自己创业干点什么好:Gene Smith 金·史密斯

2008年，金·史密斯寻访喜马拉雅山脚下的敏林寺时，给住持带了一件小礼物。他要住持将它当做护身符，戴在脖子上，以保万事平安。敏林崔钦到今天仍把它戴在自己的红色僧袍外面：那是一个记忆棒，储存了数百页佛经手稿。

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.

Some might sigh over the intrusion of the modern world. Not Mr Smith. He first went to India, a student seeking rare Tibetan books, not many years after Tibet’s uprising against the Chinese occupiers in 1959, when the country’s monasteries—in effect, its libraries—were ransacked and destroyed. Not only books were burned, but also the carved wooden blocks from which they were printed. Fleeing Tibetans tried to save the texts, the repositories of 1,500 years of thought and prayer, by trussing them on yaks, but the loads often fell into rivers and ravines. They strapped books on their own backs; but when they arrived in exile the corpus was scattered and damaged, and much of it lost.

有人可能会哀叹现代世界的无孔不入。但史密斯不会。他最初到了印度，作为一个学生，寻找珍本藏传典籍，距1959年西藏对中国占领者起义相去不过几年，当时西藏的寺庙——实际上起图书馆的作用——被清查并摧毁。逃亡的西藏人曾试图拯救经文，拯救1500年的思想和祷告，他们把经卷绑在牦牛身上，但总是落入河中或谷中。他们把书绑在自己背上，但当他们成功出逃，全集大多零落损毁，还有许多散佚途中。

Over five decades, Mr Smith made it his business to put Tibetan literature back together. He did it more or less single-handedly, fired by his love of the language and the culture and aided by a brain that rapidly became an encyclopedia of lineages, sutras, lives of lamas, and the history and ownership of every book he came across. Expatiating in serene but fearsome detail to friends in his rooms in Delhi, or Boston, or New York, all of them piled floor-to-ceiling with cloth-wrapped pecha, he could instantly find a page anywhere to illustrate a point. Though people considered him a teacher, he was always a librarian, with a librarian’s love of catalogues and connections; but his Buddhism added to that a reverence for the transmission of texts, on which all spiritual progress rested.

五十多年来，史密斯以收集整编藏传典籍为己任。他基本凭着一腔对藏语和西藏文化的热爱，独立完成这项工作，期间，他迅速对谱系、佛经、喇嘛转世，以及他见过的每一本书有了百科全书式的了解，为他的工作打下了基础。当他在德里，或波士顿，或纽约的书房中和朋友安静地，但又无比细致地畅谈时，他总能从汗牛充栋的布裹的教本中，找出一页来阐明某个观点。虽然人们认为他是一个老师，但他骨子里还是个图书管理员，有着图书管理员对目录和联系的热衷；但他的佛教信仰，在这份热衷之上又添了一层对经文传播的敬畏，这种敬畏正是修行精进的源泉。

He found two ways to save the books, both ingenious. First, for 20 years, he used a food-aid programme called Public Law 480, under which America sold surplus wheat to third-world countries and then used the local-currency payments for humanitarian ventures. Mr Smith, working after 1968 as a field officer in India for the Library of Congress, reckoned his mandate under PL480 extended to buying books. Armed only with fistfuls of rupees and with letters of introduction from his Tibetan teacher, Deshung Rinpoche, to various lamas, he trawled through Indian libraries and then travelled into the hills. There, though still fearful of exposing their treasures, exiled Tibetan monks showed him the texts they had; and, with the money he gave them, printed more. In the end the PL480 programme saved 8,000 books, each of which was printed in 20 or so copies for American centres of research.

他用两种绝妙的方式拯救书籍。第一种用了20年，他利用了一个叫做《公法480》的粮食援助计划，这个计划是说美国在第三世界国家销售过剩小麦，并用所得的当地货币支付人道主义项目。史密斯1968年后就作为陆军校级军官，在印度的国会图书馆中工作，他认为《公法480》可以拓展到购买书籍方面。只拿着一把卢比和他的藏语老师德松仁波切给多名喇嘛的推荐信，他搜罗了所有印度图书馆，又走入了深山。在山中，流亡的藏僧虽然害怕暴露了他们的宝藏，但还是向史密斯展示了他们拥有的经文；而且用史密斯给他们的钱印制了更多。最终，《公法480》计划拯救了8000本书，每本印制了20余份副本，存于美国研究中心。

Yet all this depended on Mr Smith’s encyclopedic knowledge to find, assess and edit the books; and, as time went on, digital technology proved even more efficient. In 1999 Mr Smith set up the Tibetan Buddhist Resource Centre, first in Boston and then in New York, and set about putting his 12,000-volume collection, the largest anywhere, online. By his death he and his team had scanned 7m pages of text and had made CDs of files, such as the 110-volume kangyur, or teachings of the Buddha, which were too huge to download. As for the books themselves, he left them to a university in China: the place where, despite everything, he felt Tibetan Buddhism would eventually flourish again.

但所有这些成绩都有赖于史密斯百科全书一般的知识，才能发现，评估并编辑这些书籍；并且，随着岁月流转，数码技术显然更有效率。1999年，史密斯设立藏传佛教资料信息中心，起初在波士顿，后转至纽约，并开始将他的全世界最庞大的12000卷藏书上传互联网。去世之前，他和他的团队扫描了七百万页经文，并将一些文件制成光盘，比如110卷的《甘珠尔》，或佛祖的言教，由于数量巨大，难以下载。至于书籍的原稿，他将其留给了中国的一所大学：虽然有过往的诸般劫难，他仍认为中国是藏传佛教最终的再兴之地。

Did he ever suppose, he was asked once, that he would spend most of his life immersed in Buddhist dharma? He replied, “Sure.” It was by no means so sure when he was born, in Ogden, Utah, into a Mormon family distantly linked to Joseph Smith, the founder. His connection with Utah soon faded, however, as he studied Sanskrit and Tibetan and became a Buddhist under Deshung Rinpoche’s influence. Though he was never a monk, there was a monkish look about him: the balding head, the frank, kindly eyes, the life spent in rigorous discipline among ancient texts. Friends noticed, too, his fascination with terma, tiny texts in shell-like casings that were buried and dug up again to speak wisdom to later generations, and drew joking parallels with Joseph Smith’s discovery of the Mormon golden tablets.

他曾被问道，是否曾想过，自己将毕生沉浸于佛法当中？他答道：“当然。”但他出生在犹他州,奥格登的一个摩门教家庭，还是摩门教创始人约瑟·斯密的远亲，在那个时候，这事可不这么理所当然。但在他学习了梵语和藏语，并在德松仁波切的影响下成为佛教徒后，他和犹他州的联系渐渐淡了。虽然他从未出家，却有着化外之相：渐秃的脑袋，真诚友善的眼神，持守严格戒律，批阅经卷的生活。朋友们也注意到他对岩藏的热衷，岩藏即写在贝壳一样的盒子中，埋入土中，再被后世挖出，以将智慧授予后世之人，而造化弄人，这和约瑟·斯密发现摩门金碑的典故如出一辙。

The porcelain cup

瓷杯

Amid the extraordinary complexity of his chosen subject, Mr Smith kept a childlike simplicity. He did not talk about himself or what he believed in, save books. He was sceptical of the reincarnation-claims of some of the lamas and tulkus he met. But he was deeply moved when he gave one child lama a precious porcelain cup that had been used by Deshung Rinpoche, and found that the child recognised it as his own. In such small things he placed his faith; as in a memory stick, worn round the neck, preserving everything.

虽然史密斯研究的学问异常复杂，但他仍保持着孩童般的天真。他不谈论他自己，或者他信仰什么，除了书籍。他不相信一些喇嘛和祖古所说的转世之说。但让他深受触动的是，当他给一个喇嘛的转世灵童一只德松仁波切用过的珍贵瓷杯时，那孩子认为瓷杯是自己的。他把自己的信仰寓于这种小事当中；就像记忆棒，戴在颈上，包容一切。