In December a friend of mine in India introduced me to NotebookLM, which google describes as a virtual research assistant. He had been using it to make Dharma Videos in Telegu. When I first started using it I did the same, but I soon found out this was unsatisfactory, as the videos often contained mistakes and misleading information.
But it also has the ability to make slide decks, normally produced as PDFs. This was much more manageable for the simple reason that I could extract the slides and re-edit them. They often contain unwanted information, like instructions: Heading, Body Text, and include font information, such as: Lato, Playfair and Cormorant Garamond, etc. They also occasionally get characters wrong: laymen looking like monks, monks looking like Buddhas, etc. It has sometimes been necessary to produce two decks of the same story in order to get one storybook completed.
I have been posting some of these to my Facebook account, and they have proved to be very popular, with hundreds of likes, and scores of shares, and much encouragement in the comments. So I have now made a more dedicated section for these storybooks on my Photo Dharma website, where at time of writing I have over 130 storybooks published, illustrating The Light of Asia, The Stories about the Foremost Elder Nuns, Stories from the Dhammapada Commentary, Arahat Saṅghamittā’s Story and The Lives of 12 Inspiring Chinese Nuns.
I am on the free tier, and I can only produce 2-3 stories a day. But this suits me, as I don’t want to spend more time than this takes on this work anyway. Day by day it adds up, and I am in no hurry. Future publications can be found on my Recent Publications page.
My main thought about this, is that besides introducing these stories to a wider audience, they could also be used in Dhamma Schools, and for backdrops while giving Dhamma talks. It would also be possible to turn them into videos, and in many cases to post individual slides as posters. As always people are free to do what they want with this work, as long as they don’t claim ownership. I hope this will be one more way of sharing Dharma with people.