Give the teachings a voice that can be searched, studied, and never lost.

Nearly three thousand recorded teachings by Geshe Michael Roach — decades of classes on the great classical books of West China — exist today only as video. We are transcribing every English word, so that every explanation he has ever given becomes searchable, teachable, and permanently preserved.

Why this matters now

Our translation workbench already does something remarkable: click any West Chinese word, and it can play you the exact moments Geshe Michael speaks that word in his recorded teachings. But today that link reaches only the fraction of recordings with usable captions. Transcription completes the circle — every hour of teaching becomes an open book: full-text searchable, quotable with a timestamp, and linked forever to the dictionary and the scriptures it explains.

Recordings decay, get unlisted, and disappear silently. Transcripts, once made, preserve the teaching itself — in his own words, never paraphrased.

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Exactly where the money goes

The work is scoped and the tooling is built — funding is the remaining step. Accounting for every dollar will be published to donors when the run completes.

Why $10,000 — the complete back catalog

The inventory so far counts 2,805 recorded teachings — ≈2,600 hours of Geshe Michael's English. But the complete back catalog is larger: the Knowledge Base server that holds decades of course recordings, 68 unlisted recordings that exist only as links, and private collections gathered over forty years. Counting everything, the archive most plausibly reaches 6,000–8,000 hours.

Faithful transcription of this material costs about $1.25 per hour, all-in — not because raw machine transcription is expensive, but because bargain transcription garbles exactly what matters most here: the West Chinese terms. Every hour in this budget gets an engine run with a 1,000-term West Chinese keyterm lexicon, a second-engine comparison pass on the hardest classes, human review where Geshe Michael interprets West Chinese directly, and integration into a searchable archive — plus preservation copies made before transcription, so nothing is lost while the work proceeds.

The oldest teachings are the most fragile. The video record effectively begins in 2010 — of the 3,633 videos inventoried, only 13 carry earlier course dates. Everything before that — the first twenty-five years of teaching, including the complete original course cycle — survives almost exclusively as audio: an estimated 1,500–3,000 audio-only recordings, roughly 3,000–5,000 hours, none of it transcribed and much of it on aging media. That audio era is the heart of the uncounted portion of the catalog, and preserving it first is built into this budget.

At the high case — 8,000 hours × $1.25 — the complete archive comes to $10,000. If the final inventory comes in smaller, the remainder goes directly to the deeper review passes; either way, the full accounting is published to donors.