Books
Tibetan Buddhist Encyclopedia is now 14 years old
Our Encyclopedia recently received a wonderful opportunity for a major renewal on its 14th birthday . After many years of growing our Encyclopedia had become bit slow and sometimes even decided not to answer when people knocked on the door.
A very big thank you and blessings to Dmytro Rudiy (rudiy.nl) for his great work in upgrading the server, website and all of the infrastructure and helping make TBE fast and reliable again for everyone! 🙏🙏🙏
We kindly ask our readers to help us cover the cost of this important upgrade and also help with the ongoing costs of keeping the Encyclopedia alive and freely available.
or card
Every little donation helps and every one is deeply appreciated. 🙏🙏🙏
OM AH HUM VAJRA GURU PADMA SIDDHI HUM 🙏🙏🙏
May blessings shower down on all of yous 🙏🙏🙏
A book (potthaka) is an object made of numerous thin sheets, written or printed on, and then attached to each other by some means so that they can be read. The Jātaka mentions a message being written on a leaf (Ja.II,174) and the first Indian books were made in perhaps the 3rd century BCE from the leaves of Corypha umbraculifera, the Talipot Palm.
Records from Sri Lanka say the Tipiṭaka was committed to writing in that country in about 100 BCE, although parts of it may have already been written down in India earlier. When Buddhism spread to the far north of India, books were made of birch bark (Sanskrit bhārja), and when it got to China, silk, and later paper, were used. The first modern Buddhist books, i.e. printed on paper and bound between hard covers, were produced in Sri Lanka in 1862. Buddhists have always revered books of the Tipiṭaka by putting them between golden covers, wrapping them in silk and even sometimes enshrining them in stūpas.
See British Museum Scrolls and Printing.