Digital Dharma on Kickstarter

UPDATE, 3:30am EST Jan 22: With just over 8 hours to go, the goal of 30,000 has been reached. The project will be funded and the movie completed!

Update, 7pm EST Jan 21: Just 17 hours to go and now less than $3000 short of the goal.

There are literally just hours left if you would like to help fund a movie about E. Gene Smith, the man devoted his life to the study of Buddhism and who brought us the Tibetan Buddhist Resource Center, an invaluable site for scholars and practitioners committed to the understanding and preservation of Tibetan texts.

About the Film

Digital Dharma uncovers E. Gene Smith’s 50-year journey with renowned scholars, lamas and laypeople as they struggle to find, preserve and digitize more than 20,000 volumes of ancient Tibetan text. Crossing multiple borders – geographic, political and philosophical – Digital Dharma is an epic story of a cultural rescue and how one man’s mission became the catalyst for an international movement to provide free access to the story of a people.

To view the trailer and to find out more information on the film please visit our website: www.digitaldharma.com

To become a fan of the film on Facebook, please visit:http://www.facebook.com/DigitalDharma

About the Mission

In 1959, Tibetan villages were attacked and hundreds of monasteries were destroyed, causing irreplaceable ancient Sanskrit and Tibetan writings to disappear.  This tumultuous time put the history of the entire Tibetan culture in peril – and called a man from Ogden, Utah to his destiny.

E. Gene Smith became the unlikely leader in an effort to rescue, preserve and share the riches of a 1,500-year-old seemingly lost Tibetan literary culture.  Smith’s mission crossed geographical, political and philosophical borders to rescue this chronicle of mankind’s advancements—from the medical to the mystical.

With the Buddhist thought at its core, his goal was to digitize the more than 20,000 volumes he rescued in order to provide free access to the story of a people. With technological advancement speeding forward, Gene’s vision was to make these texts accessible to everyone, even in the most remote monasteries and villages, and preserve the knowledge they contain for humanity.

(read more and see photos of Gene in the field and at work here)