SAKYA COLLEGE
INSTITUTE OF HIGHER BUDDHIST STUDIES
Gorum Library
Gorum Library already existed before the present building, but due to the increasing number of scriptures and texts in quantity and quality, the old library building (within the campus) was getting smaller in capacity to house in all the new scripture-texts and books. Furthermore, there was a growing concern for the old building’s stability that was holding all the heavy weight of the great numbers of texts and scriptures. Hence, due to all these reasons, the need for a new library building became a master plan, and on 24th January 2013, H.H Sakya Gongma Trichen Rinpoche performed a ground-breaking ceremony and laid the foundation stone. His Holiness also kindly added the name “Sungrab Gyatso Ling” to the existing name of the old library, thus receiving the full name, Gorum Sungrab Gyatso Ling Library. In 2015, the construction of the library was completed.
The new library is adorned with full sets of Kangyurs and Tengyurs, which are the words of the Buddha Śākyāmuni. The library also houses hundreds of texts and commentaries on Buddhist philosophical studies, belonging to all sects, along with multilingual texts on grammatologies, historiographies, hagiographies, theologies, poetries, philologies, and other Buddhism-related genres. Such an array of collections, exceeding more than ten thousand in numbers, are not only of daily use to the students of traditional academia but also of value to modern researchers. Furthermore, the library has a separate multimedia archive room consisting of audio cassettes, CD recordings, and other formats of audio/videos that have kept the track of the teachings of the past and present teachers. The library also has a computer lab that enables the researchers and students to do online research, teaching, finding texts and scriptures, photocopying and scanning texts, etc. There library also can host scholarly discussions and intensive programs; isolated seatings for self-study with all kinds of modern facilities, which meet the standard of any modern library found in international universities.