Preserving Access to Insight
For more than three decades, people around the world have used Access to Insight to study early Buddhist teachings. The site offers more than 1,000 sutta translations from the Pāli Canon, along with books, articles, study guides, and other Theravāda resources, all available at no cost. It has been especially valuable for people without easy access to Buddhist books, teachers, or communities.
Earlier this year, BCBS shared that the site’s aging technology could make it difficult to keep online. We heard from practitioners around the world who told us how they had used Access to Insight and why they hoped it would remain available.
With support from two donors, BCBS is now working with a web development firm to preserve the site as a legacy, preservation-only resource. The first phase addressed the most urgent technical problems. The team is now determining the best long-term hosting plan and working to preserve links that scholars, practitioners, and Buddhist organizations have cited and shared for decades.
Why Khoa Chose to Support Access to Insight
Nguyen Khoa Tran, whose major gift provided most of the funding for this work, first found Access to Insight as a teenager in Germany.
Khoa grew up near a Vietnamese Mahāyāna temple and wanted to answer questions about Buddhism accurately and point people toward texts they could read themselves. His mother heard about Access to Insight from a Vietnamese monk on YouTube and passed the site along to him.
The introductory guidance and topical index helped Khoa begin reading the suttas. He later used the site to prepare for conversations with family, friends, and young people at the temple where he volunteers.
“ATI helped me understand Buddhist theory much better,” Khoa shared, “which in turn made it easier for me to put the theory into practice so that I feel like I am actually growing as a person.”
When Khoa first heard that the site might close, he felt sad but also thought about impermanence. He had already downloaded the collection and knew there were other Buddhist websites.
Then he read the messages people had sent to BCBS. He began to think about those who still depended on the site and those who had not yet found it. That helped him decide to support its preservation.
A Brief History
Access to Insight began in 1993, when John Bullitt created a dial-up bulletin board called BCBS OnLine with support from the Center. It became part of an international volunteer effort to transcribe, proofread, and distribute Buddhist texts through early computer networks.
The website launched in 1995. Over the next eighteen years, Bullitt developed it into an extensively indexed and cross-referenced collection of early Buddhist teachings. The site includes more than 1,000 sutta translations, most contributed by Ṭhānissaro Bhikkhu, and became a widely used English-language resource for the study of Theravāda Buddhism.
In 2017, Bullitt transferred the domain and management of the site to BCBS.
We are grateful to Khoa, to another donor, and to everyone who wrote to us. Their support is helping keep Access to Insight online and available to readers around the world.
