By PETER MONAGHAN

"I know where to find some things," comes E. Gene Smith's standard response when he is asked to find particular items in his enormous collection of Tibetan Buddhist texts. "There's some sort of reason to it."

For years, from India to Indonesia to Egypt to Boston, and here at his office, some 12,000 manuscripts and block-printed volumes on thin, mulberry-husk paper, wrapped in red-and-gold cloth decorated with colored flaps, have followed him around. They hem him in now, looming on bookshelves and piled on the floor.

Mr. Smith, 66, has spent his whole adult life collecting the texts of the 1,300-year-old tradition, on which he is a leading authority. In recent years, the advent of affordable, user-friendly digitization has presented him with a way to escape being nearly buried by the texts.

"Say you want to find everything we have about the eighth karma pa," or incarnation of the founder of the Karma Kagyu school of Tibetan Buddhism, he says, sitting at a computer terminal. He taps out the name of Mikyo Dorje (1507-54) in so-called Wiley transliteration -- "mi bskyod rdo rje" -- and a database returns a stream of records on the man's works as well as information about his life and his teachers.

The references are provided by the digital archive that Mr. Smith, an independent scholar, is creating here at the non-profit Tibetan Buddhist Resource Center, which he founded and directs. At http://www.tbrc.org, one can access the center's rich memory bank of Tibetan traditions.

The Web site also provides links to a growing number of other digital resources. "Let's click on this," says Mr. Smith, and a portrait of the karma pa appears. Depicted in ground mineral pigment on cotton, he is surrounded by eight dancing figures enveloped in rainbow light.

The picture is from the 6,000-image collection of the Himalayan Art Project (http://www.himalayanart.org), run by the Shelley and Donald Rubin Foundation, which is dedicated to preserving Tibetan culture. Last year it invited Mr. Smith's center to move here to share its space in the Lower East Side headquarters of the health-insurance company that Mr. Rubin runs.

Mr. Smith's center is reached via a serpentine stroll through corridors hung with hundreds of works of Tibetan art. He moved here last spring from the center's former quarters, in a duplex house in Cambridge, Mass., which was also home to Mr. Smith and a couple of colleagues. There, users who browsed shelves, room by room, were liable to stumble over cots set among the books.

The collection includes all four of the major traditions of Tibetan Buddhism. To illustrate its range, Mr. Smith -- a genial, large-framed man, pulls out such works as a 13th-century manuscript that details the secret initiation rites for one variety of practice. A woodblock print of the Tibetan translation of the Kalachakra Tantra, the Wheel of Time, was printed in 1300 or so for the queen of the Mongol ruler Kublai Khan. A complete set of the official biographies of the Dalai Lamas, in 16 volumes, is here, too.

Many of the volumes have rarely been printed from the original wood-block versions; in the Tibetan tradition, books were typically read aloud by teachers -- or, in the case of the most sacred texts, recited from memory. The lamas who memorized texts became, in effect, living libraries. Now, through the Internet, digitally scanned versions of many texts are readily available to users worldwide. "With the explosion of interest in Tibetan Buddhism in the West, there's a need to make these more available," says Mr. Smith, determined that no future scholar of Tibetan Buddhism will share his own experience: "When I began in Tibetan studies, we didn't have any books."

Amassing the digital archive takes on some urgency because many texts were destroyed or dispersed during China's Cultural Revolution, in the 1960s and '70s, and many that survived are deteriorating. Fortunately, Mr. Smith's collection, which he built over decades of working as a foreign-service officer for the Library of Congress, includes most of the core texts. Written by monks or noblemen, they are largely about religion and ritual -- theories of perception, songs of realization, spiritual biographies, meditation instructions. Others deal with medicine, astrology, poetics, mathematics, history, and art.

When the Chinese invaded Tibet, in 1959, the Dalai Lama and some 100,000 other Tibetans fled into exile, taking tens of thousands of books with them. Many were sold to buyers who coveted the illustrated manuscripts. Some images were even painted over.

There has been good news, too: "Many of the books that we thought had been destroyed during the revolution turn out not to have been," says Mr. Smith. For that, thank Zhou Enlai, who convinced Mao Zedong that each Chinese province should set up one or two "living museums" of culture. In Tibet, says the scholar, "small cadres of monks were allowed to function within carefully circumscribed guidelines."

That, and Mr. Smith's dogged searching of Tibetan Buddhist monasteries, proved crucial when he organized a publishing project in New Delhi beginning in 1966. Thanks to federal financing of the acquisition of texts from developing countries, he was able to arrange for some 8,000 Tibetan texts to be published in small runs. Those formed the basis of collections at the Library of Congress and several American university libraries. They also swelled his own growing hoard.

His own quest for Buddhist learning began during the 1960s. Seeking deferral from the draft for the Vietnam War, he enrolled for graduate study at the University of Washington, at one of nine centers of Buddhist research set up around the world by the Rocke-feller Foundation. At first, he had no interest in Buddhism as a spiritual practice. It certainly differed markedly from the Mormon faith in which he had been raised, in Ogden, Utah.

Tibetan Buddhist leaders were invited to each of the nine centers. In Seattle, Mr. Smith was asked to live with and work as an assistant to the family of one of them, Sakya Phuntsho Phodrang. The family's tutor, Deshung Rinpoche Kunga Tenpai Nyima, became Mr. Smith's instructor, too, from 1960 to 1964. At first, "I wasn't interested in Buddhism at all, except academically," Mr. Smith says, "but my teacher turned out to be one of the most learned men who came out of Tibet. He was a good example of what Buddhist practice could result in."

The young American, drawn to Tibetan spirituality, took up Buddhism himself. He traveled to India in 1965 on a Ford Foundation grant to study with Tibetan Buddhist savants, and then took up a post as a book buyer with the Library of Congress's New Delhi field office, where he remained until 1985. Most of his collecting dates from that period. Fearing that he would be misunderstood, though, he did not tell his employers that a spiritual quest, not just librarianlike fastidiousness, was driving his success in finding and acquiring texts.

His reputation among Buddhist scholars began to grow. In New Delhi, as one colleague has remarked, his apartment became "an oasis for a whole generation of scholars coming of age" in Tibetan studies. He later worked for the library in Indonesia and Egypt. "I had a lot of shipping charges to pay," he says.

In 1999, after taking early retirement, he opened the Tibetan Buddhist Resource Center in Cambridge, even as he was working as acquisitions editor at Wisdom Publications, a publisher of Buddhist texts and commentaries. The press published Mr. Smith's Among Tibetan Texts: History and Literature of the Himalayan Plateau in 2001. In their original appearance in the 1960s and '70s, as prefaces to the small-run publications, they opened up whole new areas of Tibetan literature, history, and religion.

Most Tibetan Buddhist texts are in the public domain, so they can be scanned, digitally stored, and distributed without restriction, although the center has agreed to the requests of traditional caretakers of specific texts not to scan some that relate to secret rites. To obtain copies of texts in the center's collection, users may search through extensive bibliographical data and request texts on disk. Mr. Smith receives many requests -- more than his few staff members can quickly handle -- from libraries in Asia and elsewhere.

Finances, predictably, are an issue. "It's all based on donation," he says. "There is an uneasiness in the Tibetan tradition about selling books or images." He and his colleagues send out the digital texts without charge, leaving it up to libraries when, or even whether, to respond with donations to cover the cost. "We like to try at least to cover the cost of postage," he says.

"The idea is that we just don't want to be selling back the Tibetan culture to the Tibetans."

http://chronicle.com Section: Research & Publishing Volume 49, Issue 39, Page A48