Tibetan Buddhist Resource Center

Tibetan Buddhist Resource Center (TBRC) is a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization dedicated to seeking out, preserving, organizing, and disseminating Tibetan Buddhist texts and Tibetan literature. Founded in 1999 by E. Gene Smith, TBRC is located in Cambridge, Massachusetts and hosts a digital library of the largest collection of digitized Tibetan texts in the world.

TBRC's Harvard Square headquarters facilitates its ongoing cooperative relationships with Harvard University. TBRC also has international offices in New Delhi, India and Kathmandu, Nepal, and a newly opened scanning and text-preservation center located within the E. Gene Smith Library at Southwest University for Nationalities in Chengdu, China.

To preserve and share the Tibetan literary heritage through the union of technology and scholarship.

In the early 1960s, while working on his PhD. at the University of Washington, E. Gene Smith studied with the Venerable Dezhung Rinpoche. In 1964, Dezhung Rinpoche encouraged Smith to move to India in order to seek out and study Tibetan books more directly. He gave Smith letters of introduction to show to the lamas living among the Tibetan diaspora.

In 1968 the U.S. Library of Congress hired Smith as a field director in New Delhi where he worked on the Food for Peace humanitarian effort Public Law 480. Through the program, Smith began to copy and print thousands of Tibetan texts while keeping a version of each one for his own collection. He moved from India to Indonesia in 1985 and then Egypt, along with his collection of 12,000 volumes of texts.

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