Version sourcing

For any Tibetan work, we can perform a comphrehensive search on your behalf of all the available digital versions.

Depending on your needs and budget, we offer three options of increasing comrehensiveness.

Option one: semi-automatically sourcing all versions of a text in the BDRC collection linked to its author

Using Shantideva’s “Bodhicaryavatara” as an example, we start by searching for all the works in the Buddhist Digital Resource Center (BDRC) collection that have been tagged with Shantideva’s author identification number. Within those results, our scholars look for all of the instances of “Bodhicaryavatara.” Because versions might come in collections or might be listed with alternative titles, this part of the search is done manually.

This option takes up to a day, depending on the work.

Option two: an in-depth survey of BDRC’s collection including unlinked texts

This option includes the previous process and goes further. We also look for instances of “Bodhicaryavatara” in the BDRC system that haven’t been linked to Shantideva. This includes searching for versions by the title and all of its variations and by keyword phrases contained within the text.

This option takes 1-2 days, depending on the work.

Option three: searching the internet and the collections of publishers and monasteries

This option includes the previous two processes and extends the search to entire internet. We also contact publishers and monasteries in our network and ask them if they have digital copies of the text.

This option takes up to a week, depending on the work.

For all three options, we provide a list of download links and a collection of files.