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Nālandā Translation Committee
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Sakyong Mipham Rinpoche and Khenpo Tsering
greet each other
(Photo by Marvin Moore)
Photo by Marvin Moore
The Nālandā Translation
Committee, March 2008
www.shambhala.org/ntc
Previously on the Chronicles:
Glimpses of Alaya
Coming soon
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Saddharma Punsters, a poem by CTR |
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A listing of Chögyam Trungpa's Tibetan writings and Tibetan-English translations |
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Chögyam the Translator
by Larry Mermelstein
The Vidyādhara Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche had a great passion for translating the
dharma from Tibetan to English. By the time North American students began encountering
Rinpoche in 1970, his command of the English language was already completely fluent,
idiomatic, and intimate. It may be hard to believe, but his vocabulary surpassed many of
his native English-speaking students. His English syntax ranged from the extremely loose
to near perfect at times, and this was always difficult to predict and seemed totally
situational. But his command and eloquence with all the skills English required was
impressive.
He taught the dharma in English—directly and with penetrating precision and
gentleness. Did he formulate ideas and dharmic concepts in Tibetan and then translate
them into English? Rarely, I think, and perhaps only when the topic was very technical or
textually based. There were often as many interpretations of what he had said as there
were people who heard him, which I think reflects how intimately he connected with his
audience. And he used to amazing effect the fact that no one expected him to speak
syntactically perfect English. Subtle, complex, and mind-opening ambiguities, as well as
multiple shades and layers of meaning emerged easily from his often slippery sentence
structures. But the teachings came out spontaneously, effortlessly—again, a product of his
passion to connect with our world totally and without pretense. Dr. Alton (“Pete”) Becker,
professor of linguistics, commented after attending a lecture by the Vidyādhara in 1974,
“Rinpoche did something I’ve always known was possible, but that I’ve never experienced
before: he used language to destroy conceptuality.”
Just as the Buddha Shākyamuni taught in the vernacular as he wandered the Indian
subcontinent over twenty-five centuries ago, Trungpa Rinpoche spoke our language, with
simplicity and directness. The kind of students he attracted never imagined they would
learn his language, let alone recite liturgies or study commentaries in Tibetan. It had to be
in English, and there seemed to be little effort needed, since he taught so completely in our
language.
But, in truth, effort was required, especially as the students entered into the
vajrayāna disciplines of ngöndro (preliminary practices of tantra) and sādhana (yidam
deity practice). Initially, Rinpoche composed his own liturgies in English, as he had left
Tibet with only the smallest amount of his personal practice texts; and by the time he had
journeyed to the United States, his books remained in Scotland, along with a number of
important relics. But as we required more traditional liturgy, we began to obtain texts from
other exiled lamas and scholars we encountered. Through the efforts of Tibetologist E.
Gene Smith and his colleagues at the Library of Congress New Delhi Field Office, much of
the wealth of the huge corpus of Tibetan literature slowly became available; in this way we
began to acquire much of what Rinpoche needed—both for his more in-depth presentations
and for his students’ meditation practice.
Years before, in the United Kingdom, Chögyam the Translator emerged, working
closely with some of his very articulate and literate students. With some works, he dictated
a spontaneous translation in English, allowing his scribes to help him shape and edit the
phraseology. His work with Künga Dawa (Richard Arthure) is perhaps the most notable;
their translation of The Sādhana of Mahāmudrā, one of the termas (“treasure” texts)
discovered by Rinpoche, is a beautiful and evocative practice liturgy, held very dear by
all his students. With others who were studying Tibetan, he worked with Tibetan texts
directly. Rigdzin Shikpo (Michael Hookham) was one member of the small initial group
of translators who worked closely with Rinpoche in rendering the arcane language of
another culture into their own. We look forward to seeing more of Rigdzin Shikpo’s work
with the Vidyādhara in the near future. Francesca Fremantle, who was completing a Ph.D.
in Sanskrit at the University of London, was another early translator who collaborated with
Rinpoche. She even crossed the Atlantic not long after him to teach Sanskrit at the
University of Colorado and work with him to complete their translation of The Tibetan Book
of the Dead (1975), which is still a classic in the field.
The Nālandā Translation Committee
In America, the translation effort developed slowly and organically, as a few of us who had
the interest, though not necessarily any special talent, began to study Tibetan. The
Vidyādhara himself taught a few actual classes on the “Supplication to the Takpo Kagyüs”
sometime in 1973 and 1974, and this text, which we already knew well in English from his
earlier translation in Britain, became a vehicle for teaching us aspects of Tibetan grammar.
A small group emerged, with enthusiasm and some diligence, and Rinpoche began to meet
with us periodically. We worked with him on songs of realization by some of the
Karmapas and a beautiful sādhana he wrote while in the United Kingdom to his root guru,
Jamgön Kongtrül Padma Tri-me of Sechen. This period was very much an apprenticeship
for us in terms of education; and though it suffered from informality and lack of structure
as compared with a classroom style, it gained much from the passion of both the students
and their teacher working intimately together. And, moreover, it was “jolly good fun” at
times, as he used to say.
The first project I was given by the Vidyādhara, at the 1974 Vajradhatu Seminary,
was to prepare an edition in Sanskrit of the hundred-syllable Vajrasattva mantra, making
sure that this was in accord with classical grammar. Sanskrit had been one of my main
areas of focus while completing a B.A. in religious studies at the University of Michigan
a couple of years earlier. The following year, this work became the basis for our first real
group translation—the Vajrasattva liturgy of the ngöndro. A handful of students were
completing their prostrations and refuge practice, and Rinpoche felt that it was important
for them to begin to utilize the traditional ngöndro text. Up to that point we had been
practicing based on oral instructions, and contemplating the four reminders with short
verses spontaneously composed in English by the Vidyādhara.
The fact that Rinpoche was keen for his students to know this long mantra in a
grammatically correct form in Sanskrit reveals his allegiance to providing as authentic and
literate a transmission as possible, now that we in the West had access to such resources
long forgotten in Tibet (since the days of the main translation activity of Tibetans had
ended centuries ago). Not only did he want the mantra to be accurate in terms of its
spelling, but he wanted us to be able to pronounce it as the Indians would their native
classical language. This was in stark contrast to Rinpoche’s Tibetan contemporaries, both
his teachers and colleagues, who pronounced the Sanskrit syllables as if they were reading
Tibetan—what we have sometimes referred to humorously as the “whores dew vrey” (hors
d’oeuvre) style of pronunciation. He made great effort, though it seemed natural, to
pronounce the many Sanskrit technical terms he utilized in his talks in the way these words
would be said in India. However, when he chanted Sanskrit mantras encountered in
Tibetan liturgies, whether during his own practice or reading transmissions, he would
default to the ingrained Tibetan style of articulation, occasionally even poking fun at
himself for doing so.
A related topic is the visualization of Sanskrit seed syllables and mantras, a common
feature of tantric practice. In general, the Vidyādhara counseled us to follow the Tibetan
tradition of visualizing such syllables using the Tibetan uchen (Tib. dbu can; “possessing
a head”) script. When asked why we couldn’t use the Roman alphabet, he said, “I’m not
willing to make that leap.” He went on to discuss how important he felt it was that such
visualizations be done using a syllabary (like those employed by Tibetan and Sanskrit)
rather than an alphabet. The difference is that with a syllabary, a complete syllable is
represented by one character, which contains both a consonant and a vowel. With an
alphabet, the consonants and vowels are separate letters. Rinpoche thought it was
important in one’s visualization practice for the consonant and vowel to be inherently
inseparable, and an alphabet cannot accomplish this as well as a syllabary.
As would be readily evident to anyone reading the Vidyādhara’s books and
teachings, his liberal use of Sanskrit and relatively rare usage of Tibetan terms again
demonstrated his strong bias toward showing us the Indian roots of Buddhism, as well as
the Indian vajrayāna traditions, including the bodhisattva ideal of the mahāsiddha lineage
and their way of life as lay practitioners. We always attempted to find an appropriate
English word or phrase to translate the seemingly endless number of important terms. But
if nothing suitable was found, we often preferred to employ the original Sanskrit, especially
if this was not too difficult to pronounce or read for the English-speaking audience.
Rinpoche wanted his students to develop a technical Buddhist vocabulary and required us
to study the meaning of foreign terms. Using these somewhat unfamiliar words in a
translation instead of always trying to coin English equivalents was meant to encourage
further learning on the part of the reader. Perhaps it goes without saying, but we’ve found
that most English speakers handle Sanskrit pronunciation quite well without any training;
whereas the less familiar and linguistically unrelated Tibetan is often much more difficult.
When Rinpoche sought to name an organization or project, he often would turn to
Sanskrit again—examples range from Vajradhatu to Shambhala, Nalanda to Naropa (all written without the more scholarly use of diacritics)—though he remained mostly in his
native idiom for the names he chose for his military and service organization, known as the
Dorje Kasung (Tib. rdo rje bka’ srung), as well as for hierarchical titles within the Shambhala
organization. Ultimately, it was a blending of several influences, but his hope was that
many of the foreign words we used, especially the many important technical terms, would
eventually enter the English language formally, as a number of Sanskrit words have.
For the Nālandā Translation Committee, the year 1976 was a watershed in many
ways. We were joined by Lama Ugyen Shenpen, a longtime attendant and secretary to
Dilgo Khyentse Rinpoche, a close teacher of the Vidyādhara, and among the very few to
have escaped the Communist regime. Lama Ugyen proved to be an invaluable teacher and
guide for us, and he assisted Trungpa Rinpoche in so many ways, being the only other
Tibetan in our midst. Everything we translated was carefully reviewed with Lama Ugyen
and often drafted with his help, though he too was engaged in learning a new language in
order to improve what he could offer. After this draft was complete, we would begin again,
reading the entire translation, line by line, to the Vidyādhara.
Our first project that included Lama Ugyen fully was our translation of the short
and long Karma Kagyü Vajrayoginī sādhanas. Some of the preparation was done before
the 1976 Vajradhatu Seminary, held at Land O’Lakes, Wisconsin; but most of the work
proceeded there, from working to complete a draft with Lama Ugyen to reviewing it all
carefully with Rinpoche. This process was very intense, usually involving eight to twelve
hours a day, and the text demanded much more than our knowledge allowed. But our
understanding grew, and Lama Ugyen’s English improved steadily. At times it seemed
magical, Rinpoche sneaking into our workroom while we pored over a passage with
Ugyen; he would come just to check on our progress, prodding us along playfully and
offering interesting details that transformed our understanding. Sometimes we were so
immersed in our work that we wouldn’t even notice him approaching, much to his
mischievous delight.
It was during this intensive training program that The Golden Sun of the Great East
was revealed to the Dorje Dradül, as the Vidyādhara was known in his Shambhala
manifestation. This is the root terma text of Shambhala, the first of several mind termas he
was to discover during his years in America, and these too required translating. (Years
later, Rinpoche’s discoveries were confirmed as authentic termas by his teacher Dilgo
Khyentse Rinpoche.) As is the case with all such revealed treasure teachings, these were
intentionally hidden centuries earlier (usually by Padmasambhava, but in this case, more
likely King Gesar of Ling). A terma is hidden in order to benefit future generations, and the
timing of its manifestation is an aspect of its prophecy. The Shambhala teachings are
extremely important in the Vidyādhara’s transmission of dharma. In fact, he once said that
it was this intention alone—to propagate the kingdom of Shambhala—that provided the
necessary inspiration to leave his homeland and make the arduous journey to India and
the West.
Translation Methodology
From 1976 on, the annual three-month Vajradhatu Seminary, which included alternating
periods of intensive meditation and advanced study, became for us a fabulous translation
intensive and retreat. There were always at least two or three of us in attendance,
sometimes many more, coming and going as our livelihoods permitted. Rinpoche seemed
to have lots of time to work on our projects, and we sometimes met daily—rarely fewer
than several times a week. Seminary was also his laboratory, where he would experiment
with how to use our translations within his students’ meditation practice. He sometimes
spent hours in the shrine room with a handful of us, experimenting with different styles
of chanting, drum patterns, gong ringing, and so forth. It was a very creative and fluid
process of adapting the Tibetan ritual tradition to a new land and vocabulary, and every
year there would be new advancements in our ritual and understanding.
Back home in Boulder, Colorado, the translation work continued, though generally
at a slower pace. Meetings with Rinpoche were held once or twice a week when he was in
town, perhaps more if a project was nearing completion. He once commented that the
translation committee members were like “ladies to the court,” connecting him to his
mother tongue—no matter that most of us were male. Perhaps the translation work would
have been easier without us, since for the most part he really didn’t need us. But Rinpoche
was training us, teaching us, and being so very kind to us. He was also building an
institution.
As a translator, Rinpoche was both highly creative and meticulous. He gathered his
students into a committee, usually at least a few of us at any given time, in order to develop
a warm and collegial spirit of adventure and learning, always seeking to achieve just the
right turn of phrase to ignite students’ understanding of the text. In this way, Rinpoche was
harking back to a very traditional time—during the transmission of the dharma from India
to Tibet—when translators worked with accomplished scholar-practitioners. His
resemblance to Marpa the Translator and to Padmasambhava is not lost on us. At first we
were mostly his secretaries and editors, and were just beginning our journey into a
different mind. A new mind was required, as Rinpoche explained, to learn a new language.
It was the beginning of a long and rewarding collaboration.
Rinpoche composed much of his poetry in Tibetan, including tantric dohās and
songs of realization, and frequently translated his verse into English himself. His private
secretary, David I. Rome, and others would transcribe the spontaneous oral translation,
editing somewhat on the fly, usually with Rinpoche’s active participation. Occasionally
these would be reviewed later by our committee, especially if they were to be included in
an important publication. Most of his more extensive Tibetan writings, whether they were
tantric sādhanas, treatises, or termas, were translated by the committee from the start in
our usual fashion.
Rinpoche searched carefully for certain words, exploring with us how the intended
reader might respond to a phrase. When we met at his home, the Kalāpa Court, we always
had the complete, thirteen-volume edition of The Oxford English Dictionary nearby, and had great fun exploring the etymologies and nuances of a word. Clearly it was such a method
that had resulted in Rinpoche’s enormous vocabulary, and he often impressed us by
knowing far more about certain words than we did. No doubt, Rinpoche would be so
pleased and honored to know that the OED now cites his usage of the word egolessness
as one of its historical references under the entry for ego.
Some words that might otherwise seem to be excellent choices were so heavily laden
with problematic connotations that we found them unusable. Words such as sin and prayer
came with too much of a theistic orientation and Judeo-Christian baggage; and so, after an
initial trial of “neurotic crimes,” we settled on “evil deeds” instead of “sin” for the Tibetan
sdig pa and Sanskrit pāpa, and “supplication” and “aspiration” (instead of “prayer”) for gsol
’debs and smon lam. Other words were not quite as problematic for a nontheistic
connotation, such as “blessing” for byin rlabs. On his own, Rinpoche came up with some
marvelous and inventive translations, though we did not always use these in our
committee’s work; to give just a few: “alpha pure” for ka dag (rather than “primordial
purity”), the “eight logos” for sgrub pa bka’ brgyad (“eight sādhana teachings”), and “the
three lords of materialism” for phyi nang gsang ba’i kla klo (“outer, inner, and secret
barbarians”).
The group spirit was a very important component of our methodology as
translators. Sometimes the work would go extremely slowly, when it seemed no one
understood a passage, or when we each had to weigh in on our own way of reading or
casting a line. At times there were effortless leaps or even flights of creative expression, and
of course Rinpoche himself was often the instigator or articulator of these. The group
process did seem to produce a much greater degree of care and consistency, even if it
greatly increased the time involved. We were with our guru, a most precious opportunity,
and time rarely seemed to matter, except when a deadline loomed. It was always a
collaborative effort; discussions could become passionate, humorous, emotional,
argumentative, but there was always a basic respect for each other and, of course, great
reverence for our teacher. Looking back, I think we accomplished quite a lot during those
formative years, especially given our lack of expertise. The committee approach may
sometimes have squashed an inspired or lyrical turn of phrase one person offered,
especially when it was far from the literal renderings we usually preferred. But the
advantages usually outweighed the inevitable idiosyncrasies of the individual-translator
method, and the group easily undermined individual ego trips. (There are, it is important
to note, a number of exceptional dharma translators working individually as well.) If there
is an example of the whole being greater than the sum of its parts, it is our Nālandā
Translation Committee.
Our methodology also developed quite naturally, with everyone’s participation. We
strove to be as literal and accurate as possible, avoiding a more interpretive style of English
composition. We viewed the Buddhist practitioner as our main audience, though we still
made efforts to include some amount of scholarly reference and context for readers in the
academic community. We crafted the language in a fairly simple idiom, avoiding overly
complex or philosophically abstruse terminology. Rinpoche was concerned about the natural theistic and dualistic tendencies in language, perhaps somewhat more prevalent
in English than Tibetan, and so we looked for ways to minimize or undermine this. One
such example was our style of capitalization, which was as minimal as possible without
becoming idiosyncratic. Only the most strictly defined proper nouns were capitalized, such
as the names of people and places. The names of various yānas, or vehicles, were treated
as stages on the path rather than as fixed schools or institutions. Important teachings, too,
such as shūnyatā, mahāmudrā, and the four noble truths, were also written lowercase so
as to deemphasize any substantialistic or static connotation. Rinpoche also minimized our
personal pronoun usage whenever possible, though English demands these much more
than his native Tibetan.
Improvement and refinement were constant aspirations. And so, as our translations
were used by more and more practitioners, inconsistencies and obscure phrases surfaced,
and we responded with corrections. In Tibet, there was the Old Translation school (snga
’gyur) and the New Translation school (gsar bsgyur). It seemed at times that we were
developing the “retranslation school,” but the Vidyādhara wanted it to be correct, and so
improvements were made periodically. There was, however, very little time for such
backtracking, as the work ahead loomed large indeed.
The design of our publications also was an area of exploration and experimentation,
as this too was an important component of how the dharma was to be communicated. It
had to be both dignified and functional. Long texts that served as liturgies to be chanted
during one’s meditation practice needed to be able to open wide and lie flat on the practice
table, especially when the practice involved much ritual such as mudrās (hand gestures)
and music offerings (of bell and drum). With the help of graphic designers, we came up
with a nearly square paper size that, when opened up, approximated the size of an open
Tibetan-style book; however, the pages were to be turned like a Western book. This
allowed for one’s ritual implements to fit on a table nicely with the text, just as was done
traditionally. The pages were left unbound, as they were in Tibet, which also allowed for
easy rearrangement of liturgies at different times as required.
When playwright Jean-Claude van Itallie, a longtime student of Rinpoche’s, became
a sādhana practitioner, he urged us to consider including much more annotation of ritual
instructions and commentary within the sādhana text itself. The Vidyādhara agreed that
some amount of direction would be very helpful, especially for the first such practice text
encountered; and so we republished the Vajrayoginī Sādhana with a significant amount of
marginalia, noting when to offer music, perform a mudrā, or to use other ritual aids. The
margins of such texts were purposely left very generous so that the students could include
plenty of notes to facilitate their understanding. Rinpoche wanted us to do mostly our own
annotation through personal study and practice of the material.
There was to be no hint of inferiority in our presentation of the dharma in English,
a language that Rinpoche considered to be as suitable as any for transmitting the teachings.
And so there was no interlinear Tibetan present, whether in the native Tibetan script or a
pronounceable phonetic transcription (though such publications have proved extremely
useful to students learning Tibetan). The practitioners were going to read and chant in English, and most of the Vidyādhara’s students would have been completely lost if they
were left to chant in Tibetan. For those few Westerners who learned the Tibetan language,
the original text might suffice, depending upon their fluency.
Rinpoche once commented that it was not such a good idea to learn the dharma by
means of learning the Tibetan language, and he had noticed that some strange or mistaken
ideas seemed to creep in when that became the primary process of learning. Of course, we
learned an immense amount about the dharma through our study of the language and the
task of translating the texts for others. But Rinpoche’s point was that it was best to learn
the basic dharma principles in one’s native language, without any additional cultural filters
or projections beyond the usual.
Rinpoche delighted in word play of all kinds, and he apparently grew up writing
clever little poems amid his lessons. (The eighteenth-century master Jigme Lingpa was his
favorite poet.) In America, he also dabbled with translating English into Tibetan, with such
forays as the opening sections of the Tao Te Ching and the Lord’s Prayer. The latter text
served as a terribly funny prank he played on us, giving it to one of our members as a small
project to translate (back) into English. The translator quickly got the joke and burst out of
his room laughing. The next “victim,” of Jewish descent, was not so lucky, having never
encountered this prayer before; and thus an entire translation was prepared for us to
consider. The meeting to review this with Rinpoche was excruciatingly funny.
Tibetan Writings and Terma
Though the writings of Trungpa Rinpoche are not the main subject of this essay, I have
alluded to various of them, some of which were composed in Tibetan, and some of which
were also translated by him. As mentioned in his autobiography, Born in Tibet, Rinpoche
wrote at least two sizable works while still in Tibet: a thousand-page treatise on
mahāmudrā and meditation, “showing its gradual development up to the final fruition,”
and a two-volume “allegory about the kingdom of Shambhala and its ruler who will
liberate mankind at the end of the Dark Age.” Unfortunately, both of these works remain
lost. However, we were excited to learn recently that a number of his other texts written
in Tibet have survived.
Through discussions with Lama Yönten Gyamtso, an attendant of Trungpa
Rinpoche from when he was still an infant in Tibet and a member of his escape party in
1959, we learned that Rinpoche began to discover termas at the age of six. Lama Yönten
explained that often Trungpa Rinpoche would sit with his good friend Ugyen Tendzin (a
tülku from Sip Dzokchen Monastery) and an older khenpo (senior philosophy teacher). The
Vidyādhara would sometimes decode the terma finds orally, with Ugyen Tendzin often
serving as scribe to record his pronouncements. Apparently, many of Rinpoche’s termas
in Tibet were what are called “earth treasures”—texts and ritual objects actually taken out
of the earth or rock. Before his recent death, Ugyen Tendzin—in compiling a table of
contents of Rinpoche’s writings in Tibet—wrote a beautiful essay about Trungpa Rinpoche as a tertön (terma discoverer). Trungpa Rinpoche’s nephew, Karma Senge Rinpoche, who
is from Kyere Monastery (a branch of Surmang), has spent many years traveling
throughout Kham (Eastern Tibet) and beyond, in search of his uncle’s writings. Thus far,
he has collected over four hundred pages, and we were very fortunate to receive copies of
these during his first visit to the West in the summer of 2003. We are now beginning to read
and translate these texts, many of them termas, and so yet another chapter begins in our
continuing work with the Vidyādhara.
Larry Mermelstein
Söpa Chöling Retreat Centre of Gampo Abbey
Cape Breton, Nova Scotia
Parinirvana Anniversary, 04/04/04
For inclusion on the Chronicles with special permission from Shambhala
Publications, Inc. First published in Recalling Chögyam Trungpa, compiled and edited by Fabrice Midal, ©
2005.
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