User:Abhayakara/ThurmanPitch

This is a transcript of a pitch that Bob Thurman gave for ACIP in 2010.

Since I've been teaching, about forty years now, the Buddhist canons, and canonical literature, and also many extra-canonical texts have materialized in forms you know with the realm of computers and development of the digitalization of these texts, which are in danger of perishing, they've been destroyed, many many copies in libraries have been destroyed, a new burning of the library of Alexandria has occurred in Mongolia and Tibet and in other asian countries.

And so these have become now ubiquitous and available at the click of the mouse, on the net and everywhere, and it's like a miracle. When I started studying in the early sixties, to find a Buddhist text was a big deal. Although there were copies of things in different libraries, but these were rare, and they were incomplete, and some of them had typos and errors and pages lost and things like that. And then there were massive destruction of these things of course in Tibet.

So that in this time due to the work of Geshe Michael Roach and the other workers of the ACIP they have been restored to peoples' use worldwide. And also many other things have been found in Russia and Mongolia and India, Indian libraries, and it's quite marvelous, you know.

And the Tibetan Buddhist Resource Center interlinking that with the work of ACIP nowadays, is making this even more useful, and then there are various dictionaries online,and things, and all of this will be much facilitate by this all of this will be much facilitated by this so it's extremely helpful.

And you know if I had thought... You know when I got my PhD in 1972 and my guru told me, my original Dharma Guru, a mongolian gentleman, said don't just work in the universities, your job is to translate the Tengyur. And I had just finished PhD, and and I was wanting a rest, take a break and I was saying "thanks a lot!"

And of course he said no, you'll just get it started type of thing. And now there it all is digitized. And it's conceivable we could make a lot quicker progress than we thought. And that's like a miraculous thing how it happened. I think it's wonderful.

And it's like part of this whole thing the way history is nowadays, we are at this apocalyptic time, where the planet could definitely go under like the whole Gulf of Mexico might be being destroyed as we sit here, for example, all life in it, and very toxic fumes emerging from it, which is a very apocalyptic thing, really, for everybody living for a thousand miles in any direction.

And all these nuclear weapons everywhere, and although there seems supposedly in end of cold war, people who make money off war are trying to start other ones, on both sides. So we are in a very doomsday oriented thing. There are movies like Apocalypse 1, 2, 3, 4 and five. The Christians fanatics are thinking about the rapture and the end of the world from their point of view.

And yet on the other hand all of the good things that have ever happened in history, all the great knowledge, is sort of collected too and it's there on every fingertip, it's been there in the net, in the internet.

So Buckminster Fuller once wrote a book called Utopia or Oblivion, which I think very much applies. We are at this point where these terrific, miraculous possibilities are possible for humanity are right in front of us, and then doomsday hangs over us, you know. It's quite amazing, actually.

And then the work of ACIP over the last 30 years, or however long it's been, and Gene Smith's Tibetan Buddhist Resource Center, and you know our thing is way slow behind them, because we have to teach in universities, and we have little spare time until we get older, but we're catching up, but those resources are immensely valuable.