American scholar of Tibetan literature dies

E Gene Smith, an American scholar who devoted his life to the cause of preserving imperilled Tibetan literature and spent a lot of his time among the Tibetan exiles in India working on his mission, has died at the age of 74.

Smith, who through his efforts succeeded in amassing the largest collection of Tibetan books outside Tibet, died on December 16 at his home in Manhattan.

Thanks to his work on saving Tibetan literature, much of which could have been lost after China's occupation of Tibet in late 1950s, he has left behind him troves of valuable texts for scholars and Tibetan exiles around the world, saving them from isolation and destruction.

The Utah native was so influenced by Tibetan culture that he converted to Buddhism as a young man.

As part of his work to save and collect as much literature as possible, he established the Tibetan Buddhist Resource Centre along with a small group of friends in 1999.

The cause of his death is not known, but he had had diabetes and heart trouble in recent years, the New York Times quoted Jeff Wallman, the executive director of the Tibetan Buddhist Resource Centre, as saying.

The centre, which is now in the process of digitising its collection, houses a treasure of Tibetan books and literature and has nearly 25,000 books dating from the 12th century, the paper said.

His quest led him to move to India in the mid-1960s where he spent a major part of his life collecting texts for the Library of Congress.

His work brought him to India frequently. In fact, he also studied Sanskrit and Pali at Leiden University in the Netherlands before going to India where he spent years studying with exiled Tibetan lamas.

He joined the Library of Congress field office in New Delhi in 1968, eventually becoming field director there.

Almost 14,000 volumes — more than seven million pages of the collection has been put online by his centre.