Make the Ageless Wisdom of Tibet Available to All

During the past three months, we have been working steadily on the process of migrating the rest of the Berzin Archives website material from the old format to the new Study Buddhism format. During this period, we have:

• Completed the shortening of the titles of the 1,150 English articles to meet Google search requirements, including giving unique titles for each of the parts of all the multipart transcripts of seminars
• Sent the list of required shortened titles for translation for our 20 non-English language sections
• Continued the process of migrating, re-editing, reformatted and published in the new format the remaining English articles from the old format of the archive section and, for search engine purposes, redirected the old urls to the new urls
• Edited and published 17 English transcripts from audio files from the archive section
• Compiled, re-edited, reformatted and published 17 Russian monolingual documents separated from the bilingual transcripts of seminars
• Redesigned 30 maps and 10 charts to fit the new format
• Redesigned and moved to the top banner the navigation for the switch languages function and glossary features
• Re-edited the 22 beginners’ articles in the “What Is” and “How to” sections of the Buddhism in Daily Life section.
• Completed having these 22 articles translated into 17 of our 21 languages
• Added a Universal Values subsection to the Buddhism in Daily Life section for newcomers, including many transcripts of the Dalai Lama’s talks on the topic
• Added our video subsection also to the Buddhism in Daily Life section, linking it with our YouTube channel
• Published on “Tricycle,” the popular Buddhist online magazine, our 4-part pilot education video course, “Introduction to Buddhism”
• Prepared the subtitles for the previously filmed interviews and had them translated into our various languages
• Conducted and filmed interviews with 5 further Buddhist masters
• Started the process of adding video content to our documents to make them media rich
• Upgraded our server to meet the SSL security requirements
• Upgraded our internal search engine.

In addition, we have sent Dr. Berzin to India to represent Berzin Archives at the international conference entitled “Buddhism in the 21^st Century,” convened at Nava Nalanda Vihara University with the Dalai Lama and the spiritual leaders of the various Buddhist traditions of South and Southeast Asia. Nalanda University was the largest center of learning in the Buddhist world from the 5th to the early 13^th century. Nava Nalanda Vihara University was founded in 1951 as the revival of this great institution. 

At the conference, Dr. Berzin delivered the keynote address, “Studying Buddhism in the Digital Age,” presenting the Study Buddhism project to the distinguished audience. He also delivered a paper at the workshop on Conflict Resolution, entitled “Education: The Key to Buddhist-Muslim Harmony,” and chaired the workshop on Development and Diversity of Buddhist Traditions. At this conference, attended by 1300 delegates from 30 countries, Dr. Berzin networked with Buddhist leaders from all over the world and made arrangement for further video interviews. The valedictory speech at the conference was delivered by the President of India, Shri Pranab Mukherjee.

Further, we have sent our Video Producer, Matt Linden, to India and Nepal, where he has conducted and filmed interviews with four Buddhist masters. While there, he has also photographed the Buddhist pilgrimage sites to enrich our articles with visuals.

As you can see, we’ve been hard at work. With your help, we will be able to continue our steady progress like this in making the ageless wisdom of Tibet available to all. 

Links:

• Study Buddhism website of the Berzin Archives
• Study Buddhism on Facebook
• Study Buddhism on Sound Cloud

• Bodhi Tree, Bodh Gaya, India (PDF)