Khmer Buddhist Foundation provides $1 million in grants to digitize Buddhist palm leaf manuscripts

[geovalin]

A Khmer Buddhist Foundation, a nonprofit entity dedicated to preserving the culture of the Khmer population, announced that it has furnished over $1 million in grant funding to the Buddhist Digital Resource Center (BDRC) to source, preserve, restore and digitize nearly 1.5 million pages of palm-leaf manuscripts — the largest collection of Cambodian Buddhist palm leaf manuscripts in the world.

 

The chief medium for Cambodian literature for hundreds of years has been the palm leaf manuscript. A South and Southeast Asian tradition for millennia, palm leaf manuscripts are typically short bundles of rectangular palm leaves that are tied together with colorful strings.

 

Palm leaf manuscripts are created by drying and trimming young palm fronds and then using a sharp stylus to etch text onto both sides of each strip of palm leaf. Given their organic nature, the manuscripts are perishable and also vulnerable to insects and fire. To protect them from loss, scribes would regularly recopy manuscripts, transmitting knowledge from generation to generation.

 

read more https://www.khmertimeskh.com/501023822/khmer-buddhist-foundation-provides-1-million-in-grants-to-digitize-buddhist-palm-leaf-manuscripts/