Muktabodha has launched a new chapter in the development of its ground-breaking Digital Library. 1,144 paper manuscripts of all the most significant texts of Shaiva Siddhanta are now available worldwide through Muktabodha’s on-line Digital Library. Until now, this fragile collection of choice manuscripts has only been available by visiting the French Institute in the South Indian town of Pondicherry. In fact, this is the first time that a major collection of largely unpublished Sanskrit texts has been made available on-line.

Muktabodha now has the largest on-line library of Sanskrit texts in the world, consisting of 2,100 digitally imaged Shaiva texts of various schools, 90 searchable electronic texts from the tantric traditions, and 5 unpublished and largely unknown texts partially edited by one of the leading scholars of the field. See: www.muktabodhalib.org/digital_library.htm This new collection consists of over 210,000 clearly written pages that form more than 2,100 Sanskrit texts of the Shaiva tradition, including some of its oldest surviving literature. The majority of these handwritten texts had been digitally photographed by Muktabodha’s team, then carefully processed for the internet.

Muktabodha photographic staff with bundles of paper transcripts and palm-leaf manuscripts of the IFP

An exciting feature of the collection is that it is fully integrated into a searchable on-line catalog. The detailed catalog records were prepared over many years by the scholars of the French Institute of Pondicherry and the Ecole française d’Extreme-Orient -- our wonderful collaborative partners in this project.  They were then developed into a web-based catalog by Muktabodha’s staff using open-source software.

These texts, which come from various regions of India, were originally fragile palm-leaf manuscripts that over the centuries were copied and recopied by scribes in minute lettering and in scripts that are no longer used. Before being preserved and published in this digital form, each one has passed through the hands of many scholars, philosophers and religious practitioners; some had been used to inform the religious ceremonies in the great Shiva temples of South India, some were preserved in the libraries of Maharajas, and others were held in monasteries.

The current project dates back to the 1950s when Pandit N. R. Bhatt, a scholar of the French Institute, traveled throughout South India to reconstruct a forgotten chapter in the history of South Asia. In addition to collecting old palm-leaf manuscripts, he had all the important texts painstakingly transcribed into the well known Devanagari script, in clearly legible characters on uniform-sized pages. These now form the core of the largest collection of Shaiva Siddhanta manuscripts in the world, which has been recognized by UNESCO in its prestigious “Memory of the World” register. Muktabodha’s web site has a detailed description of the project, including an article on its history by Dr. Dominic Goodall, the curator of the collection and one of the world's leading contemporary scholars of Shaiva Siddhanta: http://muktalib.org/access_page.htm.

This Shaiva Siddhanta collection superbly complements the other core facet of Muktabodha’s Digital Library: the growing corpus of early Tantra texts presented in electronic format. Under the guidance and training of the renowned scholar of Kashmir Shaivism, Dr. Mark Dyczkowski, a data entry team in Varanasi is carefully typing out forgotten manuscripts and decaying old books into searchable text documents. This team is trained to read scripts that are long out of use, such as the old Newari of Nepal, the Sharada script of Kashmir and the Grantha script of South India. This enables them to make copies of some of the oldest and most important Tantric manuscripts, and make them widely accessible to the worldwide academic community for the first time. For a full description of the e-text collection, see Dr. Mark Dyczkowski’s introduction at www.muktabodhalib.org/digital_library.htm. To date, 90 such electronic Sanskrit texts have been added to the Muktabodha Digital Library. The response has been remarkable. Statistics show online viewing of over 772,000 pages, and over 18,000 downloads of entire texts by individuals and institutions worldwide.
	Dr. Mark Dyczkowski instructing the head of Muktabodha’s data entry team in Varanasi
	Dr. Mark Dyczkowski in Varanasi

An example of those many users of the library is Christopher Tompkins, a Ph.D. candidate at the University of California at Berkeley, who uses this collection frequently in his research on the Tantric Origins of Hatha Yoga. He says: “Because these texts are typed in, my search system can read every verse. This allows me to search at once for key terms and phrases that appear in multiple Tantras. This is an amazing benefit, because I can track the development of key ritual practices, for example, across multiple texts; or I can determine which Tantra is borrowing terminology from which. Thus, for the first time in Tantric scholarship, we are able to understand the evolution of Tantrism through intra-textual research. I am indebted to Muktabodha for so advancing our ability to research and publish in this exciting field.”

Using Muktabodha's Digital Library, Christopher and his colleagues are working with their professor on some of the first translations ever created of passages from texts that are over a thousand years old. We look forward to the time when their work is published and thereby contributing to the development of human understanding.

For more information on Muktabodha’s Digital Library and ways to support this project,
please visit www.muktabodha.org or contact info@muktabodha.org