Paper’s patrons: digitisation, new media and the sponsorship of sacred Tibetan books in California

Abstract

ABSTRACT This paper focuses on the sacred text-production work of a Nyingma Buddhist group based in Berkeley, California. It unpacks their selective engagement with the tools afforded to them by digitisation and new media. Digitisation projects – appearing in growing numbers – offer a powerful resource for the re-assembly of Tibetan Buddhist textual collections scattered in the political upheaval of recent decades. Yet the meeting place between the digital and the sacred is sometimes contested in this context where sacred text is an embodiment of the Buddha’s speech. This paper argues that the choice to print ink-and-paper texts is more than a simple rehearsal of tradition and in fact demands alternative forms of engagement with the potential offered by media tools. It explores how the moral invectives contained within sacred Tibetan texts become reshaped through the prisms of contemporary media and the American sponsorship landscape.