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.

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.   

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

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”

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

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

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?

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.

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

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.

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.”

Asian Borderlands Research Network

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 

Self and Religious Subjectivities

April 5–6, 2014 | Yale University |

Self and Religious Subjectivities  (panel discussant)

Modern South Asia Workshop, 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)”

Śākyamuni in the Service of Jo nang: Tāranāta’s Jo…

July 25, 2013 | International Association of Tibetan Studies 2013 | Ulaanbaatar, Mongola |

Himalayan Connections: Disciplines, Geographies, Trajectories

March 9-10, 2013 | Yale University |

An interdisciplinary workshop on the intersections of Himalayan studies.

Organized by Andrew Quintman & Sara Shneiderman