I was honored to have known Gene and I considered him to be a great friend, mentor, and role model. I am very happy to see him being recognized as the great man that he was.
WHEN he visited the monastery of Menri, in the foothills of the Himalayas, in 2008, Gene Smith took a tiny gift for the abbot. He told him to wear it as an amulet round his neck, to ensure that all was well. Menri Trizan sports it today with his crimson robes: a memory stick, containing hundreds of pages of Buddhist scriptures.
At other monasteries, up and down the remote hillsides and the steep valleys, Mr Smith made a present of portable hard drives. A bulky, jacketed figure among the swarms of shaven heads, making an untidy namaste with his chunky Western fingers, he handed over devices, no bigger than the palm of a hand, which contained 10,000 books. Where for centuries monks lifted their pecha texts from decorated bookshelves and read the loose leaves across their knees, they now stare into laptops, contemplating the works Mr Smith has scanned for them.
For more on Gene and his work visit the TBRC website.
