Dear Friends,
We wanted to share with you a project that we feel has a special significance for our readers, and our core mission to expand the general knowledge and understanding of Trungpa Rinpoche’s teachings.
The newly-formed Chögyam Trungpa Institute (CTI) at Naropa University has has set out to complete the transcription and online publication of every talk given by Chögyam Trungpa during the seventeen years that he taught in North America. This is not a small undertaking. Chögyam Trungpa gave talks and conducted meetings tirelessly during his time in the West, and as a result, there are recordings of more than 2,700 hours of material. While it is true that some significant portion of these have been transcribed since the recordings were first made, (and these transcripts are the basis for the many books published under his name), a surprisingly large percentage of these lectures and remarks have never been transcribed, and thus remain largely inaccessible.
The current project will produce not only conventional transcripts but will make them available online, archivally cataloged, searchable, and synchronized with the digital audio or video files of the event. These will reside within a complete digital archive of all the assets associated with his life and teaching, (including photographs, poetry, letters, etc.), but the primary effort, at this time, is transcription.
While CTR was alive and giving teachings, transcription was accomplished by volunteer students, (using typewriters), as a form of study that allowed other future students to benefit. Today, in order to complete a final, verbatim, archival collection of the entirety of his teachings, a highly focused effort conducted by a closely supervised team of paid transcribers who are familiar with his teachings is underway. The project needs a big financial boost this year to get fully up to speed.
For the next week, during a “matching gift” campaign, we have the chance to join in this effort to ensure the long term impact of the entirety of CTR’s remarkable teachings for future generations, by lending our support to this project at this early stage. Donations of all sizes are deeply appreciated; CTI hopes to draw on a broad base of support from a large number of individual grassroots donors.
For more on the project, see this demonstration of “interactive transcripts”.
-The Chronicles
