Erik Davis covers the making of a computer software designed to spread enlightenment through virtual reality. In a Gelukpa Buddhist monastery in southern India, Michael Roach has collected groups of monks together in order to help create this new visionary project. The Asian Classics Input Project is an idea created by Roach to have buddhist texts and teachings obtainable by the click of a finger. Currently the project is only available in a working state on CD ROM or floppy disk, for a donation of $15, though the donation is not necessary. The first DC-ROM, Woodblock to Laser, contains ”half-million words of Buddhist philosophy, as well as catalogs, some nifty search software, and eleven woodblock images of Buddhist masters scanned from a celebrated copy of the Prajaparamita.” Although many of the teaching can be transfered into a digital mode, some of the more exclusive teachings are troublesome; not all the desired texts are able to be taken out of the country in order to be used with the correct technology and people. Roach and his team have already begun spreading the software, they’ve given away 10,000 discs to 50 countries, the first being Africa. By putting these sacred teachings into virtual reality, the Asian Classics Input Project is hoping to allow everyone the opportunity to learn about Buddhism in an interactive and organized manner. The software includes hypertext using keywords from various citations so that the reader is able to have immediate definitions of unknown words and so they can “get a feel for the complete web of Buddhist philosophy.” This also serves a metaphorical role in order to “demonstrate the intimate relationship between morality and the concept of emptiness, the tricky and pivotal notion that all things have no intrinsic “self-nature.” The legal positives of putting this material on the internet is the lack of financial hassles and the availablity of exclusive printed volumes which are not publicly accessable.
