A couple of days ago, Bitter Winter published a piece about the purging of certain books in Buddhist temples and monasteries. In some accounts, book removals seemed to target Buddhist teachers from Hong Kong and Taiwan, such as Chin Kung 淨空 and Cheng Yen 證嚴. The Bitter Winter piece included the detail that the books targeted were those without a “publication number.”

As the images accompanying the piece show, many of the books collected are small books, easily held in the hand or put in a pocket, and often distributed for free at temples. If you were to flip to the back of these books, where the copyright and publishing information is usually found, you might find that it is labeled an “item not for sale” (fei mai pin  非賣品).  To take a specific example, in collection of Pure Land stories titled Nian Fo ganying lu 念佛感應錄 and published in Taiwan, we find on the same page as fei mai pin this assertion:  “No copyright.  You are welcome to reproduce it and to circulate it so as to produce karmic ties; the merit will be limitless” 沒有版權，歡迎翻印，輾轉結緣，功德無量.  The book is not part of system of legal rights and profit, but rather one of merit.  This is reinforced by the verse transferring merit at the top of the page. Situated in a system of merit, the book is valued not for its material form but for its contents, and those contents are valued not as original work (to which rights could be attached) but rather for their ability to transform the reader.

In this context, how the book is valued by the producer has implications for how it is valued by others, and as a consequence how it circulated and preserved. A book that is price-less and un-copyrighted does not need a publishing number or ISBN. Being price-less signals that a book is outside governmental and commercial systems.

Being price-less can also mean that a book is essentially worthless in the context of modern libraries.  Libraries acquire books through purchase, exchange, or as gifts, with the first being the most common.  Many university libraries routinely buy all publications in a particular series or from an important academic publisher in the fields that they collect.  Other types of material—fiction, media, and commercial non-fiction—may not be collected as widely.  In the case of these Pure Land volume I mentioned above, it would not appear on a publisher’s booklist, and could not be purchased even if a patron requested it.  If it is acquired at all it is likely to be through a gift.[1] 

Related to the question of how an academic library might acquire books like this is the question of whether they should.  Is contemporary popular material or religious material within the purview of academic libraries?  Interestingly, the Pure Land collection is in a number of Taiwanese university libraries.  Thinking of a (perhaps) parallel case in the United States, that of televangelist Joel Osteen, university libraries seem to collect him erratically.  The University of Virginia library has one Joel Osteen book, Penn and Johns Hopkins do not seem to have any, and Harvard (being Harvard) has Joel Osteen books in English, German, Dutch, and Spanish.  But even with this variety, they only hold some of the many Joel Osteen books published. Given that university libraries are not collecting materials by an important figure in American religion, it is not surprising that they are not collecting similar material (modern, popular) from other countries.  But what Leigh Penman has said of archives seems true of libraries as well:

The archive is itself a text: the product of a multiplicity of interventions occasioned by microsociologies of interest and disinterest which influenced its evaluation. But the archive is not only shaped by the interests that have informed decisions concerning what enters it, and what is to be preserved.[2]

In other words, the choices made by the university library convey something about what that university (or universities more generally) consider important.

This leaves the burden of preserving and archiving these types of materials to libraries of deposit, on the one hand, and to digital repositories. Legal deposit requires publishers of books to submit copies of their books and other materials to designated libraries.  These are most often national libraries, such as the Library of Congress (which does indeed hold all of Joel Osteen’s works) and the National Central Library of Taiwan, where I found the Pure Land collection I began with.  This Pure Land collection is also online at the website maintained by the foundation that published it, but these are subject to change and are not, to my knowledge, archived or collected by any other institution.  Many such websites change frequently, and for the most part our cultural notions of what needs to be preserved still seem to privilege the book, in physical or digital form, over the chat room, the discussion thread, and other online materials. 

As someone who has worked in both premodern and modern materials, I think of the library cave at Dunhuang, which preserved multiple copies of important texts and dedicatory information that tells us how they are were used. This manuscript cache also preserved doodles, sketches for paintings, and secular texts important to the monastic community.  As a historian, I look at popular materials in the present day with envy and concern—what materials are being lost because institutions value some kinds of books over others, and some forms over others?  Such questions become all the more important when these very same books are targeted for destruction.

This post is adapted and condensed from a presentation I gave at the Bibliography Among the Disciplines Conference, Philadelphia, PA, October 12-15, 2017