Activities
Translating Tibetan Buddhism
November 23, 2019 | American Academy of Religion, San Diego
Translation is fundamental to religion and to the study of religion. Despite a growing body of literature theorizing the study of religion and its relationship to the practice of translation, currently there is not AAR unit devoted to translation. Translation thus remains an undertheorized practice at the AAR despite its centrality to Religious Studies. This exploratory session addresses this lack by leveraging the intense energy currently running through the field of Tibetan Buddhist Studies, which has become a major cultural, economic, and intellectual force within the sphere of global Buddhism. We propose to bring together stakeholders to critically assess the past, present, and especially the future of translation. We seek to promote translation practice as a conceptually rich space in which to reflect upon multiple scholarly, philosophical, social, cultural, and political issues in the study of and global engagement with Buddhism, and in the study of religion more broadly.
Andrew Quintman & Kurtis Schaeffer, Presiding
Panelists: Daniel Aitken, Holly Gayley, Amelia Hall, Sarah Harding, Sarah Jacoby, Anne C. Klein, Marcus Perman, Dominique Townsend, Sangseraima Ujeed, Nicole Willock, Tom Yarnall
Notes on the Performance and Programmatics of Mgur
13 July, 2019 | International Association of Tibetan Studies Conference, Paris
Delivered at the panel Mgur: Songs of Realization in Tibetan Culture.
The past half century has witnessed a florescence of research on the poetic form of songs of realization (mgur), primarily through the identification and translation of a widening circle of major literary sources. Contemporary scholarship has addressed the genre of mgur from a multiplicity of perspectives: the history and classification of mgurand its relationship to other Tibetan verse forms; the formal analysis of content and structure of individual mgur and mgur collections; and the aesthetic interpretation of mgurstyle and artistry; and these are in addition to more traditional forms of Buddhist doctrinal commentary. And indeed, here we are today—most in this room have contributed.
Read more “Notes on the Performance and Programmatics of Mgur”Mapping Religious Lives in the Himalayan Borderlands
11 July, 2019 | International Association of Tibetan Studies Conference, Paris
Delivered at the roundtable on Mapping Tibet: Past, Present, Future.
The places associated with a life, set forth in literature, can also be read on the ground as a kind of biographical text. The notion of a geographic biography is thus useful as a means for teasing out the relationship between Tibetan life writing and sacred geography while critically addressing received notions about the forms they inhabit.
Michel de Certeau has suggested that the narratives of a saint’s life story are a “composition of places,” charting an itinerary of departures and returns that ultimately come to define the life through the places it inhabits. In past years, I have worked (and published) on the intersections of text and terrain in the recording of an individual’s life. In particular, I have been looking at sites of transformation in Mi la ras pa’s biographical narratives, arguing for what might be called a geographic biography. I suggest that the topography of Mi la ras pa’s life constitutes an important (but frequently overlooked) form of life writing in its own right.
I further suggest that the topography of Mi la ras pa’s biographical tradition was unstable, subject to both change and revision much like the tradition literary biography As individual locations evolved over time, they appear to have served as powerful sites for remembering episodes of the yogin’s life story and for re-recording how those stories were told. The sites of transformation in the geographic biography thus reveal a dialogical relationship between a life story recorded on paper and a life imprinted on the ground. Biographical narratives may landscape the terrain, but sacred sites in turn serve to re-imagine how those narratives can be written and read.
Digital Reflections of the Buddha: A Life in Text…
June 4, 2019 | Yale Center for British Art
Delivered at The Future of Images Symposium on IIIF standards held at the Yale Center for British Art.
Summary From the Organizers
On June 4th, 2019, Yale hosted a daylong program entitled “The Future of Images at Yale: Introducing Yale’s new Image Standard” to demonstrate to nearly 200 faculty, staff and students the potential offered by the Yale Library and Museums’ shared commitment to implementing IIIF-enabled images across their collections.
International Image Interoperability Framework (IIIF) is a model for seamlessly gathering, presenting and annotating digital images from collections at Yale and around the globe. IIIF allows scholars and users to bring together images from collections cordoned off in discrete catalogs and it will eventually provide a cornerstone of an integrated cross-collections search and discovery platform at Yale. This image framework also solves the problem of delivering high-quality large-scale images over the web by nimbly requesting pieces of images as requested for deep-zooming by the IIIF viewer tools, instead of accessing/ downloading unwieldy large image files.
Read more “Digital Reflections of the Buddha: A Life in Text and Many Images”A Brief Survey of Tibetan Buddhist Poetry and Translation
December 19, 2018 | Renmin University, Beijing
The Great Deeds of the Buddha: A Seminar on…
December 18, 2018 | Tsinghua University, Beijing | Seminar Report 1, Seminar Report 2
“Life of the Buddha” Project Overview: Digital Frameworks for Preservation and Analysis”
“Exploring the Life of the Buddha in the Jonang Murals and Texts”
19 Ways of Looking at Milarepa
November 19, 2018 | American Academy of Religion, Denver
Translation is a multivalent process. A translation is a reading, an interpretation, an argument about the text, its author, its time and place, and about its reception in the new spaces the translator imagines herself to be placing the text. A close reading of all available translations of a given verse, for instance, reveals, potentially, as many imagined authors, times, places, doctrines, and world systems breathing life into the text as there are translations. This roundtable panel takes its inspiration from the epitome of such work: Eliot Weinberger and Octavio Paz’s 19 Ways of Looking at Wang Wei (Asphodel Press, 1987), a slim book that provocatively comments on nineteen translations of four lines of Chinese Buddhist nature poetry. Through a close reading of multiple English renderings, Weinberger and Paz elicit the ways in which, “a translation is more than a leap from dictionary to dictionary; it is a reimagining of a poem. As such, every reading of every poem, regardless of language, is an act of translation: translation into the reader’s intellectual and emotional life. As no individual reader remains the same, each reading becomes a different—not merely another—reading” (43).
In this roundtable, our task is to similarly reflect on a few lines of verse attributed to Milarepa, Tibet’s earliest and most famous Buddhist poet. We ask, how might an English translation evoke emotional responses, or reflect comparable religious aspirations attributed to the Tibetan source? How do choices about the tone and timbre of a translation—reflected by word order, meter, rhyme scheme—alter a poem’s religious meaning, or transform its efficacy as a vehicle for religious transmission? To what degree can we consider the poems ascribed to a Buddhist teacher, in Tibetan or English, to be Buddhist? If translation is “a reimagining of a poem,” the roundtable participants seek to illuminate how the translation of Tibetan Buddhist poetry entails reimagining the very nature of religious expression itself. This becomes especially acute in literature where environment, feeling, experience, doctrine, and ethics are so concisely bound together in a single discourse. How do we make sense of this synthesis in Tibetan religious poetry, and how does translation work within this process of making sense?
Lotsawa Tibetan Translation Workshop
October 5-8, 2018 | University of Colorado, Boulder | Workshop Website
Mountain Echoes: Himalayan Literature Festival
August 22–25, 2018 | Thimphu, Bhutan | Festival Website |
Peripheral Visions: An Indian Buddha in the Tibetan Imaginaire
May 4, 2018 | Asia Society, New York | Event Link |
Keynote lecture for the international symposium “Moving Borders: Tibet in Interaction with Its Neighbors”
In conjunction with the exhibition Unknown Tibet: The Tucci Expeditions and Tibetan Painting.
The Greatest Story Ever Told: Meditators, Madmen, and the…
May 9, 2018 | Zhejiang University |
Inaugural lecture for the Centre for the Humanities and Social Sciences, Zhejiang University, International Campus.
New Directions in the Study of Tibetan Buddhist Art…
April 28–29, 2018 | Harvard-Yenching Institute | Harvard University |
“Painting Manuals (bris yig) as Transmedial Texts”
Jaipur Literature Festival
25–29 January, 2018 | Jaipur, India | Festival Website |
“Milarepa: The Master and His Teachings”
Narrative Paintings from Central Asia to the Himalaya
23 October, 2017 | Musée Cernuschi, Paris | Conference Website |
“Writing the Visual: Translating Buddha Life Narratives from Text into Image”
Accounts of the Buddha’s final life are ubiquitous across Tibet. Among the most extensive and striking are those in the corpus of literary and visual materials produced by the seventeenth-century luminary Tāranātha Kunga Nyingpo (1575–1634) at his monastic seat of Phuntsokling in the Tibetan region of Tsang. This paper examines Tāranātha’s work entitled A Painting Manual for the Hundred Acts of the Teacher, Lord of Śākyas (Ston pa shākya dbang po’i mdzad brgya pa’i bris yig). This text exemplifies the little-studied genre of Tibetan writing known as the painting manual (bris yig). In it, Tāranātha self-consciously bridges two sets of Buddha vitae: his literary narrative in 125 chapters called The Sun of Faith (Dad pa’i nyin byed) and the narrative murals executed in his monastery’s second floor gallery, covering some 150 square meters, referred to as “the Boundless Design” (bkod pa mtha’ yas). The Painting Manual covers the entire arc of the Buddha’s life story as told in The Sun of Faith, and contains scene-by-scene instructions for its visual representation. Tāranātha’s Painting Manual thus inhabits in a middle ground between two media, effectively translating text into image. This paper draws on Tāranātha’s writings and a complete site documentation of his murals to reflect upon the different kinds of stories textual and visual narratives tell, and how the translation from one to the other leads to new forms of storied knowledge.
Jaipur Literature Festival at Boulder
September 15–17 | Boulder, CO | Festival Website |
“The Life of Milarepa: From Text to Practice”
Illuminating Carefree Awareness: Tibetan Poetry Collections and the Landscape…
August 20–25, 2017 | Toronto | Conference Website |
International Association of Buddhist Studies XVIIIth Congress
Panel on Literatures of Contemplation (organized by Andrew Quintman & Kurtis Schaeffer)
Tibetan Translation and Transmission Conference
May 31–June 3, 2017 | University of Colorado, Boulder | Conference Website |
“Fidelity and Innovation in Translation”
“Translating Tibetan Poetry & Poetics: Kāvya in Tibet”
Tibetan Poetry and Poetics
May 12–14, 2017 | Latse Library |
Religion and the Literary in Tibet Workshop
10th in a continuing series of workshops on Tibetan Literature.
More information here.
Desegregating Digital Humanities Research and Teaching
November 19, 2016 | American Academy of Religion, San Antonio |
Panel: The Digital Futures of Religious Studies
HH Tai Situpa Visits Yale
October 6, 2016 | Yale University |
His Holiness the 12th Chamgon Kenting Tai Situpa visited Yale, toured the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, met with several student groups, and delivered a public talk “Meditation in the Modern World.”
More information here.
Life of the Buddha Project in 2016 Yale ITS…
September 16, 2016 | Yale University |
The Life of the Buddha Project appeared on the cover of the 2016 Yale ITS Annual Report and was featured prominently in the online version.
Frontier Lamas and Monastic Networks in the Himalayan Borderlands
June 25, 2016 | Bergin, Norway |
Panel on “Trans-Himalayan Corridors” organized by Hildegard Diemberger and Andrew Quintman
14th Congress of the International Association of Tibetan Studies
The Life of the Buddha in Literature, Art, and…
May 6, 2015 | Yale Center Beijing | Event Link |
“Yale Center Beijing Launches ‘Asia in the World’ Lecture Series” (Yale News)
Slideshow from the Council on East Asian Studies
How to Read the Life of a Buddhist Saint
May 5, 2016 | Renmin University, Beijing |
Universities as Agents of Sustainable Conservation
April 12, 2016 | UN Global Colloquium, Yale University | Event Link |
UN Global Colloquium on the Preservation of Cultural Heritage
Sustainable development —the concept of meeting the world’s current needs without compromising the ability of future generations to do the same—is of growing importance in times of rapid social transformations, global climate change, and economic uncertainty. This satellite workshop will address important challenges on the way towards sustainable conservation, in all three dimensions of sustainability: economic, ecologic, and social.
In the presence of already existing UN organizations/platforms, what role might a university consortium serve to provide solutions for sustainability in preservation? How can universities create and maintain interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary networks for addressing issues of sustainability in conservation, mitigating challenges of mitigation and adaptation for creating resilient societies, and forming links to UN sustainable development goals?
Putting the Buddha to Work: Śākyamuni in the Service…
March 31, 2016 | University of Chicago | Event Link |
South Asia Seminar Talk, Foster Hall 103, 4:30 pm
The Yogin and the Madman Receives Honorable Mention for…
February 12, 2016 | Association for Asian Studies |
The Yogin and the Madman receives Honorable Mention in the 2016 Association of Asian Studies’ E. Gene Smith Book Prize.
The Life of Milarepa Available as Audiobook
December 21, 2015 | Audible link |
The Life of Milarepa (Penguin Classics 2010) is available for the first time in audiobook form.
Religion and the Literary in Tibet Workshop 5
October 17–18, 2015 | University of California, Berkeley |
Continuation of a long-running project. More information here.
The Making of Milarepa
September 10, 2015 | Tibet House |
Public book talk on The Yogin and the Madman: Reading the Biographical Corpus of Tibet’s Great Saint Milarepa
7:00 pm | 22 West 15th St, New York, NY
There is a suggested donation but I have requested that all proceeds go toward earthquake relief in Nepal.
Buddhism on the Edge: Locating Premodern Religion on the…
July 3–5, 2015 | Yunnan Minzu University, Kunming, China | Workshop Link |
Workshop on Exploring New Grounds in Himalayan Studies
Two-Year Collaborative Research Fellowship from ACLS-Ho Foundation
June 1, 2015 | Yale University | Award Link |
Andrew Quintman & Kurtis Schaeffer receive a 2-year ACLS-Ho Foundation Collaborative Research Fellowship in Buddhist Studies for “The Life of the Buddha at Jonang Monastery: Art, Literature, and Institution.”
Project website: lifeofthebuddha.org
The Yogin and the Madman Receives Yale Prize for…
May 28, 2015 | Yale University |
The Yogin and the Madman receives Yale University’s 2015 Samuel and Ronnie Heyman Prize for outstanding scholarship.
Illuminating the Yogin’s Path: Manuscript Illustrations in Tibetan Biography
April 16–17, 2015 | University of Virginia | Conference Link |
Conference on Books and Readers in the Pre-Modern World
The ubiquity of the book in literate societies can blind us to its complex social and cultural functions in particular times and places. The materials out of which books are made, the physical form that they take, the way scripts and images are inscribed on their surfaces, the kinds of texts they preserve, and the means by which they are circulated, consumed, and even performed can illuminate economic and environmental conditions, ideological agendas, and the ways networks function within and between cultures. Studies of book culture have increased exponentially in recent years, and the aim of this conference is to offer an inter-disciplinary, cross-cultural analysis of the status quaestionis in dialogue with one exceptionally influential volume, Harry Gamble’s Books and Readers in the Early Church: A History of Early Christian Texts, which in 2015 will mark its twentieth anniversary.
Visit to Yale by HH the 17th Karmapa Ogyen…
April 6–10, 2015 | Yale University | Event Link |
A four-day visit to Yale University by His Holiness the 17th Karmapa Ogyen Trinley Dorje. Activities include His Holiness’s Chubb Fellowship Lecture “Compassion in Action—Buddhism and the Environment”.
More information about the visit, news reports, and a photo gallery can be found here.
The Buddhas of Jonang: Literature and Art in the…
February 17, 2015 | Yale Himalaya Initiative | Event Link |
A talk in the Yale Himalaya Initiative Seminar Series, Yale University
Room 202, Luce Hall, 34 Hillhouse Ave
Borderland Buddhism: Locating Pre-Modern Religion in/on the Himalayan Frontier
December 8–10, 2014 | Hong Kong |
Asian Borderlands Research Network Conference
Panel: Border Politics, Identities, and Scholarship Across the Himalayas—a Further Call for “Critical Border Studies.”
The Yogin and the Madman Receives AAR Book Award
November 23, 2014 | American Academy of Religion, San Diego |
The Yogin and the Madman receives the American Academy of Religion’s Award for Excellence in the Study of Religion.
Remarks from the awards committee:
“It is eminently readable, engagingly written, while displaying impeccable scholarship. I am by no means familiar with Tibetan biographical literature and know next to nothing about Milarepa. But in this book, Mila does indeed come alive! through the author’s cogent analysis of the multiple readings of his biography in differing historical circumstances and of how these readings shaped and reshaped the Buddhist consciousness. This book can be read with interest by all those similarly interested in the place of biographical literature in other religious traditions (as I am) but also by nonspecialists.
The Yogin and the Madman got me excited to read primary text material about Milarepa, someone I’d never thought about twice previously. I found the author’s argument layered and nuanced in its thought. I thought it was written nicely, with a level of sophistication and maturity not found in a lot of textual studies. The author drew richly from the primary texts, and the primary texts (both in terms of their content, reception, and deployment) are at the heart of his argument. The book also includes original translation work by the author. Finally, it made me appreciate what texts contribute to the study of religion broadly.”
Translating Poetic and Inspirational Materials
October 4, 2014 | Keystone, CO | Event Link |
Translation and Transmission Conference
Keystone, Colorado, 2-5 October 2014
Panel overview and audio recording
The Making of Milarepa
October 1, 2014 | University of Colorado, Boulder |
A book talk on The Yogin and the Madman: Reading the Biographical Corpus of Tibet’s Great Saint Milarepa
University of Colorado, Boulder
British Studies Room, Norlin Library, 5:00 pm
Free and open to the public
The Yogin and the Madman: On Writing and Reading…
May 29, 2014 | Trace Foundation | Event Link |
A book talk on The Yogin and the Madman: Reading the Biographical Corpus of Tibet’s Great Saint Milarepa
Trace Foundation, 132 Perry St., Suite 2B, New York, NY
Free and open to the public
Self and Religious Subjectivities
April 5–6, 2014 | Yale University |
Self and Religious Subjectivities (panel discussant)
Modern South Asia Workshop, Yale University
Himalayan Studies Conference
March 14–16, 2014 | Yale University | Conference Link |
Histories of Himalayan Buddhism (panel convener)
“Buddhism on the Border: Institutional History and the Formation of Religious Tradition on the Frontier of Tibet and Nepal” (paper presentation)
The Himalaya and Tibet in the North American Classroom (roundtable participant)
The Yogin and the Madman: On Writing and Reading…
January 31, 2014 | Yale University | Event Link |
A book talk on The Yogin and the Madman: Reading the Biographical Corpus of Tibet’s Great Saint Milarepa.
International Room, Sterling Memorial Library, Yale University
Geographical Narratives, Narrative Geographies: Transformations of Lives and Landscapes…
December 16–18, 2013 | Heidelberg University |
Conference on Putative Purities: Transcultural Dimensions of Master Narratives in Religion
Heidelberg University
4th Seminar on Religion and the Literary in Tibet
November 2013 | American Academy of Religion Conference, Baltimore |
“The Literary” in Tibet Through the Study of Recipes”
“Prose Narratives and Court Histories: The Royal Genealogy of Dergé(Sde dge rgyal rabs)”
Literature, Art, and Institution: Religious Studies Collaborations in Bhutan
November 12, 2013 | Yale University |
Speakers: Edward R. Cook, Timothy Gregoire, Andrew Quintman, Mark Turin and Tshering Yangzom
- Edward R. Cook, Ewing Research Professor and Director, Tree-Ring Laboratory, Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory
- Timothy Gregoire, J. P. Weyerhaeuser, Jr., Professor of Forest Management
- Andrew Quintman, Assistant Professor of Religious Studies
- Mark Turin, Program Director of the Yale Himalaya Initiative
- Tshering Yangzom, Program Officer for the Bhutan Foundation
Śākyamuni in the Service of Jo nang: Tāranāta’s Jo…
July 25, 2013 | International Association of Tibetan Studies 2013 | Ulaanbaatar, Mongola |
Life of the Buddha at Jonang Monastery: Literature, Art,…
April 29, 2013 | Newark Museum of Art |
Annual Tibetan Collection Lecture