's interim digs are less picturesque, perhaps, than his former Cambridge home, but they are high tech.</p> <p>The bulk of Smith's collection is now in climate-controlled storage. But his office still holds its own unique charm. Smith, a gentle, slightly rotund man in a plaid cotton shirt and grey sleeveless cardigan, takes down a few examples from his shelves: a book of instructions for reading mandalas, which Smith describes as an Eastern &quot;psycho-cosmogram&quot;; a handbook of Tibetan prosody, loosely syllabic, but with complex rules about the thirty-five different types of &quot;adornment&quot;. Then there's a 1976 reprint of a hagiography from the fifteenth century, first published in the &quot;Iron Rat Year,&quot; in Lachi in far western Tibet. </p> <p>These are Indian reprints of Tibetan works Smith supervised during his years as a Library of Congress employee in New Delhi, collecting books of all languages and publishing them under Public Law 480, with money generated from the sale of excess agricultural commodities. The books he published, gathered from escaping Tibetans, might otherwise have simply vanished.</p> <p>Originals of course excite more interest. The term &quot;books&quot; is used loosely, for original Tibetan manuscripts are preserved on 26&quot; x 4&quot; strips of mulberry-husk paper, either handwritten or printed with wooden blocks. They are bound together by straps and lengths of red and gold cloth. Tibet is a land of extraordinary scholarship and a huge oral tradition from the seventh century onwards -but often these manuscripts existed only as single copies in monasteries, subject to the normal depredations of the centuries. Hence, the perishability of Tibetan culture. After the Chinese takeover, the perishing became an active, rather than a passive, process. &quot;Atrocities were also perpetrated by the Tibetans themselves&quot;, Smith says. &quot;They were intent on showing their redness rather than their ethnicity.&quot; Nor were all the bruises on the Tibetan side of the border. &quot;The cultural revolution affected the Chinese culture as much or more than the Tibetan culture. They are trying to make amends&quot;, he adds diplomatically.</p> <p>Smith has been called the greatest Western scholar of Tibetan literature, the most important person behind the Tibetan collections in university libraries across the United States. In India, he is regarded as an important lama. Lisa Rubin, Director of the Rubin Museum of Art, calls him &quot;a saviour of civilization&quot;. But his journey began humbly, as befits a lama. Smith has self-effacingly described himself to reporters as a hippie attempting to dodge the Vietnam draft by studying rarefied languages -but the dates don't quite add up. Direct US intervention in Vietnam began in 1964; by that time Smith was already on his way to Leiden for postgraduate studies in Sanskrit and Pali. He had already encountered Tibetan savants in Europe two years earlier. In 1965, he went to India with a Ford Foundation grant to study with living exponents of all of the Tibetan Buddhist and Bonpo traditions.</p> <p>The draft was probably not a big issue. Buddhism was probably a bigger one: </p> <p>Buddhism and violence are mutually exclusive. By the time the Vietnam War gained momentum, Smith was already a man charged with an extraordinary mission almost singlehandedly to save the Tibetan canon. The way he did it was &quot;absolutely legendary&quot;, according to a colleague. He had to gain the trust of monastic officials and others. He consulted the Dalai Lama. He was respectful and remarkably sensitive. Had he not taken on the task, it's unlikely that it would ever have happened. No one else could have done it. The amount of material involved is staggering, says Smith. More Buddhist literature exists in Tibetan than in any other language. For instance, the Kanjur, or words of the Lord Buddha, takes up 102 volumes, not counting commentaries and sub-commentaries. Moreover, each Tibetan sect has its own traditions, its own literature.</p> <p>Scholars estimate that 100,000 to 200,000 texts remain of the 500,000 written or translated since the ninth century. Smith is less sanguine: he estimates that scholars have 10 per cent of what once existed, but 80 per cent of what was well known. Little of it has been translated, and the culture as a whole remains largely inaccessible to the West. The solution: TBRC is going digital -which will have enormous repercussions on this little-known body of literature, preserving it, and expanding its influence internationally. TBRC is scanning millions of manuscript pages, and building an encyclopedic database for works historically passed down from teacher to student, never indexed or cross- referenced in the Western manner. At its website (www.tbrc.org), TBRC has over 7,000 authors and teachers online, and over 20,000 book titles. Its ambition is to put all that exists in Tibetan literature online. Works already scanned have been downloaded onto CDs as well. Unscanned works can be ordered as xeroxes or scanned on request.</p> <p>We often talk about the extinction of languages and cultures; obviously, the computer era offers unprecedented opportunities to reverse this process, and the remarkably enterprising and industrious Tibetans may show us how. They may be about to present us with a linguistic miracle on the order of the twentieth-century resurrection of Hebrew as a living, spoken language. Hebrew provides another analogue: the indestructibility of the reproduced, written word is what kept the culture of the Jews, alone in their region, alive and intact for millennia, especially since their strict interpretation of the Decalogue prohibited more perishable kinds of art, such as sculpture and painting. Only one copy of the Torah had to be rescued for an unlimited number to be reproduced from it, all alike in literary value to the original, in spite of conquest and displacement. If all that exists in Tibetan literature is online and downloadable, it becomes virtually indestructible - unlike the fragile, ethereal tangkas that line the walls around Smith's offices, where electronic reproduction can only give a whiff of the original.</p> <p>It is as hard to measure what the world will gain, just as it's hard to gauge what we have already lost through centuries of deterioration and the Chinese Cultural Revolution. Simone Weil's words about the Albigensians are chastening: </p> <p>&quot;Nothing is more cruel to the past than the commonplace which asserts that spiritual values cannot be destroyed by force; on the strength of this belief, civilizations that have been destroyed by force of arms are denied the name of civilizations; and there is no risk of our being refuted by the dead. In this way we kill once again something that has perished&quot;. In this sense, &quot;resurrection&quot; may not be too strong a word for what is about to happen to Tibetan literature, religion and culture.</p> <p>Centuries of Tibet are about to speak to us.</p></td></tr><tr><td><img src="Samambaia_files/spacer.gif" alt="" border="0" height="15" width="1"></td></tr><tr><td>&nbsp;</td></tr></tbody></table><table border="0" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0"><tbody><tr><td><img src="Samambaia_files/spacer.gif" alt="" border="0" height="30" width="1"></td></tr></tbody></table></td><td bgcolor="#ffffff"><img src="Samambaia_files/spacer.gif" alt="" border="0" height="1" width="9"></td><td bgcolor="#999999"><img src="Samambaia_files/spacer.gif" alt="" border="0" height="1" width="3"></td></tr><tr><td colspan="2" rowspan="2"><img src="Samambaia_files/tls_body_bottom_left.gif" alt="" border="0" height="9" width="15"></td><td bgcolor="#ffffff"><img src="Samambaia_files/spacer.gif" alt="" border="0" height="6" width="1"></td><td colspan="2" rowspan="2"><img src="Samambaia_files/tls_body_bottom_right.gif" alt="" border="0" height="9" width="12"></td></tr><tr><td bgcolor="#999999"><img src="Samambaia_files/spacer.gif" alt="" border="0" height="3" width="1"></td></tr></tbody></table></td></tr></tbody></table></td><td><img src="Samambaia_files/spacer.gif" alt="" border="0" height="1" width="6"></td></tr><tr><td colspan="5"><img src="Samambaia_files/spacer.gif" alt="" border="0" height="10" width="1"></td></tr><tr><td colspan="5" class="white-bold12"><img src="Samambaia_files/spacer.gif" alt="" border="0" height="1" width="200"></td></tr><tr><td colspan="5"><img src="Samambaia_files/spacer.gif" alt="" border="0" height="10" width="1"></td></tr><tr><td><img src="Samambaia_files/tls_template_bottom_left.gif" alt="" border="0" height="10" width="9"></td><td colspan="3"><img src="Samambaia_files/spacer.gif" alt="" border="0" height="10" width="742"></td><td><img src="Samambaia_files/tls_template_bottom_right.gif" alt="" border="0" height="10" width="9"></td></tr></tbody></table></center></body></html>