Digital Dharma

Digital Dharma tells the story of E. Gene Smith, an American Tibetologist. He undertook a mission to digitize lost historical documents from Tibet. Further, he set out to ensure their continued archival for future generations. Writing of Digital Dharma, Variety said:

Dafna Yachin’s specialty docu is richly informative, not only about Smith’s life and his place in the troubled history of Tibet, but also about the intersection of ancient work and new technologies.[4]

The film includes interviews with Tibetan scholars and experts, including Matthieu Ricard, Khyentse Norbu, and Leonard van der Kuijp.

The story begins with political upheaval in the late 1950s and early 1960s, when multiple Tibetan villages are attacked by China's military. Monasteries are pillaged and destroyed, causing ancient Tibetan and Sanskrit texts to vanish. E. Gene Smith, a Mormon from Ogden, Utah, becomes aware of the situation while studying the Sanskrit and Tibetan languages at the University of Washington. At this time he meets Khyentse Norbu, a highly educated Tibet escapee. Norbu and Smith grow close, and Norbu asks Smith to help in recovering the lost Tibetan texts.

When Tibetan monasteries were pillaged, thousands of ancient texts vanished.

The mission lasts fifty years. Over the decades, obstacles mount. Ongoing political tensions stemming from Tibet and the People’s Republic of China mean Smith cannot work directly with China to recover many missing texts. While working for the Library of Congress in the 1960s, Smith is suspected of being a spy working on behalf of the CIA, slowing Smith's search. As years pass other political and technical issues hinder progress, but Smith persists with his plan, gathering an increasing number of documents over time.

In the late 1990s, Smith sees the emergence of the Internet as a great aid in his goal to preserve Tibetan culture. He creates the first online library of Tibetan documents, with the hope of scanning over 20,000 texts into the database. Then, in 2008, Smith's negotiations with the Chinese come to a halt when Tibetan protests create violence at the Summer Olympics in China.

Despite the halt in progress, Smith continues reaching out to China in hopes of finishing the project. An agreement is finally reached between his organization, the Tibetan Buddhist Resource Center and China to ensure future archival and preservation of the Tibetan texts. However, before Smith can complete the work of digitizing all 20,000 documents, he dies in 2010. People mourn his passing, but praise his work preserving the Tibetan culture.

Writing for The Huffington Post, journalist Maggie Jackson said of Smith's dying and the importance of the film:

At his death in 2010, [Smith] left behind a single volume of essays, but an enormous lifework: the preservation and reproduction of tens of thousands of rare, seminal Tibetan texts from a canon integral to the history of Buddhism. In an age when information seems quick, easy and even expendable, the film Digital Dharma should make us think carefully about technology's relationship to replication in our post-analog lives.[6]

As covered by Documentary Magazine, Director Dafna Yachin first met Smith while filming a documentary about philanthropist Peter Gruber. Once she came to understand the scope and importance of Smith's quest, she received his permission to follow him back to India and Nepal to capture his delivery of the first 12,000 digitized texts he had salvaged.[3]

Filming while travelling was demanding. Yachin said, “Delhi was our most difficult place. It’s crowded, and with shooting around the historic monuments, people can give you some issues if you don’t pay the government.”[7]

Raising money for ongoing production was a constant concern. According to Boulder Weekly, the filmmaker said, "Nobody wants to hear a story about a librarian," which made the film a "tough sell."[8] A variety of fundraising methods were used to continue filming, including donations from organizations, individuals, and web platforms Kickstarter and Indiegogo.[9]

In 2010, while still filming, the film's main subject, E. Gene Smith, died.[10] This caused the director to reconsider the production schedule. Said Yachin, "The sudden death of E. Gene Smith in December 2010 underscored my urgency to tell Gene’s remarkable story as soon as possible."[11] Of her hope for the finished film, Yachin stated:

With this feature film, I want viewers to quickly move from asking why to wanting to learn how: how Gene's ultimate mission of collecting, digitizing and distributing all the texts will be accomplished, and perhaps even how the viewers might become agents for accomplishing such a purpose in their own lives.[3]

Digital Dharma at IMDb
Digital Dharma Official Site