Mahamati Foundation preserves ancient Buddhist teachings in Akord vaults
Permanently preserve teachings in an easily accessible way
During the Iraq war in 2003, the Iraq National Library and Archive estimated a loss of about 60% of its collection. Events like these are sadly common enough, making the question of digitisation and preservation of invaluable cultural records a pressing concern. At the same time, a 2020 survey by the Society of American Archivists found that about 60% of US institutions had backlogs of materials that were not yet accessible to the public; highlighting that even when records are being safely preserved they may never see the light of day.
The challenge at hand is a matter of permanence, integrity, and distribution. How can we maintain the authenticity of humanity’s most valuable information and assure its availability for present and future generations? Considering the historical centralisation and impermanence of information storage methods, along with unpredictable events like war and natural disaster, this has always been a fraught task.
Founded by Karma Trinlay Rinpoche, a highly accomplished Buddhist teacher and meditation master, the Mahamati Foundation has a profound mission at its heart: preserving and disseminating ancient Buddhist teachings. The teachings include those directly from Rinpoche and those received from various accomplished Vajrayāna Buddhist masters.
Akord is providing the Foundation with the means to not only protect and store digital files for hundreds of years, but also to ensure the quality of the information is preserved perfectly.
Karma Trinlay Rinpoche, Founder, Mahamati Foundation
Permanent accessibility and discoverability through Akord's vaults
Mahamati Foundation have setup Akord’s blockchain vaults to ensure the integrity and preservation of audio and written teachings for the next 200 years. File versioning and an in-built media viewer in Akord means that translations can be transparently and sequentially stored over generations, with the ability to view and instantly switch between different versions.
The vaults facilitate tags and descriptions that will enable easy search, retrieval and discoverability. Akord Explorer, scheduled for release in 2023, will be deployed on the Arweave Permaweb itself – a permanent application that anyone will be able to access and search for content uploaded to Akord. Explorer will be a portal for anyone, now and in the future, to search and surface these teachings.
The Foundation is also interested in token gated access as another means to ensure that certain materials are made available under the right context. We are currently in the process of helping the Foundation transfer old audio recordings on disk to digital formats and stored in Akord vaults.
The Foundation’s foray into web3 is not stopping at decentralized storage – they plan to release an NFT collection that will tie to a digital version of an ancient Buddhist game. The tokens, data and the application running the game will be deployed on Arweave using Akord as the publishing tool.
Guaranteeing future generations can access the wisdom of Buddhism
The Mahamati Foundation is at the forefront of non-profit organizations that are looking at innovative web3 blockchain technology as a further extension in the evolution of information storage.
Using Akord's technology, the Mahamati Foundation has found a reliable and secure solution to their mission of preserving and passing on teachings to humanity. The teachings' integrity is reflected in the complete data integrity and perpetual preservation offered by this technology, ensuring future generations will only ever build on what we have now, and never lose these invaluable teachings.
The Foundation’s use of blockchain data storage is a commitment to its mission to make the information as accessible as possible. Any teachings uploaded to public vaults will be instantly accessible to anyone in the world, and because storage is paid for upfront they know it will remain this way for many generations to come.
