Dear Thay,
Dear Spiritual Ancestors,
We, your students from around the world, are gathering today, Sunday May 24th, 2026, to generate a collective energy of presence and mindfulness as we present the Living Gems Archive as an offering to the Three Jewels in the Ten Directions.
We are aware that safeguarding the Dharma has been a sacred responsibility of the Buddha’s students for more than two thousand six hundred years. This work began with Ananda and the Early Indian reciters, continued with the council that took the radical step of moving from oral to written Dharma in the first century B.C.E., and advanced with the pioneers of Mahayana Buddhism who collated and evolved the teachings: Nagarjuna, Asanga, and Vasubandu. Their work was carried forward by the cross-cultural translators who brought the Dharma east into China and beyond. Generations of practitioners and monastics have invested their time, energy, and material resources to ensure the Dharma is safeguarded across boundaries of language and culture. Today, with Living Gems, we continue that sacred work.
Thank you, dear Thay, for insisting on recording every one of your talks, planting the seeds of Buddhadharma for future generations—from the cassette tapes of the 1990s, to the minidisk and mp3 players of the 2000s. We are so grateful to every volunteer, across the decades, who helped record, film, and archive your words. Thank you, Thay, for your generosity in inviting translators to offer simultaneous translation in up to nine languages. The gentle hum of translators whispering in the background of every talk remains a beautiful mark of your care and inclusiveness.
Today, with the launch of Living Gems, we bring the living Dharma into the 21st Century: a fully searchable archive, translated into English, French, and Vietnamese—without ads, clickbait, or surrendering ownership of the Dharma. In Living Gems, we have preserved all your teachings exactly as they are, so that any person can come and learn from you directly. You always taught us to make good use of technology to make the teachings available and help people suffer less. Dear Thay, this is the Online Dharma Hall you asked us to build in 2010, and finally, we have made it.
As a multifold sangha, we thank the team of developers for their vision, tenacity, and thousands of hours of work: thank you Maarten, David, and Vizza. We thank Jonas, child of Plum Village, for his extraordinary talent and generosity, digitizing all the tapes with such skill and professionalism. We thank Mark, Julia, and the team of over 100 volunteer validators, continuing to work hard to steadily review every transcript; and we thank Julie and Ernest for their skilful curating of the playlists, and the wider Online Monastery team for all their support. And above all, we thank the whole community of donors and supporters without whom this ambitious project could not be realized. Together, we give rise to the aspiration to continue to expand this archive into more and more languages, and with more curated playlists and interactive elements, so that Living Gems can be a deep and refreshing well of wisdom where the community of Thay’s students can gather and learn together.
Today, with all our love and respect, we offer the Living Gems Archive to Thay, to our spiritual ancestors, and the world.
Pháp giới bao la tính tịch nhiên,
Pháp thân cùng khắp cả nhân thiên.
Bánh xe chánh pháp thường vô tận,
Ánh sáng từ quang chiếu diệu hiền.
Phá tan bóng tối niềm mê muội,
Đưa lại an vui khắp mọi miền.
