From their website…
Preserving A Heritage of Peace, Wisdom and Compassion
Welcome to the interim website of theBuddhist Literary Heritage Project
The sacred literature of Buddhism is one of the world’s greatest cultural heritages.
Its vast number of wide-ranging works focus on cultivating peace, wisdom and compassion—and these works are no less relevant today than they were 2,000 years ago. The Buddha’s teachings were passed down orally for several centuries after his lifetime, and were only committed to writing, in several different Indian languages, from the 1st century BC onwards. One important collection of texts in Pali has survived to the present day, but thousands of other works in Sanskrit were destroyed during the political upheavals in India between the 11th and 13th centuries—and would have been lost altogether if most of them had not earlier been translated and preserved in classical Chinese and Tibetan.
NO TIME TO LOSE Now, once again, there is a real risk that this ancient heritage could be lost within a generation.
Less than 5% of the Tibetan texts (known as the Kangyur and Tengyur) have been translated into modern languages, and only 15% of the classical Chinese texts into Western languages. Yet very few people alive today still hold the deep traditional learning necessary to interpret these texts accurately. Before this precious treasury of knowledge is irretrievably lost, join us in making it available to the world through translation.
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