June/July 2007

Complementary Currencies for Social Change: An Interview with Bernard Lietaer
Ravi Dykema

To Remake the World: Something Earth0changing is Afoot Amonth Civil Society
Paul Hawken

Leave No Child Inside
Richard Louv

Research Shows Television Watching Affects Children's Development
Jody Woodruff

Global Warming Can't Buy Happiness
Bill McKibben

Worldwide Shift to Compact Fluorescents Could Close 270 Coal-Fired Power Plants
Lester R. Brown

The Seven Spiritual Laws of Success
Deepak Chopra

Principles for Spinal Safety
John Stern

The Economic Potential of a New Energy Revolution
Jerome Ringo

The Campaign for a Department of Peace: A Holistic Approach for Reducing Violence
Pip Cornall

Translated Ancient Buddhist Texts: Teachings of Life Free From Agression, Full of Compassion
Lama Chönam, Sangye Khandro & Jules B. Levinson

Book Review

Cosmic Calendar
Salina Rain

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Translating Ancient Buddhist Texts

By Lama Chönam, Sangye Khandro & Jules B. Levins

For the liberation from hatred, avarice, and fear to be portrayed to an international community in a vivid and
compelling manner, not only in our lifetimes but also for many generations into the future, the words serving as vessels for that knowledge need, once more, to be created anew.

When the Buddha taught his students, he spoke in the languages of his time and place, and he urged his students to teach in the languages and dialects of their listeners. The Buddha’s words and those of his students migrated into a spectrum of Indian languages and eventually found their way into many Asian languages, which allowed them to spread far beyond the borders of India and endure long beyond the eventual disappearance of the Buddhadharma from the Indian subcontinent. Translated into familiar words and meaningful expressions, the Buddhadharma crossed the Asian continent and permeated the lives of people throughout Central and Southeast Asia, China, Korea, and Japan, the Indonesian archipelago, the Tibetan cultural area, and Russia’s Asian frontiers.

Though Buddha Shakyamuni was born in India in 500 B.C. and attained his enlightenment there, the Buddhist culture of India bequeathed a particularly rich transmission of Buddhadharma (the teachings of Buddha) to Tibet where it flourished for many centuries. Rarely has the world seen such a vast and complete acquisition of one culture’s knowledge by another accomplished with such excellence. Not surprisingly, the world looks increasingly to the Tibetan heritage in its search for the teachings of the Buddha. Yet we know that the Buddhadharma did not come to Tibet until more than twelve hundred years after the Buddha died. How did Tibet become so central to the life of the Buddhadharma? Through translation. Many thousands of Buddhist texts were translated from Sanskrit and other Indian languages into Tibetan, and the slow infusion of stories, aspirations, inquiry, and contemplation into the language and culture of Tibet provided the ground from which the richness of liberating practice grew in such bounty.

The transformations that have swept over Asia during the past three centuries have in many ways eroded the ground in which the Buddhadharma grew abundantly while at the same time casting fertile seeds across land and sea. Now the Buddha’s teachings have begun to take root in America as well as in Europe—as in the past, so in our own time the knowledge of liberation passes from one person to another through the medium of the spoken and written word. For the liberation from hatred, avarice, and fear to be portrayed to an international community in a vivid and compelling manner, not only in our lifetimes but also for many generations into the future, the words serving as vessels for that knowledge need, once more, to be created anew.

However, we may not have all that much time. Teachers who received a significant portion of their education in Tibet have grown old, and many have already died. The texts they studied describe a life free from aggression and full of compassion, as well as the means for developing such kindness in oneself. Yet without guidance from the elder teachers, it will be difficult to understand the richly worded texts inscribed in a language unrelated to our own, the delightfully complex conversations that have unfolded across generations, or the initially invisible ways in which inquiry, contemplation, and ritual echo and inform one another. If we are to translate the texts in which the masters of the Buddha’s way have expressed their understanding, then the next few years will be critical to our work, for it is the knowledge and experience of the elder teachers that can enable us to speak of freedom, compassion, and joy to those who live here with us now and to those who will come after us.

A generation of Tibetans has grown up in oppressive conditions with relatively limited opportunities for study and practice. A generation of refugees has come of age in India and Nepal; most of them have never seen Tibet. Often the younger Tibetans find themselves in situations not entirely dissimilar from our own, working against time to learn as much as possible from their elders. Meanwhile, the reference points of language, landscape, and human culture shift at an ever accelerating pace, such that even as many texts are recovered, the ability to read those texts slips away. With the clock ticking, we look soberly at a powerful illustration of the Buddha’s teaching of impermanence; just as people come and go, so do languages, entire cultures, and all their knowledge.

In 1959, tens of thousands of Tibetans fled their homeland seeking refuge from violence, oppression, and annihilation. Though in great danger, many took precious moments to pack sacred texts, which they then carried with them as they walked over the Himalayan Mountains to India. Limited to a few items, often they chose books over food. Inspired by such faith and sacrifice, the Light of Berotsana Translation Group was formed in the spring of 1999 with the aspiration to contribute precise, lively, and eloquent translations to the library of Buddhist literature now developing in the English language. The Tibetan Buddhist Resource Center in Manhattan has over 90,000 discrete titles in its collection of digitized Tibetan texts, but less than 1% of these have been translated into the English language. Did you know that no one currently speaks the language that the Buddha spoke? Without translation, what would we know of the Buddha’s teachings?

When our teachers left Tibet and came to India forty-five years ago, they left so many things behind and they lost so much. Whenever possible, they brought their books with them, and even now they continue to scour the Tibetan plateau in search of texts that disappeared many years ago. They have undergone such hardship, and they have taken so many risks for the sake of the knowledge held in those pages. Suppose the literature of Tibet were never to be translated, what would be lost? At present we cannot say precisely how the knowledge of body and mind that Tibet’s Buddhist literature may offer to humanity in the coming millennium will illuminate and uplift the lives of our children and their children, even though we feel certain that it will. But consider this: from the tenth to thirteenth centuries, the translation of treatises on philosophy, mathematics, astronomy, medicine, and alchemy from Arabic into Latin gave Europe the knowledge that Eastern scholars had culled over many centuries from Greece, India, Persia, China, and the Near East. Among these were the works of Euclid, Plato, Ptolemy, and Aristotle. These translations in turn played a crucial role in the developments that we now call the European Renaissance and in the inception of modern science. Suppose these works had never been translated into Arabic or had never passed from Arabic into Latin. Would we wish to forego such knowledge and invention as has come from discovering the philosophy, mathematics, and poetry of India, Persia, and Greece? Probably not. Something like that knocks at our door even now. We do not know what will come from mixing our minds with the visions of Longchenpa, the revelations of Jigme Lingpa, the humane learning of Jamgön Mipam, Karmapa Rangjung Dorje’s meditations upon the ineffable, or Karmapa Mikyö Dorje’s compelling analysis of confusion and clear seeing, but we do know that the keys to a treasury of imagination, compassion, and practical application have been placed in our hands. We have only to turn them in the lock.

The mission of The Light of Berotsana Translation Group is to further the translation, study, and preservation of the Buddhist literature and philosophical heritage of Tibet at the highest standards of excellence. The Translation Group is named for the renowned Tibetan translator Berotsana who flourished during the eighth century, translated hundreds of texts, and played a pivotal role in the establishment of Tibet’s literary culture. Though we travel extensively as translators for oral teachings of the Buddhist doctrine, Lama Chönam and Sangye Khandro live near Ashland, Oregon and Jules Levinson lives in Boulder, Colorado. Each member in the group has studied with some of Tibet’s most learned masters for three decades, and all of us continue to work closely with a diverse group of exceptional teachers.

Raised and educated in Golok, Tibet, Lama Chönam came to the United States in 1992. He brings an extensive education and the sensibilities of a native speaker to the work. Sangye Khandro has lived, studied, and practiced among Tibetans and translated for accomplished Tibetan teachers for thirty-five years. Jules Levinson received a B.A. in English literature from Princeton University and earned a Ph.D. in Buddhist Studies at the University of Virginia. When they met, they found a harmony of interests, knowledge, and styles and working together realize work finer than anything accomplished individually.

Following the way of the Buddha, our ancestors have looked long and hard at the practice of integrity, the process of knowledge, the meaning of dignity, the nature of mind, and the journey to freedom. Without careful translation of these deep reflections, very few will have access to them; profound insight and the benefit it brings may easily be lost to future generations. The main purpose of Light of Berotsana is to undertake the translation, from Tibetan into English, of many of the classic texts from the Buddhist Sutra and Mantra traditions of India and Tibet. Primarily, this includes the most pertinent texts taught in the colleges, training centers, and retreats of the Nyingma and Kagyü Tibetan Buddhist traditions. These commentaries and treatises serve as foundations for the rich cultural heritage of the Tibetan Buddhist tradition, an erudite and exacting system of inquiry into the nature of existence and knowledge.

We do not translate haphazardly, without reason or purpose, or without authoritative guidance. Not fancying ourselves to be learned and wary of arrogant inflation, when we translate the dharma that is included within Sutra and Mantra, we seek instruction from accomplished scholars for whom, through a lineage of transmission, the text has become meaningful.

Without pretending to know more than we know, we assess the meaning of a passage with the valid reasoning we ourselves can marshal. Furthermore, as our model and standard we take the kings, ministers, scholars, and adepts of the snowy land of Tibet who considered unadulterated altruism to be principal and translated and propagated the Buddha’s teachings. Rejoicing in their legacy, we approach the task of bringing the Buddha’s teachings into English in accordance with oral traditions, with a caution induced by recognizing the limits of our own knowledge, without considering our individual views to be supreme, and with the intention that our work further the teachings and serve as medicine for those who wander from lifetime to lifetime.

In selecting texts from the course of studies followed at eminent schools for Buddhist learning, the translators emphasize depth of exposition alongside relevance for contemporary scholars and students. At present, the focus is upon the work of illustrious Tibetan scholars such as Jamgön Mipham, Dodrup Tenpa’i Nyima, Longchenpa, Karmapa Mikyö Dorje, and Jamgön Kongtrül Lodrö Thaye. In the future, Light of Berotsana will explore the work of many scholars central to Tibetan Buddhist literature whose names have yet to become familiar even to those already passionately interested in the Tibetan literary and cultural legacy. Throughout the northwestern United States, there are many Tibetan Buddhist Dharma centers of different lineages, all of which are dependent upon good translators and accurate translations.

As we grow, we will invite additional translators and teachers to join in our work. With a view to the future, we presently devote a portion of our time to teaching the Tibetan language to aspiring translators. From our own experience, we know the road leading to expertise to be both long and demanding.

In every age and every land where the Buddhist teachings have flourished, translation has played a crucial role. Had the texts not been translated, the Buddhadharma would not have endured. This world so full of strife would be much the poorer without the vision of nonaggression, gentle humor, and effective action that the Buddhist teachings provide.

We hope that you will take an interest in our efforts to preserve and translate the rich literary heritage of Tibet, and we invite you to participate in whatever way you can. If you are interested in sponsoring our work, we welcome your support. Donations made to Light of Berotsana, a not-for-profit corporation, are tax deductible to the extent allowed by law. Donations support administrative expenses and the translators and teachers working on our various projects. Profits from the sale of our translations return to Light of Berotsana to support further translation and publication.

We seek to provide the resources necessary for those who speak and read the English language to immerse themselves in the study of Tibetan civilization. We are intent upon bringing the many treasures of Tibet’s literary heritage within reach of a global community. To learn more about our work or possibilities for sponsorship, please write to Jules B. Levinson at jules@berotsana.org, or visitwww.berotsana.org.

May the Buddha’s compassionate wisdom permeate the minds and hearts of all.

Interested readers can search for “Tibetan Buddhism” on the internet, as well as the following websites which will help in locating local centers: www.tashicholing.org, www.kscashland.org, www.chagdud.org, and www.nwdharma.org.

Sangye Khandro, Lama Chönam & Jules B. Levinson.