Ambassadors, in Bir, together with the Project's Executive Director (L-R): Nisheeta Jantiani (India); Sarah Wilkinson (US); Helen Bonzi (Canada); Huang Jing Rui (Executive Director); Frank Lee (Singapore); Ushnisha Ng (Singapore).
My latest “On the Buddhism Beat” post is now online over at Shambhala SunSpace. This week, it’s a conversation with Sarah Wilkinson, one of the American ambassadors for Dzongsar Jamyang Khyentse Rinpoche’s Buddhist Literary Heritage Project. Sarah is also a student in the Psychology program at University of the West, where I am professor in the Religious Studies department. Here’s a snippet of our conversation:
Sarah, would you please explain the Buddhist Literary Heritage Project for those who aren’t familiar with it?
The Buddhist Literary Heritage Project is a project that evolved from a conference hosted by the Khyentse Foundation in March 2009. Obviously it was conceived of prior to that date, but that’s when fifty translators, scholars, and lamas met for the “Translating the Words of the Buddha” conference at Deer Park Institute in Bir, India, just outside of Dharamsala. The idea was to get together to try to figure out exactly how to go about translating all of the Buddha’s teachings, with a more urgent focus on those that are only available in Tibetan right now. Knowing that the language has changed a lot and is kind of dying off, there’s a sense of urgency about getting these Buddhist texts translated. Some of these teachings are only available in Tibetan, and only five percent of what’s in Tibetan has been translated into English thus far. Some of these texts have been translated into Chinese, but only about 15% of those have been translated into English.
So there are many, many teachings of the Buddha only available right now in Tibetan—and Classical Tibetan at that, which relatively few people can understand at this point. So we’re trying to make sure that great lamas and qualified translators get together to both train new translators over the next couple of decades and make sure that these teachings of the Buddha are made available to everybody before it’s too late. This is a long-term project and is expected to take 100 years. Actually, I believe the ultimate goal is to get English (to begin with) translations of all the Buddha’s teachings, whether from translations in Tibetan, Sanskrit, Chinese, or Pali, into a single, user-friendly database for the use of scholars and practitioners alike.
Read the rest here.
Today’s quote comes to us from the great Khenpo Tsultrim Gyamtso Rinpoche, whom I previously quoted and wrote a little bio for in this post. This is it:
