A treasure trove of Tibetan literature has left its temporary home in New York for Asia. Instead of ending up in Lhasa, however, the collection of original wood blocks and unbound pages now resides in China’s Southwest University of Nationalities. According to David Germano, a professor of Tibetan studies at the University of Virginia, the books include the scriptural canon, “histories, stories, autobiography, poetry, ritual writing, narrative, epics — pretty much any kind of literary output you could imagine.”

As The New York Times reported last week, this collection, considered to be the largest outside Tibet, would be more accessible to foreign journalists and non-Chinese visitors if kept in Chengdu, the capital of Sichuan province and 1,300 miles from Tibet. With its large population of ethnic Tibetans, Chengdu was a necessary, if not altogether satisfactory, compromise. Yet despite violent oppression and the specter of the Cultural Revolution, which destroyed and outlawed everything Buddhist, religious, and sacred, the re-assembling of these exiled Tibetan texts steadily continues:

In November, robed monks from the Dongkar Monastery in western Sichuan arrived with a yellowing collection of 300-year-old texts that had never been published. Scrawled in cinnabar and black ink, the manuscripts, detailing the tantric rituals of Buddhist deities, were copies of 15th-century texts. The monks stayed for five weeks while archivists scanned 6,000 pages, then returned home carrying their beloved texts and a single CD-ROM of digital copies. They vowed to return with seven more volumes.

E. Gene Smith, one of the founders of the Tibetan Buddhist Resource Center that had housed nearly 25,000 of these texts, had gathered, copied, maintained, and shared the collection with various scholars and traveling Buddhist monks since the 1960s until his death in 2010. In 2007, he bequeathed more than 12,000 books to the library in Southwest University of Nationalities; political unrest stalled the project before the collection was opened to the public in October 2013.

The film Digital Dharma, released in 2012, celebrates Smith and his dedication to the preservation of these texts. For him, a Mormon from Utah turned devout Buddhist who managed to gain the absolute trust and respect of fellow Tibetan scholars and monks, this endeavor was a lifelong devotion to the messages of enlightenment and compassion. And now at the library, four archivists — what a sober, contained number — are meticulously digitizing the books so that they can be read online for free.