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In the course of a day online—answering your e-mail, paying bills, sending a tweet about your favorite doughnuts—it's easy to forget how completely and utterly miraculous the Internet is. The monks of Tibet have not forgotten.

Some nine million pages of Buddhist texts and other Tibetan writings have been rescued from almost-certain extinction and now reside on the 'Net in a searchable, easily downloadable form. "Every morning I will be doing prostration to the computer," one famed lama said as the huge digitization project began to bear fruit.