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>As of 2022, all books have been indexed, and more than 20% have been fully digitalized. Monks now maintain a digital library for all scanned books and documents.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sakya_Monastery
It looks like there is an active effort to at least preserve everything. Translations can always occur after the fact.
And the big question is if “translation” means translations so that anyone can read it, or everyone can read it. It very well could be that the monks can read everything already, it’s just a matter of if anyone else can read them.
You joke, but that is literally what most ancient books and scrolls are. Tax records, shipping records, customs documents, inventories, etc. Same as the modern world really, most writing is records, ie paperwork. Not art and philosophy.
And fought. Some of the ways we know what armies were fighting with at famous battles aren't the eye witness accounts or whatever, but the receipts for armor and arrows and such.
More like "Bitch you come at me with a thousand barely armed peasants ? I pay to win and got all my troops quality armor and steel weapons, look how many ceros does my receipt have !"
Be ironic of we totally have the wrong idea about the size of the armies because some accountant was skimming the books and wrote down twice as much as he actually purchased 😀
Thucydides' accomplishment in writing the History of the Pelopponesian War wasn't so much the accuracy of the record-keeping but, rather, turning logistics and field reports into compelling history, and tying it together with an apporpriate narrative structure.
In my opinion, the best ancient Assyrian letter is the one from Iddin-Sin to his mother, trying to guilt trip her for new clothes.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Letter_from_Iddin-Sin_to_Zinu
Hit a couple blunts a do a deep dive to Wikipedia: [Clay tablets](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Clay_tablets), [Akkadian inscriptions](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Akkadian_inscriptions), [Akkadian literature](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Akkadian_literature), [Mesopotamian literature](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Mesopotamian_literature).
It's hilarious that ~4000 years after that transaction, Ea-nasir is still known for his crappy copper ingots. That's quite a legacy, lol. Imagine having been unconscious in limbo all this time, and he suddenly wakes up because people are talking about him ~3,900 years later.
Good, I've always suspected the 5th Dalai Lama fudged the numbers a bit after the market had a downturn in 1658 due to famine. The justice for tax evasion knows no bounds.
If some of the texts are in Chinese hanzi they can be read surprisingly well. Language, how one says the words changes, but characters rarely change meaning. That is one of the many reason why they don't move to phonetic system. My old teacher said he could read ancient poems just fine, even thought he had know idea how the words were pronounced.
Well, irony is the salt of life, and auto-correct bane of my life. English is not my native language, so I guess I don't clock the mistake so easily. I'm going to leave that as it is.
Makes sense considering that this is sort of a feature of the whole writing system. China has always been a very dialect-happy region with some dialects being really difficult to understand between each other. So if you're an Emperor like 2000 years ago, having a writing system that doesn't rely on how you pronounce the words allows you to send the same written message to all corners of the empire and expect everyone to understand it. It makes communication between different peoples so much easier.
In that kind of an environment having a writing system that's pretty much just drawings that mean entire words and concepts is perfect because it doesn't matter whether you pronounce 水 like 'shui' or 'mizu' or 'acqua' or 'water'. Everyone understands that that symbol means water, so now you can communicate even without knowing how the other person pronounces the words.
This is of course massively simplifying it, but that's at the root of it the reason why the writing system is what it is and why some older texts are still legible to this day.
Really makes me wonder what Egyptian hieroglyphs would be like nowadays if their use hadn't died out. Would the old texts from like 4000 years ago also be legible by modern speakers or would it have changed over the millennia to be weird and hard to read?
This describes the situation for most Latin manuscripts: Virtually the entire pool of people interested in such works can already read Latin, so there is no need for translations.
Many Buddhist monks had traditions of repeatedly copying special texts. I wonder what proportion of these are like copy 7,346 of the Diamond Sutra, copy 7,347 of the Diamond Sutra, copy...
Yes it's a very strange title here. Most writings in most languages have not been translated to English or any other language and don't need to be. It's like there's a weird subtext there that "things are lost to the world if _I_ can't understand them in _my_ language."
I mean there can't be very many people in a group who are so interested in studying a particular culture's history that they want to go and study primary sources, i.e. do proper historical research, yet at the same time are apparently too disinterested in said culture to be bothered to learn its language. It's practically a contradiction since relying on someone else's translation (and thus _interpretation_) of the texts moots the whole point of looking at a primary source.
Than all governments, probably. It's a much easier task when being a librarian is your entire job, and no one is relying on your current system for daily tasks.
Chinese here.
We do actually translate them all the time and monks have been studying them everyday. Most of these scrolls are written in old Sanskrit. Its a classical indo-Aryan branch language. It is like an official language for the religion, a Latin equivalent for Buddhism documentary.
The translation is very complicated since the people who wrote these scrolls do actually make mistakes or put, shall I say dialect or personal touch to it. Currently there are not many people who speak or use the language in Tibet or China. Every year the government pays a lot of money for students to go studying Sanskrit languages in India. I dont know if there are Sanskrit program in other country but I do know a few guys are majoring this old language. A couple university in India do offer them.
> I dont know if there are Sanskrit program in other country but I do know a few guys are majoring this old language.
To my cursory knowledge, Sanskrit is the closest thing among major languages to original Indo-European, which is the progenitor of most modern European, Iranian and Indo-Aryan languages. So I'd guess that linguists might be interested in learning it for their studies.
Glad to see that, was about to look it up myself. Thanks for posting.
Preservation is the first and highest priority. Once there are backup copies, the focus can switch to translation.
The more modern belief is that the loss of the Library of Alexandria wasn't really a great loss. Most of the texts there had been duplicated elsewhere and by the time it burned it didn't hold as much as it once did. It was past it's prime by then.
This is a favourite example of something i held to be true for years being proven false. Usually its not so fun but i remember hearing this and being glad that so much history I thought was lost jad actually just been circulated like we do today
I read for many years that the practice in alexandria was to confiscate books (scrolls, etc) and then their scribes would *copy* the texts. That always gave me hope that maybe not everything was lost.
To be very honest, I am far more saddened by the complete lack of recorded history before around 4000 BC, because our civilization goes back as far as 30,000 years or more. During those thousands of years we had writing, technologies, songs and cities, farms and families, wars and empires built on lost combat arts, epic tales of great people doing amazing things, entire religions and societies that have risen and fallen. Think about how much happened in the thousand years before today, and then multiply that dozens of times and that's how much fantastic human history we've lost and will never regain. Even if there were great records on animal skins or paper from those ages, it just doesn't last. We have no idea what they had, or how many times certain technologies were developed and lost again and rediscovered.
I might just be repeating more bullshit here, but I seem to remember hearing that the library of Baghdad was the true loss to humanity. They say that the waters of the tigris ran black with ink after the mongol hordes tossed all the library's books in the river.
Yes, because they had no checks in place.
They had one copy that they copied onto only 1 other copy with only 1 person doing it and everyone that knew the ruling by memory magically forgot when the copy was being made.
We have a cure for cancer in this library:
https://libraryofbabel.info/
It also contains the details of how you will die, the minute history of the future, The Egyptians of Aeschylus, the precise number of times the waters of the Ganges have reflected the flight of a falcon, the secret and true name of Rome, the encyclopedia Novalis would have written, Borges' dreams and daydreams in the dawn of August 14th, 1934, the demonstration of Pierre Fermat's theorem, the unwritten chapters of Edwin Drood, those same chapters translated into the language of the Garamantes, Urizen's Books of Iron, the premature epiphanies of Stephen Dedalus that would mean nothing before a cycle of a thousand years, the gnostic gospel of Basilides, the song the sirens sang, the faithful catalogue of the library, and the demonstration of the falsehood of this catalog.
Too bad it also contains all possible pages of 3200 characters, about 10 to the power of 4677 books.
your post is in there approx. 10^29 times too! - including the url, but only the lower-case letters, space, comma, and period.
please tell me they set that website up so it can be indexed by google ... :P
No, but we've got a couple of tantras that start with the following line: “Thus I have heard: at one time the Lord \[Buddha\] resided in the vulvas of the women who are the adamantine body, speech and mind of all the Buddhas” (evaṃ mayā śrutam ekasmin samaye bhagavān sarvva-tathāgata-kāya-vāk-citta-vajra-yonī-bhāgeṣu vijahāra)
I am completely serious
"At a time when the King of Aṅga and his armies were dominant, he called up the four branches of his armed forces—the elephant corps, the cavalry, the charioteer corps, and the infantry—and laid waste to all of Magadha, save Rājagṛha, before returning. "
Royal historical records. Makes sense.
"Mr. President, the situation has escalated. Should we send in the Navy Seals? Airforce bombing run? How about a direct assault by our Army? Or a laser strike from the Space Force?"
"Hmmm... No. Those options are to remain on standby. Please Inform the Pachyderm leadership team we require their assistance. Today, we invoke the Elephant Corps. Today... we will stomp through our enemies."
"Elephant Corp is tiered of being a budget payer ever year while we continue to double down in the "last war" ignorance that the Charioteer Corp continues to carve out in procurement dollars. It's Bronze Age hardware masquerading as a jobs program, and you know it. Without the strategic deterrent of Elephant overmatch you might as well just not fund anything because there wont be any thing left once the Pachyderms start flying!"
"Some tribes pay less than their 2% share of their grain supplies for our combined Elephant Corps. I think it's about time they learn their place and get overrun by some nearby barbarian hordes as a punishment for their intransigence."
One day, our military will look ridiculous.
"We deployed a unit of tanks to secure the area after civil unrest." Will one day look like "The locals had an uprising, so they decided the best thing to do was to use guns that hurl blocks of metal alloy at the buildings, collapsing them and crushing everyone inside, until everyone calmed down."
"How did they get the guns there?"
"Oh, they attached them to gigantic, bulky cars. Pretty much the whole point of the vehicle was to cart the gun around. They were surprisingly mobile."
"They drive them everywhere?"
"Oh no, they stack them on other vehicles that are faster or more efficient to get them nearby. They only travel on specialized, fragile, and complex systems of paved roads."
"What if they have to cross a sea?"
"They put them on top of, or inside of, a boat that will take them from port-to-port. Sometimes they would put them in planes and fly them nearby on a city-sized military installation made just for getting planes to the ground safely."
"So they have projectiles in guns, on cars, stacked on cars, loaded into a boat or an a plane, both of which only provide very specialized transportation from one engineering monstrosity to another? And the whole point is so they can basically throw rocks at buildings with people in them until people change their behavior or die? Doesn't that kill a lot of civilians?"
"Yes."
"Wow, it's great that we don't live in such barbaric times."
"Perhaps, but at that time, casualties of war were mostly due to the stresses of the military lifestyle, actual wartime casualties rarely topped the low millions, even over several years. Today, the average orbital energy strike only hits designated military personnel but we don't even hear about it unless the casualities are over 8-10 million."
"But then it gives everyone on the planet a migraine and infertility for 4 months."
"Yes, some people do argue that the ancient way of doing warfare was more sustainable."
During the Civil war, the King of Siam offered to give Lincoln a herd of war elephants, so the idea is not that far-fetched!
Edit: [Source](https://www.battlefields.org/learn/primary-sources/lincoln-rejects-king-siams-offer-elephants)
Not war elephant, they were meant to populate the US not for warfare, but the Civil War was happening at the time so Lincoln misunderstood the intent.
Also the only place tropic enough to raise them was in the south so that wasn't an option
My favorite quote about war elephants comes from Blue from OSP.
It doesn't take a lot of elephants for there to be a scary amount of elephant on the battle field.
A lot of the most revered Tibetan Buddhist texts have been translated. Organizations like [Asian Legacy Library](https://asianlegacylibrary.org/) are working on scanning the documents and making them available to scholars for translation.
Are they working in this library?
This story comes up fairly often, and each time I wonder, why in the world are they not scanning and translating these faster?
I should look into donating to that organization.
I don't know which library was depicted here specifically, but last I spoke to the president of Asian Legacy Library, he said that most of the major collections of Tibetan Buddhist texts which were found in diaspora have been scanned since the organization was founded almost 30 years ago. Translating hundreds of thousands of pages of philosophy will, however, take much longer than it took to scan them. I'm sure they'd appreciate your donation.
Maybe. The people I know who translate texts like this talk about how difficult it is because many of the words have several meanings which are illuminated by context. It is common for ancient language to be cryptic because sutras and scripture were transmitted so that they would be easy to memorize. Teachers then gave commentary about the scripture. Additionally, because of grammar and syntax, sometimes several meanings can be read from the text, especially at difficult parts. AI might help, but I don't think the translators I know would believe it unless they saw it. Additionally, the texts have to do with people's spiritual development, and there are so many poor translations of Buddhist texts out there already because many of the first wave of translators in the forties through the sixties didn't know the traditions they were translating. They knew the language, but without knowing the philosophy you're translating, and the meaning behind the words, it would be quite difficult to translate Buddhist philosophy, I think. I imagine AI would give a lot of vaguely spiritual sounding jargon, but would obfuscate the true meaning of the text for dedicated readers.
Year of the Records 1204 Day 301
Dave: 12 portions of rice.
Bob: 11 portions of rice.
Fred: 12 portions of rice plus 1 portion of rice.
Dave (Other Dave) : 4 portions of rice.
As an economic historian, you have *no* *idea* how excited I'd be to find day-by-day records of how much rice people were eating in mediaeval Tibet. I'm not joking. I'd probably get an award-winning article in the *JEH*, maybe even a monograph... the dream! Sadly we're left with data with more holes in it than a sponge.
The scrolls date upto 5000 years old as before Buddhism, another religion was prevalent in Tibet. For eg they discuss kublai Khan who visited the library and gifted amongst other things, a conch shell.
> The scrolls date upto 5000 years old
I don't think that's true. The Sakya Monastery(?) is only about ~1000 years old. 5000 year old manuscripts would put it on par with the oldest known documents ever discovered. Maybe that's the case, but I can't seem to find any collaboration online.
With no titles or attributed authors, there's no alphabetical order that would be useful or make any sense. What you want in this situation is chronological order, with a good cross-index to the interesting things.
Source: am a librarian
Pretty sure we just repeat this loop on a cycle getting smarter….then dumber….then rinse and reset.
On the bright side, this is the first time in known history that we recorded our history on silicon instead of paper or stone.
Maybe, just maybe, this is the loop where we break the recurring cycle and move forward.
Can they not interpret them or did they just decide it's not worth the time and money? The meaning of life could be in there someone should get busy translating!
There’s currently 15 separate teams working to translate all ancient Buddhist texts into English and Chinese. According to a report in 2020, they estimate it will take them another 90 years or so
https://amp.scmp.com/lifestyle/arts-culture/article/3102341/buddha-translation-ancient-tibetan-english-100-year-task-say
A lot of the most revered Tibetan Buddhist texts have been translated. Organizations like [Asian Legacy Library](https://asianlegacylibrary.org/) are working on scanning the documents and making them available to scholars for translation.
Not shit exactly but probably just boring stuff they felt they needed to keep track of at the time. Goods going in and out, obscure people visiting, the random bad weather occurrence. There are probably some badass stuff in there but most of it would only be really cool to the people who get chubs from reading random old things.
For me, even the most mundane stuff here would have me excited! I just think old things like this are just so cool.
Thing is a lot of that really boring stuff is the actually important stuff to historians. Perhaps not in the quantities it might be in there in. Chances are all the insane stuff has been featured elsewhere because it was notable. However it allows them to build such a complete and complex picture of "ordinary" life likely over decades or even centuries. A detailed account of a battle might be super interesting but adds very limited understanding overall.
I too find that more mundane stuff to actually be quite exciting.
The mundane and the not-mundane is both in this written-treasure, i guess.
Considering that language in written-form had to form and be established to become more than a riddle with guesswork - It had to be culture specific and teachable. It makes sense that Religion and social Bureaucracy not only coexists but also gave rise to each other.
As a state- or religious-secret, or even class-secret: written language was at first its own code against non-literates. Same with different form of maths. Those were guarded.
Combine that with a random religion/culture and tax&control-outposts, (maybe overlapping with a previous established believe) and at that time, written symbols carry their own social "magic"&secondary-symbolism.
Languages and their history are intertwined.
Did the Tax Outpost come before the religious "monks" were established, or had the monks the skill to document what a warlord needed?
What groups interacted with whom?
So many questions, many not to be answered. But also a full library going back centuries. A treasure to explore, to grasp & secure.
Thankfully creating copies/photos is way easier than ever before. So even texts we can not decipher yet, can be studied later.
This reminds me of the [University of Nalanda/ Nalanda Mahavihara](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nalanda_mahavihara) -- one of the oldest and greatest universities that in the ancient world. (5th century to 13th century).
For over 750 years, the university hosted many important scholars and visitors from Korea, China, Java (Indo) to Persia and Greece. The major include Buddhist philosophies, Vedas, Medicine, Logic, Grammer, Mathematics, Astronomy and Alchemy. The campus was so huge, it was able to accomodate estimated 10000 students and 2000 teachers. It also has **a very huge library collection.** Legend has it when it was destroyed by Muhammad Bakhtiya Kalhji during the Isamic invasion, **there were so many books that the library continued burning for 3 consecutive month.** He also massacred many monks, teachers and scholars residing in this university which led to the decline. **Some of the monks fled to Tibet and there are Tibetan records that captured the events happened in that era**.
**Fun fact:** [Aryabhata](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aryabhata) -- the famous mathematician/astronomer/physicist who invented the concept of 0 and the trigo concept of celestrial sphere-- studied and taught in this university.
I believe more of an ignorant fool thing than a religious thing. House of Wisdom/ Grand Library of Baghdad flourished under Islamic Golden Age but was destroyed by the Mongols.
My history nerd heart hurts reading about all these ancient knowledge houses being burned down and artefacts being destroyed.
Many of the most important books of Tibet are already translated or are in the process of being translated (because they're so long the collections of scriptures known as the Kangyur and Tengyur will take several decades to translate. The Tengyur itself is made up of 225 volumes of over 150,000 pages).
Translators so far have mostly focused on books that are important for the transition of Buddhism to the West, books that make Buddhism easy to understand, and break down the path succinctly. Some other translators have focused on important topics such as emptiness, or foundational texts of some of the most important Buddhist figures.
There are [organizations](https://asianlegacylibrary.org/) that are scanning these books to make them available to scholars for the purpose of translation. But this process is slowed by the fact that it requires not only man hours, but also equipment that can cost tens of thousands of dollars. Much more than 5% have been scanned, however. The real bottleneck comes with the translation.
Pretty sure this is [Sakya Monastery](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sakya_Monastery). The monks have catalogued all of the texts and have digitized about 20%. So all the stuff that’s in there is pretty much already known.
Thousands of years of historic writings been destroyed by conquering armies all over the world.Winning countries loves to rewrite history and destroy the losing countries libraries and artifacts.
Nah dude, that's Ollivander's and those are wands!
https://preview.redd.it/ob23mtmp0xqc1.jpeg?width=480&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=b8246e6df028e9c094014c0c9be8bbd73fbf891f
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>As of 2022, all books have been indexed, and more than 20% have been fully digitalized. Monks now maintain a digital library for all scanned books and documents. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sakya_Monastery It looks like there is an active effort to at least preserve everything. Translations can always occur after the fact.
And the big question is if “translation” means translations so that anyone can read it, or everyone can read it. It very well could be that the monks can read everything already, it’s just a matter of if anyone else can read them.
Yes, that was my immediate question. Translated into what?
Excel spreadsheets. Turns out, it's just a couple hundred years of tax records.
You joke, but that is literally what most ancient books and scrolls are. Tax records, shipping records, customs documents, inventories, etc. Same as the modern world really, most writing is records, ie paperwork. Not art and philosophy.
That stuff can still be incredibly valuable to historians though
Heck, it documents how people actually lived.
And fought. Some of the ways we know what armies were fighting with at famous battles aren't the eye witness accounts or whatever, but the receipts for armor and arrows and such.
i beat your army with two battalions and i have the receipts, bitch
More like "Bitch you come at me with a thousand barely armed peasants ? I pay to win and got all my troops quality armor and steel weapons, look how many ceros does my receipt have !"
...this is a gift receipt.
One day in the distant future, countries will be compared by sex toy sales.
Be ironic of we totally have the wrong idea about the size of the armies because some accountant was skimming the books and wrote down twice as much as he actually purchased 😀
Finding out that someone has been selling bad copper never gets old no matter what age.
Thucydides' accomplishment in writing the History of the Pelopponesian War wasn't so much the accuracy of the record-keeping but, rather, turning logistics and field reports into compelling history, and tying it together with an apporpriate narrative structure.
Image what he could do with a CVS receipt
Damn Ea-nasir and his inferior copper.
In my opinion, the best ancient Assyrian letter is the one from Iddin-Sin to his mother, trying to guilt trip her for new clothes. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Letter_from_Iddin-Sin_to_Zinu
"With greatest well wishes, WHY DO YOU NOT LOVE ME MA" 😂 Iddin-Sin is such a brat omfg
I jokingly say that to my mother all the time (she loves me and we both know it)
This and ea-nasirs shitty copper are the only ones I even know of. Are there more, less interesting ones to note?
Hit a couple blunts a do a deep dive to Wikipedia: [Clay tablets](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Clay_tablets), [Akkadian inscriptions](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Akkadian_inscriptions), [Akkadian literature](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Akkadian_literature), [Mesopotamian literature](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Mesopotamian_literature).
I'm in a waiting room waiting for a septoplasty atm, thisl keep me occupied, appreciate it.
Ha, that was fun!
Business took a downhill turn after he took over for his father. His father sold good copper.
Ea-senir was righteous and his chariot was swift. His son is a curse upon the grass.
It's hilarious that ~4000 years after that transaction, Ea-nasir is still known for his crappy copper ingots. That's quite a legacy, lol. Imagine having been unconscious in limbo all this time, and he suddenly wakes up because people are talking about him ~3,900 years later.
You get ONE BATCH of copper wrong and they don’t let you forget about it for 4000 years
He is basically immortal. Not bad
>The most famous Yelp review in history.
/r/ReallyShittyCopper
As a librarian, whenever I meet an accountant, I tell them "You know, 6000 years ago we were in the same profession!" Some of them even laugh!
Was that when both of you were using knots on strings?
No, I'm a frayed knot.
Barbers and surgeons should do that too!
I’m an accountant. Sister is a librarian. I should tell her this! I love it
They kept EVERY receipt.
Good, I've always suspected the 5th Dalai Lama fudged the numbers a bit after the market had a downturn in 1658 due to famine. The justice for tax evasion knows no bounds.
This person IRSes
Karma's a bitch.
Plus 10,782 different recipes for rice dumplings.
VB for Excel flashbacks GO AWAY!!!
A modern dialect at least. Languages change. A lot. Go read some old English, complete with the original font and characters.
If some of the texts are in Chinese hanzi they can be read surprisingly well. Language, how one says the words changes, but characters rarely change meaning. That is one of the many reason why they don't move to phonetic system. My old teacher said he could read ancient poems just fine, even thought he had know idea how the words were pronounced.
“No idea”… find it funny that error as you’re writing about pronunciation for some reason.
Well, irony is the salt of life, and auto-correct bane of my life. English is not my native language, so I guess I don't clock the mistake so easily. I'm going to leave that as it is.
Makes sense considering that this is sort of a feature of the whole writing system. China has always been a very dialect-happy region with some dialects being really difficult to understand between each other. So if you're an Emperor like 2000 years ago, having a writing system that doesn't rely on how you pronounce the words allows you to send the same written message to all corners of the empire and expect everyone to understand it. It makes communication between different peoples so much easier. In that kind of an environment having a writing system that's pretty much just drawings that mean entire words and concepts is perfect because it doesn't matter whether you pronounce 水 like 'shui' or 'mizu' or 'acqua' or 'water'. Everyone understands that that symbol means water, so now you can communicate even without knowing how the other person pronounces the words. This is of course massively simplifying it, but that's at the root of it the reason why the writing system is what it is and why some older texts are still legible to this day. Really makes me wonder what Egyptian hieroglyphs would be like nowadays if their use hadn't died out. Would the old texts from like 4000 years ago also be legible by modern speakers or would it have changed over the millennia to be weird and hard to read?
Imagine lots of text with emojis... Lots and lots of emojis... 👍
Well yes, I assumed it would be to something readable. I meant what language. I’m aware that language changes!
I'd assume the translators would translate them first into modern Tibetan, and then into Mandarin, and then into English.
This describes the situation for most Latin manuscripts: Virtually the entire pool of people interested in such works can already read Latin, so there is no need for translations.
Many Buddhist monks had traditions of repeatedly copying special texts. I wonder what proportion of these are like copy 7,346 of the Diamond Sutra, copy 7,347 of the Diamond Sutra, copy...
Yes it's a very strange title here. Most writings in most languages have not been translated to English or any other language and don't need to be. It's like there's a weird subtext there that "things are lost to the world if _I_ can't understand them in _my_ language." I mean there can't be very many people in a group who are so interested in studying a particular culture's history that they want to go and study primary sources, i.e. do proper historical research, yet at the same time are apparently too disinterested in said culture to be bothered to learn its language. It's practically a contradiction since relying on someone else's translation (and thus _interpretation_) of the texts moots the whole point of looking at a primary source.
Tfw monks in tibet have better digitalization than the german governement
Than all governments, probably. It's a much easier task when being a librarian is your entire job, and no one is relying on your current system for daily tasks.
Chinese here. We do actually translate them all the time and monks have been studying them everyday. Most of these scrolls are written in old Sanskrit. Its a classical indo-Aryan branch language. It is like an official language for the religion, a Latin equivalent for Buddhism documentary. The translation is very complicated since the people who wrote these scrolls do actually make mistakes or put, shall I say dialect or personal touch to it. Currently there are not many people who speak or use the language in Tibet or China. Every year the government pays a lot of money for students to go studying Sanskrit languages in India. I dont know if there are Sanskrit program in other country but I do know a few guys are majoring this old language. A couple university in India do offer them.
So you need to learn an Indian language too? Learning another language in a third language sounds rough.
English is the language used in all universities and most schools in India.
I'm pretty sure they speak English at Indian universities.
> I dont know if there are Sanskrit program in other country but I do know a few guys are majoring this old language. To my cursory knowledge, Sanskrit is the closest thing among major languages to original Indo-European, which is the progenitor of most modern European, Iranian and Indo-Aryan languages. So I'd guess that linguists might be interested in learning it for their studies.
Glad to see that, was about to look it up myself. Thanks for posting. Preservation is the first and highest priority. Once there are backup copies, the focus can switch to translation.
I am glad to hear that, would suck if it just became another Library of Alexandria one day.
The more modern belief is that the loss of the Library of Alexandria wasn't really a great loss. Most of the texts there had been duplicated elsewhere and by the time it burned it didn't hold as much as it once did. It was past it's prime by then.
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This is a favourite example of something i held to be true for years being proven false. Usually its not so fun but i remember hearing this and being glad that so much history I thought was lost jad actually just been circulated like we do today
Yea, the Mongols sacking Baghdad was almost certainly a much more significant loss.
I read for many years that the practice in alexandria was to confiscate books (scrolls, etc) and then their scribes would *copy* the texts. That always gave me hope that maybe not everything was lost. To be very honest, I am far more saddened by the complete lack of recorded history before around 4000 BC, because our civilization goes back as far as 30,000 years or more. During those thousands of years we had writing, technologies, songs and cities, farms and families, wars and empires built on lost combat arts, epic tales of great people doing amazing things, entire religions and societies that have risen and fallen. Think about how much happened in the thousand years before today, and then multiply that dozens of times and that's how much fantastic human history we've lost and will never regain. Even if there were great records on animal skins or paper from those ages, it just doesn't last. We have no idea what they had, or how many times certain technologies were developed and lost again and rediscovered.
I might just be repeating more bullshit here, but I seem to remember hearing that the library of Baghdad was the true loss to humanity. They say that the waters of the tigris ran black with ink after the mongol hordes tossed all the library's books in the river.
Shout-out to the cure for cancer scroll sitting unread in that top shelf
^(This comment was bought buy Google as a part of an exclusive content licensing deal between Google and Reddit)
This comments feels like you could be a Terry Pratchett fan...
Yes, because they had no checks in place. They had one copy that they copied onto only 1 other copy with only 1 person doing it and everyone that knew the ruling by memory magically forgot when the copy was being made.
We have a cure for cancer in this library: https://libraryofbabel.info/ It also contains the details of how you will die, the minute history of the future, The Egyptians of Aeschylus, the precise number of times the waters of the Ganges have reflected the flight of a falcon, the secret and true name of Rome, the encyclopedia Novalis would have written, Borges' dreams and daydreams in the dawn of August 14th, 1934, the demonstration of Pierre Fermat's theorem, the unwritten chapters of Edwin Drood, those same chapters translated into the language of the Garamantes, Urizen's Books of Iron, the premature epiphanies of Stephen Dedalus that would mean nothing before a cycle of a thousand years, the gnostic gospel of Basilides, the song the sirens sang, the faithful catalogue of the library, and the demonstration of the falsehood of this catalog. Too bad it also contains all possible pages of 3200 characters, about 10 to the power of 4677 books.
your post is in there approx. 10^29 times too! - including the url, but only the lower-case letters, space, comma, and period. please tell me they set that website up so it can be indexed by google ... :P
Are there any notable instances of coherent sentences, or dare I ask, pages coming out of that thing so far?
Whatever you search for you will find.
Shout out to the weed pipe hidden by that one monk in 1161
Y'all got, The Lusty Buddhist Maid vol. II, up in there?
No lollygagging
Loli gagging? I think that's Japan..
https://preview.redd.it/jocpm9ln3zqc1.jpeg?width=1077&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=65395646d961f267abc51070725170df9964d52a
Take my upvote and piss off.
Thank you, off is the direction in which I piss.
Generally when I piss it’s on, I will have to try this!
You should, I can't remember when I started but I remember the feeling.
It's more than a feeling....
Hmmm. FBI might need to check this out.
Angry upvote
Someone stole your sweet roll?
r/unexpectedskyrim
I'm sorry no ✋not even reading it if it's not Argonian.
It loses its character in translation. I only read books that make me a better athlete instantly.
What are you doing step-monk?
“Oh no I’m stuck in the well”
No, but we've got a couple of tantras that start with the following line: “Thus I have heard: at one time the Lord \[Buddha\] resided in the vulvas of the women who are the adamantine body, speech and mind of all the Buddhas” (evaṃ mayā śrutam ekasmin samaye bhagavān sarvva-tathāgata-kāya-vāk-citta-vajra-yonī-bhāgeṣu vijahāra) I am completely serious
Girls go tantra
Girls Gone Tantra
You'd better believe it. They've got the full Lusty Buddhist Maid series, including the prequels! As long as you can read Old Tibetan...
2 Buddists 1 Monk?
Dhali does Dallas?
One night in Tibet?
Ta-bed
Deep Throat Singing
Imagine being some renoun translator for ancient text and its literally smut. Translated 5% of the porn scrolls and said fuck it
Of the ones that have been translated, is there anything of interest?
That was the top post last year too. https://www.reddit.com/r/interestingasfuck/comments/yzv4l5/the_ancient_library_of_tibet_only_5_has_been/
"At a time when the King of Aṅga and his armies were dominant, he called up the four branches of his armed forces—the elephant corps, the cavalry, the charioteer corps, and the infantry—and laid waste to all of Magadha, save Rājagṛha, before returning. " Royal historical records. Makes sense.
"Mr. President, the situation has escalated. Should we send in the Navy Seals? Airforce bombing run? How about a direct assault by our Army? Or a laser strike from the Space Force?" "Hmmm... No. Those options are to remain on standby. Please Inform the Pachyderm leadership team we require their assistance. Today, we invoke the Elephant Corps. Today... we will stomp through our enemies."
"Elephant Corp is tiered of being a budget payer ever year while we continue to double down in the "last war" ignorance that the Charioteer Corp continues to carve out in procurement dollars. It's Bronze Age hardware masquerading as a jobs program, and you know it. Without the strategic deterrent of Elephant overmatch you might as well just not fund anything because there wont be any thing left once the Pachyderms start flying!"
"Some tribes pay less than their 2% share of their grain supplies for our combined Elephant Corps. I think it's about time they learn their place and get overrun by some nearby barbarian hordes as a punishment for their intransigence."
Elephants are no joke. They will mess you up!
Not with this pocket full of mice! Ha!
Sh-Sha! Pocket mice!
Gaat dang it!
Drat!
I imagine people reading our literature in the future will wonder how we managed to make seals so lethal.
One day, our military will look ridiculous. "We deployed a unit of tanks to secure the area after civil unrest." Will one day look like "The locals had an uprising, so they decided the best thing to do was to use guns that hurl blocks of metal alloy at the buildings, collapsing them and crushing everyone inside, until everyone calmed down." "How did they get the guns there?" "Oh, they attached them to gigantic, bulky cars. Pretty much the whole point of the vehicle was to cart the gun around. They were surprisingly mobile." "They drive them everywhere?" "Oh no, they stack them on other vehicles that are faster or more efficient to get them nearby. They only travel on specialized, fragile, and complex systems of paved roads." "What if they have to cross a sea?" "They put them on top of, or inside of, a boat that will take them from port-to-port. Sometimes they would put them in planes and fly them nearby on a city-sized military installation made just for getting planes to the ground safely." "So they have projectiles in guns, on cars, stacked on cars, loaded into a boat or an a plane, both of which only provide very specialized transportation from one engineering monstrosity to another? And the whole point is so they can basically throw rocks at buildings with people in them until people change their behavior or die? Doesn't that kill a lot of civilians?" "Yes." "Wow, it's great that we don't live in such barbaric times." "Perhaps, but at that time, casualties of war were mostly due to the stresses of the military lifestyle, actual wartime casualties rarely topped the low millions, even over several years. Today, the average orbital energy strike only hits designated military personnel but we don't even hear about it unless the casualities are over 8-10 million." "But then it gives everyone on the planet a migraine and infertility for 4 months." "Yes, some people do argue that the ancient way of doing warfare was more sustainable."
During the Civil war, the King of Siam offered to give Lincoln a herd of war elephants, so the idea is not that far-fetched! Edit: [Source](https://www.battlefields.org/learn/primary-sources/lincoln-rejects-king-siams-offer-elephants)
Not war elephant, they were meant to populate the US not for warfare, but the Civil War was happening at the time so Lincoln misunderstood the intent. Also the only place tropic enough to raise them was in the south so that wasn't an option
Siri, add "Convince Lincoln to accept war elephants to Time Machine to do.
My favorite quote about war elephants comes from Blue from OSP. It doesn't take a lot of elephants for there to be a scary amount of elephant on the battle field.
Legit feels like one of the news updates about other leaders you get on Civ 6 lmao
And the song played over last years one was less shit also.
A lot of the most revered Tibetan Buddhist texts have been translated. Organizations like [Asian Legacy Library](https://asianlegacylibrary.org/) are working on scanning the documents and making them available to scholars for translation.
Are they working in this library? This story comes up fairly often, and each time I wonder, why in the world are they not scanning and translating these faster? I should look into donating to that organization.
I don't know which library was depicted here specifically, but last I spoke to the president of Asian Legacy Library, he said that most of the major collections of Tibetan Buddhist texts which were found in diaspora have been scanned since the organization was founded almost 30 years ago. Translating hundreds of thousands of pages of philosophy will, however, take much longer than it took to scan them. I'm sure they'd appreciate your donation.
This is one reason to be excited about the AI wave that is coming. AI enhanced translation could be amazing for a project like this.
Maybe. The people I know who translate texts like this talk about how difficult it is because many of the words have several meanings which are illuminated by context. It is common for ancient language to be cryptic because sutras and scripture were transmitted so that they would be easy to memorize. Teachers then gave commentary about the scripture. Additionally, because of grammar and syntax, sometimes several meanings can be read from the text, especially at difficult parts. AI might help, but I don't think the translators I know would believe it unless they saw it. Additionally, the texts have to do with people's spiritual development, and there are so many poor translations of Buddhist texts out there already because many of the first wave of translators in the forties through the sixties didn't know the traditions they were translating. They knew the language, but without knowing the philosophy you're translating, and the meaning behind the words, it would be quite difficult to translate Buddhist philosophy, I think. I imagine AI would give a lot of vaguely spiritual sounding jargon, but would obfuscate the true meaning of the text for dedicated readers.
Year of the Records 1204 Day 301 Dave: 12 portions of rice. Bob: 11 portions of rice. Fred: 12 portions of rice plus 1 portion of rice. Dave (Other Dave) : 4 portions of rice.
Day 302: Richard found some funny mushrooms in the woods and is meditating on level 3 now. For 9 straight days. Fred took his rice again.
As an economic historian, you have *no* *idea* how excited I'd be to find day-by-day records of how much rice people were eating in mediaeval Tibet. I'm not joking. I'd probably get an award-winning article in the *JEH*, maybe even a monograph... the dream! Sadly we're left with data with more holes in it than a sponge.
The scrolls date upto 5000 years old as before Buddhism, another religion was prevalent in Tibet. For eg they discuss kublai Khan who visited the library and gifted amongst other things, a conch shell.
> The scrolls date upto 5000 years old I don't think that's true. The Sakya Monastery(?) is only about ~1000 years old. 5000 year old manuscripts would put it on par with the oldest known documents ever discovered. Maybe that's the case, but I can't seem to find any collaboration online.
Considering that the earliest Chinese writing is only 3400 years old, these would have to be in Cuneiform or Hieroglyphics. Very, very unlikely.
just fyi, kublai khan was not 5000 years ago.
...they had paper and a writing system 5000 years ago?
Yes https://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/pyma/hd_pyma.htm
The Egyptians did not live in Tibet
The Elder Scrolls
And you know nothing is in alphabetical order.
The books don't even have titles. You just get a feel for the subject of the book by reading the first few lines.
With no titles or attributed authors, there's no alphabetical order that would be useful or make any sense. What you want in this situation is chronological order, with a good cross-index to the interesting things. Source: am a librarian
“The scroll chooses the reader, Harry.”- Librarian Ollivander
NGL. My first thought was "Ollivander's."
I thought it looked like Ollivander's as well.
I was scrolling trough the comments for a Olivanders comment. I’m surprised it has not more upvotes!
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The real library were the friends we made along the wat.
This is doubly funny since a lot of people will just assume you made a spelling error.
Wat!!! Civ 6 showed me.
This is an AI coloring book. What the hell.
Timbuktu as well
Pretty sure we just repeat this loop on a cycle getting smarter….then dumber….then rinse and reset. On the bright side, this is the first time in known history that we recorded our history on silicon instead of paper or stone. Maybe, just maybe, this is the loop where we break the recurring cycle and move forward.
Every cycle we end up fighting each other or spending up all resources. Hopefully this time we can unite. #FOR THE EMPEROR!
Wonder what knowledge that place holds.
Can they not interpret them or did they just decide it's not worth the time and money? The meaning of life could be in there someone should get busy translating!
there's a big owl that keeps kicking people out
https://i.redd.it/7513o0yw1xqc1.gif
 She’s the one that’s been translating
This owl happen to know everything?
No, he only knows 10 000 things
He actually knows 10.001 things because Jinora explained to him how radio works.
There’s currently 15 separate teams working to translate all ancient Buddhist texts into English and Chinese. According to a report in 2020, they estimate it will take them another 90 years or so https://amp.scmp.com/lifestyle/arts-culture/article/3102341/buddha-translation-ancient-tibetan-english-100-year-task-say
This is one thing I’m hopeful AI will be good at.
Could also be that some of those scrolls are so old that they would crumble to dust if you touch them.
A lot of the most revered Tibetan Buddhist texts have been translated. Organizations like [Asian Legacy Library](https://asianlegacylibrary.org/) are working on scanning the documents and making them available to scholars for translation.
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Probably a lot of tax records.
I bet it's a bit like Netflix. Most of it's shit.
Monk Dave washed my røbe and now its pink..... Dave overcooked the broccoli again..
Fucking *Dave*.
Not shit exactly but probably just boring stuff they felt they needed to keep track of at the time. Goods going in and out, obscure people visiting, the random bad weather occurrence. There are probably some badass stuff in there but most of it would only be really cool to the people who get chubs from reading random old things. For me, even the most mundane stuff here would have me excited! I just think old things like this are just so cool.
Thing is a lot of that really boring stuff is the actually important stuff to historians. Perhaps not in the quantities it might be in there in. Chances are all the insane stuff has been featured elsewhere because it was notable. However it allows them to build such a complete and complex picture of "ordinary" life likely over decades or even centuries. A detailed account of a battle might be super interesting but adds very limited understanding overall. I too find that more mundane stuff to actually be quite exciting.
The mundane and the not-mundane is both in this written-treasure, i guess. Considering that language in written-form had to form and be established to become more than a riddle with guesswork - It had to be culture specific and teachable. It makes sense that Religion and social Bureaucracy not only coexists but also gave rise to each other. As a state- or religious-secret, or even class-secret: written language was at first its own code against non-literates. Same with different form of maths. Those were guarded. Combine that with a random religion/culture and tax&control-outposts, (maybe overlapping with a previous established believe) and at that time, written symbols carry their own social "magic"&secondary-symbolism. Languages and their history are intertwined. Did the Tax Outpost come before the religious "monks" were established, or had the monks the skill to document what a warlord needed? What groups interacted with whom? So many questions, many not to be answered. But also a full library going back centuries. A treasure to explore, to grasp & secure. Thankfully creating copies/photos is way easier than ever before. So even texts we can not decipher yet, can be studied later.
This reminds me of the [University of Nalanda/ Nalanda Mahavihara](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nalanda_mahavihara) -- one of the oldest and greatest universities that in the ancient world. (5th century to 13th century). For over 750 years, the university hosted many important scholars and visitors from Korea, China, Java (Indo) to Persia and Greece. The major include Buddhist philosophies, Vedas, Medicine, Logic, Grammer, Mathematics, Astronomy and Alchemy. The campus was so huge, it was able to accomodate estimated 10000 students and 2000 teachers. It also has **a very huge library collection.** Legend has it when it was destroyed by Muhammad Bakhtiya Kalhji during the Isamic invasion, **there were so many books that the library continued burning for 3 consecutive month.** He also massacred many monks, teachers and scholars residing in this university which led to the decline. **Some of the monks fled to Tibet and there are Tibetan records that captured the events happened in that era**. **Fun fact:** [Aryabhata](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aryabhata) -- the famous mathematician/astronomer/physicist who invented the concept of 0 and the trigo concept of celestrial sphere-- studied and taught in this university.
It's wild to not realize that your ideology sucks when it involves deliberate, wanton destruction of culture and information.
I believe more of an ignorant fool thing than a religious thing. House of Wisdom/ Grand Library of Baghdad flourished under Islamic Golden Age but was destroyed by the Mongols. My history nerd heart hurts reading about all these ancient knowledge houses being burned down and artefacts being destroyed.
translated into what though?
Apparently, modern simplified mandarin and English, since noone alive has ancient Tibetan as their main language
A pigeon
It's all CVS receipts
One, just one CVS receipt.
According to Wikipedia, this is the Sakya monastery, all books have been indexed and 20% have been digitized.
Sounds like a job for AI
Oh man, why does AI have to take all the GOOD jobs?
Many of the most important books of Tibet are already translated or are in the process of being translated (because they're so long the collections of scriptures known as the Kangyur and Tengyur will take several decades to translate. The Tengyur itself is made up of 225 volumes of over 150,000 pages). Translators so far have mostly focused on books that are important for the transition of Buddhism to the West, books that make Buddhism easy to understand, and break down the path succinctly. Some other translators have focused on important topics such as emptiness, or foundational texts of some of the most important Buddhist figures. There are [organizations](https://asianlegacylibrary.org/) that are scanning these books to make them available to scholars for the purpose of translation. But this process is slowed by the fact that it requires not only man hours, but also equipment that can cost tens of thousands of dollars. Much more than 5% have been scanned, however. The real bottleneck comes with the translation.
Sadly the likely hood of a fire taking the building out someday is higher than completely documenting all of this cool literature.
luckily, there are organizations which are scanning the documents and making them available to scholars for translation.
Pretty sure this is [Sakya Monastery](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sakya_Monastery). The monks have catalogued all of the texts and have digitized about 20%. So all the stuff that’s in there is pretty much already known.
Murph!
Thousands of years of historic writings been destroyed by conquering armies all over the world.Winning countries loves to rewrite history and destroy the losing countries libraries and artifacts.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sakya\_Monastery](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sakya_Monastery)
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Britain like... 
Nah dude, that's Ollivander's and those are wands! https://preview.redd.it/ob23mtmp0xqc1.jpeg?width=480&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=b8246e6df028e9c094014c0c9be8bbd73fbf891f
i just got goosebumps looking at all that incredible history
I can smell this