So I was ActionScript, I know. I'm so sorry, we do not speak.
Such a that that. Gregory obtained his Ph.D. in Chinese cities and from university and was a great fellow.
It doesn't say is my best judgement at that.
While that can be found from the network, which later became the study that was written and have decided to return to Manchester.
He is currently senior lecturer in Chinese culture and history,
and so it's a great personal pleasure to welcome him to his presentation, which is almost ready.
Any moment now, I will manifest it in a note on the subject of reading scriptures in China.
The role of scripture addresses the is no, it's questions.
And that's 30 minutes to. Wonderful.
Thanks very much, Naomi. So welcome, everybody, thank you very much for being here.
Whether you are manifesting yourself in person or online,
my presentation is going to be a bit of a shift from Charles's were we're moving from Pandora to China and from the earliest,
you know, some of the earliest generations of my Mahayana to a period that is much more recent, the 19th and 20th centuries tartly history at all.
It's basically journalism. It's so recent. But one thing that connects it is this feature of my in the scriptures that they contain
within them instructions for their own replication that they contained within them.
This language that says if you cause others to read the scripture,
if you cause others to have a copy of the scripture, if you distribute it, you oppose it.
If you make more copies in the world than the merit accrue to you will be immeasurable.
It would be so much more than any kind of a material donation or any kind of a material action you could do in the world.
It's kind of like a virus has within itself the DEA instructions to make copies of itself and to spread.
Although it might be a little early to start making some tweaks to viruses might maybe a little too soon for that sort of thing.
So my what I look at is Buddhists in China in the 19th and 20th centuries,
and especially those Buddhists who are very much involved in print culture in printing and the connexion.
I think between my work and sort of the overall theme of the conference,
this is basic question, but how do you make connexions between readers and texts?
How do you get texts into the hands of readers and make sure that they can understand them once they have a copy in their heads?
So I'm interested in people and institutions who are involved in creating Buddhist texts and distributing them in crafting them and editing them,
getting them into the hands of readers. Even though it's it's arisen in quite a few presentations that it seems for a lot of these texts.
They weren't actually read all that often, and often times the power of a text can be something that has nothing to do with Reading.
Just holding it or having it. Having a physical copy in a place itself has its own kind of energy.
It's its own, its own power that has nothing to do with actually looking at the text and interpreting it and reading the words.
Although, of course, that possibility always remains open.
But the types of people that I look at in in the modern period of Chinese history, we're absolutely concerned with reading.
And the problem they faced in the early part of this period was that there weren't enough texts.
There should be more of them. And how do we create more of them, get them into the hands of people?
The problem that I'm dealing with, looking at the entirety of this period is quite different from what Charles is doing with I feel like Charles.
When you find a new manuscript, you're really excited, right?
You have these little tiny fragments and you try to you look at them in such detail and try to extract all the meaning you can.
I am flooded with texts. I've got too many titles. There's just they printed too much stuff, especially in the 20s, in the 30s.
It is just overwhelming a flood of text to try to get a handle on all of the authors and additions and things like that.
So at the end of my presentation,
I'll introduce to you a digital tool that I and a few colleagues are working on to try to get a better sense of the terrain of Chinese
religious publishing and try to better navigate the this the sea of scriptures that they ended up that they ended up producing.
So for me of this topic is it's kind of a return to what I wrote.
My Ph.D. on my Ph.D. was kind of an initial study on different types of publications and publishers during the early 20th century.
For a variety of reasons, I didn't end up turning that into a book.
As Naomi said, I was a an in early career fellow and one of the requirements is that funding is that you do a project that's not your.
So for a period of time, I moved away from books and I went to monasteries and I looked at temple destruction and rebuilding during this period,
and that ended up being my first month. So now that's finished and I'm well established at the University of Manchester.
So like, I kind of want to go back to this material and kind of do it right because now I'm more mature.
I know at least a few more things. I want to return to this topic and eventually come out with my second monograph,
which is really going to be looking in detail at this world of prints and world of text amongst Chinese Buddhists during the modern period.
That's kind of my own interest in it.
But looking more broadly looking to colleagues and the studies and colleagues in Chinese studies, more generally,
the point of it in the kind of the what to answer the so what question the idea is that I make
the case that Buddhists during the modern era were enthusiastic participants in modernity.
It wasn't the case that the Buddhists doing Buddhist things over here and then the
rest of China was having revolutions and and innovations and modernisation over here.
They were intimately connected and Buddhists were concerned about current events, about the way that's the direction in which China was going.
They wrote about political topics. There's no topic that they didn't address in some way in their own literature.
They were embedded in history that were part of history.
But unfortunately, most historians have butter in China, and other people think about modern China usually put religion to one side.
They leave them out then. Stan, oh, yes, if were around and they were doing their thing, but they weren't part of the core story.
It wasn't part of the story of literature and politics and war and destruction and technology that we know to be the story of modern China.
Well, I want to rewrite put it's back into the story of modern China and make a case to say that they were front and centre in their own way.
They were participating in all the various types of cultural innovations and modernisation that were happening during this time.
So that's my kind of outward looking case and inwardly Typekit of studies and the
ramifications of importance for Chinese Buddhism is I want to argue that engaging with print
and engaging with producing texts that reflects the facts and Buddhists themselves and
change the way that they understood their own tradition in ways that they did Buddhism.
So it's not just a case that they printed stuff that was a reflection of what they were doing.
The very act of printing producing these texts change what they did and change how we thought about themselves.
Okay, so let's get started and we'll start with the war.
The the period of time that I look at and it starts with destruction,
it starts at this period of the war, which lasted about 14 years for most people.
If they know about modern Chinese history and they think about the types of wars and conflicts that were important.
Usually, they focus on things like the Opium War, maybe the Boxer Rebellion, Sino-French war, things like that.
These colonial wars and wars with foreign powers are, of course, important to the history of colonialism and the history of empire,
but they pale in comparison to the sheer destruction of the typing war.
In terms of human lives lost, it is likely the most destructive human event in history so far.
It doesn't receive as much attention because it doesn't fit as well into this kind of this modern history of China being the
victim of colonial powers and then fighting back and standing up for itself and regaining regaining its debt to ruin the world.
But for my purposes, it's extremely important and had a big impact on Buddhism because much of the fighting and
the conflicts of the type of war took place in a region of China sort of near Shanghai,
Nanjing, right in the central part of China, in the lower,
lower reaches of the Yangtze River and in the early from the early modern period into the modern period.
This was very much a cradle for Buddhism, very wealthy monasteries, monks, owners located right in this region of China.
It was very culturally productive, who was relatively wealthy. And when the typing more happens from 1850 onward, it devastated this entire region.
So the tapings were Christians. They were led by a Christian leader who famously considered himself to be the younger brother of Jesus Christ.
Foreign missionaries, when they heard about the Taiping Rebellion, thought, Oh good. All of our decades of work in China are finally paying off.
The Chinese are finally going to mass convert to Christianity, and our work will be will be completed.
And then they heard what the tapings actually believed. And they were like, Wait, wait, needed to to that.
That's not what we believe. And they were actually quite quite upset. But the Typekit had their own theology.
They had their own version of Christianity. They were very good Protestants and as good Protestants, they knew that religious images were bad.
So anywhere that they went in China, they destroyed whatever religious images that they found.
And as you know, images are very important for Buddhism. They're very important for other varieties of Chinese religion as well.
Untold monasteries and sacred images. Sacred statues of the 80s were destroyed, burned, chopped up on mats at the hands of the Chinese.
Some Buddhist monastic institutions were also destroyed because, unfortunately, many times in China, monasteries will be built on the top of the hill.
Unfortunately, hills are also excellent points for spotting artillery and for directing military operations,
so sometimes monasteries would be destroyed so they could be used as a base or an observation point during
the over the decade of fighting the customs between the Taiping Rebels and Chiang loyalist troops.
So in terms of the modern history of Chinese Buddhism, which I think war is a period of untold destruction,
some of the things that they destroyed, as I mentioned, were religious images.
The institutions themselves, the physical monasteries, the buildings, and of course, they burned Buddhist scriptures as well.
So some of the the most wealthy and well-equipped Buddhist libraries in China were located in the area taken over by the typing forces.
And these texts were destroyed and they were lost.
So this kind of becomes this period of destruction and revolution forms the kind of the intro to the period that I studied.
And I look at what Chinese Buddhist stood in the wake of this.
What did they do to reconstruct and rebuild after the typing forces were finally finally pacified and to rule was was was re-established?
So my book, which came out in March of last year, which is not great timing, but it came out anyway.
In my book, I look at what happened to monasteries, how did they rebuild the physical homes for monks and nuns?
How do they rebuild the physical institutions that they keep a home for Buddhist play?
But as I said in this new project? And look, I want to look at what they did with texts.
So let me tell you a little story about a fellow named young woman.
This is him pictured here. Young was born in 1837, so when the typing war broke out, he's basically a teenager, right?
He was a young man. Young had grown up in a relatively well-off, but a certainly very scholarly family based in Nanjing.
Nanjing was eventually taken over by typing forces and lost for a very long time.
So young and his family had to flee as refugees, and they ended up in the city of hunger, which wasn't taken over by.
I mean, if you've ever been to Hong Kong, you know, it's very beautiful. This much worse places end up as a refugee.
So young is in NGO. He's a young man. He's had to leave his home.
There is death and destruction going on all around, all around him, as we've experienced in the last 18 months.
It's one of those periods when it seems like the entire world is being overturned and you really start to question,
what am I doing and what will I do in the future? I can't just assume that things will always be as they were.
Are there other possibilities for me?
There's also a story that Young had wanted to marry this one woman, but his family set him up with an arranged marriage with another woman.
So he's also heartbroken as well. And I mean, we've all been teenagers at some point, and you know how intense and strong those emotions can be.
You feel like you're the only one in history to ever feel like this. And then you figure out, no, you're just a human being like the rest of us.
So Yang is wandering around in the streets of Punjab. He's young man. He's fled the war and as the story goes, happens into a Buddhist bookstore.
And he's had no interest in Buddhism before. He is aware of it, but he's not a Buddhist follower or anything special like that,
and something prompts him to take a book off the shelf and just start to read through it and look through it.
And it's this moment that sparks something in them,
and it's likely the kind of the background of death and destruction and the kind of the revolution that's going on around him.
But this encounter with the Buddhist book changes his life.
And from that point onward, he dedicated his life to printing and reprinting Buddhist scriptures in China.
And as I said, after the typing war, it's finishing up and typing forces are pacified.
Many Buddhist scriptures have been destroyed.
If they don't exist anymore to print up so young one way and others start projects to try to replace them,
to print new copies, to replace the copies that had been lost. So in the seminal work on this period at home as well in his book,
The Buddhist Revival describes it that's so young and his collaborators considered that the only hope for this age of drama and decay,
so this is the more remarkable era, was the circulation of sutures to save all sentient beings.
The long song scriptures in the North.
So that's the Chen Long canon that have been printed a few decades earlier, they considered to be a dead letter.
The twanging library had been burned by my writing troupe, so this is one of the major Buddhist libraries have been destroyed during the war.
Therefore, this type of therefore he resolved to cut printing blocks for the trip in order to give it a wider circulation.
So it's very interesting as well.
Melchior is drawing upon the recollections of young granddaughter who wrote a book in Chinese about about her grandmother grandfather.
So it's kind of Second-Hand. But at the same time, I find it rather interesting that the canon of the official canon at that time that been
circulating in China and still existed outside of the area been destroyed by Typekit forces,
they considered a dead letter. And for a lot of these printers,
they're not interested in Kenyans because Kenyans are these kind of these dusty things that sit on a shelf and nobody ever actually reads,
it just kind of sits there like a monument. They wanted living books that got into the hands of people that people would
actually open up and read and young would play throughout all of his life.
He died in 1911, sort of just just at the point when the revolution was happening in the dynasty was falling.
He, for all of his life, wanted to produce new versions of the Chinese canon, but he could only produce individual scriptures.
But he did print over a period of his life. He did print hundreds of it.
So starting with young wooden play,
there was an entire movement through the latter part of the 19th and early 20th centuries to reprint Chinese Buddhist scriptures using using books.
So my main thesis,
my main argument looking at figures like young men and looking at others who throughout this period produced Buddhist texts in China distributed them,
got them into the hands of readers is that they had one foot in the past and one foot in the modern era.
We see very much that they are working within an established understanding and established tradition of texts within Buddhism using Buddhist texts.
At the same time, they did not shy away from innovation in the modern era.
We never produced an unprecedented explosion in the number and types of texts,
and I would argue a deeper penetration of these texts into all levels of society
so that the canon would no longer be something that exists in the library, the only kind of flip set.
But it would be something you could have in your very own couch that would be accessible to readers.
And I think the larger ramifications of this is that Buddhists were able to introduce innovations into their own tradition into Chinese Buddhism,
but also participate more broadly in Chinese security through print culture.
So I'm going to be looking at the titles come up a little bit,
but I'll be looking at three different types of institutions that produce text during this period, the first of which is scriptural presses.
There's also scripture distributors and finally more modern style bookstores and publishers.
So for the rest of my talk, I'll just give you kind of an outline as to what you said.
And then at the end, I'll talk. I'll mention that new digital tool that I'm currently developing to try to get a handle on what they've produced.
So as critical presses were a new form of institution placed under the first one in about the 1860s or 1870s.
But it was quickly followed by other independent presses. It was based on the model of the temple spectrum,
so monasteries had often had a workshop where they could carve blocks and print scriptures on a small scale,
not entire tenets, but just individual particular titles. They use this to use the same technology wouldn't block printing,
but rather than being based in temples and led by monastics, these presses were led by laypeople usually.
Sometimes they would have a monastic advisor. But these were very much a lay institution by institution.
They relied on donations and volunteer labour. They were not for profit. If you wanted to have the text produced,
you had to donate the money to cover the cost for the materials and the labour to produce the blocks and print the works.
They didn't have a kind of a rolling budget or anything. They took a donation and.
And up until into the 1940s, they almost exclusively used this traditional technology.
You would like their book catalogues. They sometimes use movable type, but the scriptures themselves were always printed using wood lines.
And as I said at the bottom here,
this is just a selection of five or so I've identified over a dozen major spiritual presses that were founded during this period.
So these prices, especially in the 20s and 30s,
developed into complex organisations because the lay people who are renting them had day jobs as professionals in modern industry.
And so they bring in things like issuing stock, taking advantage of modern financial technologies, opening bank accounts, producing prospectuses.
So you can see just this is like an IPO. They're asking for donations in the form of buying stock in their company.
And if you buy stock in their companies, you will also get merit to return because they're producing success of these scripted presses,
especially in the later period from the 1910s. The 40s was massive.
One of these presses in 1928 reported that they distributed over a million copies, 1.4 million copies of over one hundred and seventy titles.
So this is a huge amount of production that's happening during this period.
And if you luckily a lot of your book catalogues have been reproduced and reprinted,
so they're relatively easy to access, the sheer number and variety of titles they produce is simply staggering.
It's it's very much it's it's very much a huge endeavour that they were involved in.
The kind of the network that held all these together was another form an institution called Scripture distributor.
These distributors link together scriptural presses and a kind of a network that spans the entire Chinese nation.
In contrast to the presses, many of these if you read their book catalogues, many of these distributors welcome in-person customers.
You can go into their shop, you can browse the titles they have on display. You can put in an order if they don't have the stock and pick it up later.
The presses instead were more like distributors.
They would they would send out text, but they didn't necessarily have their own bookstore that you could actually walk into.
And the distributors did. Scripture distributors are interesting because many of them are associated with the particular temple.
This one, I reproduced the front page of the book catalogue.
Here they are based in the Gospels, up and in between.
So this is from the inspiration for Saudis is called Beijing.
So a lot of these distributors are located within monasteries, but the printers are not.
The printers are separate institutions led by laypeople, a small number of commercial presses.
So these are for profit. Non Buddhist presses also kind of styled themselves scripture distributors and would sometimes offer in their book
catalogues and special section a selection of Buddhist texts that have been produced by by the scriptural questions.
These distributors produce absolutely massive book catalogues because they provide titles from multiple different presses.
So here's the first page of the book catalogue for the region's future distributor.
You can see it gives you the title the translator, the number of festivals, the number of books, the price for printing.
So it's still kind of if you are not doing this for a profit and not to make a profit on these books.
Rather, you put up the money to have it printed, and that covers the materials and labour to produce a certain number of.
And then finally, at the bottom, it shows you which of the three professors originally produced it,
which one carves the blocks and created the edition, which they are offering for sale.
And as I mentioned these these for the standards of the time, these catalogues are enormous.
The Beijing scripture to look for nineteen twenty three has about 300 titles,
so you can see this is a massive this is almost a constellation of Buddhist text.
Imagine in the nineteen twenties having this in your hand, you have access to a huge amount of potential material and both distributors and
presses made use of the postal system as a way of further expanding their network.
So even if you couldn't physically make it into a city to visit a distributor and buy a copy,
you could send in a postal remittance and a request for a title. They would post it to your local post office and you could pick it up.
So this is an unprecedented level of access for ordinary people to put his text.
And it wasn't just looks. Some of the did offer attendees lots of different sex frictions, but Chinese,
you can see from the right here to sell images, printed images of deities and other scenes about cheat.
So these are like dharma implements, wooden fish bells,
all of the various little doodads that you need to run rituals or do Buddhist things in your own home.
Meet some insects you can order, you know, famous types of incense from these distributors as well.
So it's kind of like a if people nowadays, especially if they're Buddhist sells and they look at Buddhism, they say, Oh, it's so commercialised.
You know, Tricycle magazine, it's all about, you know, buying a fancy new meditation cushion or buying this incense.
Here is commercialisation already happening in China in the 1920s? So the final type of institution I might talk about is publishers and bookstores,
and these more than any other really spend the boundary between secular and religious.
There's a lot of them are located within non-religious companies and presses, but they produce religious stuff.
So most of the big commercial presses in modern China, the the commercial, the commercial press don't have books and world books.
So-called Big Three didn't really publish a lot of Buddhist material.
It's very small, and it's usually about Buddhist philosophy or something.
If you read their book catalogues, they don't publish much about Buddhism at all.
However, the same technology that they use in print shops that they used were used by some to produce modern style texts,
such as periodicals and Moneyfacts.
There were over 200 different types of Chinese periodicals ever produced during the early half of the 20th century.
And I don't know how many dozens of individual monographs writing about Buddhism.
These aren't scriptural texts. These are Buddhist scholars and others that are writing about Islam and the world of these publishers.
Bookstores is definitely centred in Shanghai.
They have locations elsewhere, but most of printing during the early 20th century was based in Shanghai for a number of reasons.
And the number of interesting ways was kind of the broader world and culture.
So I just recently found this photograph, and it was very happy to. This is the the first building of the Times newspaper.
Sure, both very important modern style newspaper founded I believe in the late 19th century in Shanghai.
And if you look just to the back there, you can see my cursor. Within the building of this press, there's also an institution called Yeonjung Books,
your junk food, you and your gym should you did produce Buddhist books and Buddhist publications.
So they're kind of like a little institution within the larger institution of Surabaya.
Now, the founder of Shabelle was very interested in Buddhism himself. He was a kind of a a patron for Buddhist causes.
But the company as a whole is not a Buddhist company. It's a for profit newspaper publisher.
They just happen to use their presses from time to time to run off a few copies of Buddhist books.
One institution that I've written about before in which I'm really looking forward to returning to this new project is trying to Typekit its books.
Founded in 1929 and this is a modern style publisher that is devoted to Buddhism,
set up on the model of a commercial publisher but a specialist in producing Buddhist books, and they were a for profit company that issued stock.
And if you read their prospectus, they make the argument saying, Oh yes, you can invest in like a mine or you can invest in a mill.
But if you invest in us in a Buddhist bookstore, you'll not only make monetary profit, you will also accrue merit.
What other business can give you that? I mean, they really they're giving you the hard sell in terms of investing in the company.
The board of directors, it was set up very much on the model of the Motor Company Board of directors of Typekit.
Its books include some of the leading Buddhist laymen in Shanghai at the time.
It's kind of a who's who of the late Buddhist community in Shanghai, and they used modern mechanised movable type.
They didn't use wood blocks. They used what was then the cutting edge technology to produce their works.
So that's one of the logos that they include in a lot of their books and of the portray logo.
And then this is an image of the storefront of their branch in Punjab.
So that's some kind of Southeast China, and they see the advantage of having an enormous screen, as you can see by 1935.
They had a network of local distributors that spend almost the entire nation, right even out in Gansu, in the south and southwest, in the northeast.
They have local branches where you can buy Shanghai for this book's production.
On the right there, there's just a list of some of the local branches.
Some of these are kind of directly owned like it's Shanghai with his books photo branch.
Others are just local bookstores with whom they have a distribution agreement.
So they don't necessarily own or control them, but they have their books. They send them there and they can be bought from their shops.
So summing up reflection and future directions for this material during this period, this very modern period of Buddhist history,
of course, the rhetoric and benefits of producing and reading Buddhist texts remain, they still use the same language.
You will accrue merit if you cause these texts to be reproduced and be distributed.
That much has not changed. Is still core to the modern Chinese Buddhist experience of dealing with texts.
However, the technologies and systems that they use for distributing and promoting them are much more modern.
They're very new, they're innovative. They draw upon the legacy of the past, but they are very different from what had existed before.
And I find this very interesting. It's a nice example of innovation without losing connexion with tradition.
There is no kind of worry that using a modern technology would be betraying the patent of the patrimony or the history of Chinese production.
They were very happy to use the most modern technologies to get their texts.
There were also new genres that had not existed before in Chinese Buddhist literature,
such as the periodical, and this kind of idea of a book for beginners like Buddhism for Dummies.
You know nothing about Buddhism. You can pick up this book and learn a little bit about it.
Four steps. These are looking to extend the reach of Buddhism beyond those who are already Buddhists.
Get them into the hands of people who maybe have a passing interest like young.
One way he didn't have any special connexion to Buddhism,
but through the experience of eating up a book that sparked something in which led to a lifelong engagement with them.
And throughout this period, there were dozens of producers and thousands of texts.
So accessing this world for us, at least as a historian, can be difficult because it's almost a flood of texts.
It's not just one single text you can focus on and look at. There are multitudes of them, but it's this third point.
I think it's it's quite interesting and might be most interesting to to the participants in
this conference that these new genres picked up on the language and the values of Buddhism,
but present them in very different ways and can do new things with Buddhist ideas.
So, for example, in these periodicals, Buddhist, we're able to inform each other of threats to temples.
So a lot of state authorities in modern China wanted to destroy temples or take them over and turn them into schools.
Well, Buddhists in their periodicals warn each other of emerging threats like this band together and make the case to stop it.
There was a new focus on essentials. What is essentially Buddhism?
What is the core Buddhism? What is most important to learn?
How do you boil it down to something that can be accessible to a beginner, to somebody who hasn't yet been immersed into the world of Buddhism?
Also, modern science and philosophy is becoming much more known.
How do you articulate Buddhism in terms of modern science? My colleague Eric Trump, of course,
has done a great deal of work on this on what would have stood to articulate their own tradition in terms of the values of modern science.
But his masters could become national figures within their lifetime.
For much of history, famous monks and nuns, their writings would really only be collected and reprinted after they were dead.
And if you read about them without having met them, they were already gone.
Well, during this period, we have Buddhist masters who become almost Buddhist celebrities during their own lifetime,
and then they're invited to go around and give lectures. Some, like Thai, who were masters of self aggrandisement and self-promotion,
and they used publications to make themselves out to be a much bigger deal than they actually were.
But you know, as with influencers and TikTok nowadays, if you keep telling that lie eventually becomes true because enough people pay attention to.
And finally, support from highly placed people is also important. This new technology.
Printing a modern book with a modern press isn't something that's very simple.
You need special technology. You need special expertise.
And having highly placed elite lay people, supporting your efforts became very important as well.
So finally, I just wanted to Lessing want to talk about, is this new?
Is this new sort of online resource digital resource which a few colleagues and I are putting together?
You can access it right now if you want to create an insult. We're calling it the Chinese Religious Text Authority.
And it's an attempt to map the territory of Chinese texts, Buddhist and otherwise throughout all of history up until about 1950 or so.
And my own little part in this, of course, is adding entries on Chinese Buddhist texts from the modern period.
But I have colleagues working on those and working on a text review textbook.
And as you can cut, you can probably see the background. The back end of it is media software, so it's the same software that runs Wikipedia.
Anybody with an account can go on and edit it,
and we're trying to make this a kind of a map of all of the various and interesting Chinese sects that are out there.
Just to give you a sense of what it can do, all of the data that we add, it's not just sort of encyclopaedia entries,
it's also specifically formatted data so you can export it in a way where you can see a list of titles,
list of involved persons, whether they're orphans or editors, place of publication publisher in your publication as well.
So this is the Shanghai which contributes the Shanghai bookstores.
You can see just a selection of some of the earliest books monographs that they're producing.
And again, these aren't spiritual works. These are commentaries guides.
These are discourses on topics having to do with Buddhism as well.
So that's all I have for you today. Thanks very much.