Old and Rare Book Museum

Help us to find and preserve rare books. There are thousands of Vedic works existing in India, many of which are hundreds of years old. These are full of valuable spiritual information, but in many cases, not enough has been done about their preservation from the technological point of view. Jiva has therefore established a Preservation Program to preserve many of these books and make them available to the whole world.

The Vedic tradition of caring for books and writings is similar to the concept of disciplic succession; that is, libraries are maintained by pious individuals, who in their old age, pass them on to children or other deserving people. They are preserved in that sense, and thus they make their way through time.

Unfortunately, a succession of literary individuals, just like a succession of spiritual individuals, can be broken. Books are sometimes bequeathed to uncaring family members who have no regard for Vedic tradition or for scriptures. To them, the books just take up space. Subsequently, valuable works meet their demise. Descendants who are a little pious consign them to holy rivers such as Yamuna or bury them in the ground; others merely burn them to keep themselves warm or to start coal fires for making tea.

At present thousands of books are stored in the houses of India. Many of these books are rare and valuable – often original copies, unknown to the outside world. If no attempt is made to preserve them, it is likely that these books will disappear before long.

To remedy this problem, the Indian Government has made some attempts to locate aged works and preserve them. Many texts have been microfilmed, laminated, and stored in some library facility.

Although these attempts have been made, there is still a great need to locate, obtain, and preserve Vedic texts that face an uncertain future.


We have set out to do this task so that the world and its future generations have the benefit of access to the Vedic Literatures. With such access, people will be able to greatly strengthen their spiritual knowledge.