Dharamshala, 15th July: The Buddha is reported to have given 84,000 teachings. The Tibetan Buddhist canon is more than 230,000 pages lengthy in total. A global push to translate it all into English dubbed a “100-year project,” has already been ongoing for some years. That effort now has a new partner to help them get closer to the finish line: UC Santa Barbara. The Buddhist Texts Translation Initiative at UCSB[University of California Santa Barbara] is a collaboration between the university’s Buddhist Studies program and the nonprofit 84000: Translating the Words of the Buddha. It’s a massive undertaking with far-reaching global implications.
Translation of Tibetan texts, including scriptures, has been central to student training at UCSB, according to Cabezón. Indeed, several UCSB students have already published translations that can be found in the 84000 Reading Room, with more on the way. The new agreement formalizes the campus’s already strong relationships with 84000 and offers to fund the training of a new generation of translators whose work is anchored in the academic study of Buddhism and rigorous research of classical texts.
UCSB’s Department of Religious Studies founded more than a half-century ago, is widely regarded as one of the best in the country. The department stresses the study of religion in various worldwide contexts, embracing multidisciplinary approaches to understanding religions around the world. One of the department’s key strengths is the study of Buddhism.
The achievement of 84000’s grand ambition of making the 231,000-plus pages of the Tibetan Buddhist Canon available to the Western world is contingent on a continual stream of skilled translators, scholars, and teachers of the living tradition. This collaboration supplements that work and emphasizes the organization’s commitment to assuring the availability of a legion of qualified translators of classical Tibetan, Sanskrit, and classical Chinese now and in the future.
As visiting scholars, the initiative will welcome two editors from 84000: Nathaniel Rich, who earned his Ph.D. at UCSB with an academic focus on the intellectual and institutional history of Tibetan Buddhism’s Nyingma tradition, and Rory Lindsay, an assistant professor of classical Tibetan at the University of Toronto who conducts research on the Tibetan Buddhist canon. Rich and Lindsay will collaborate closely with Cabezón and Wallace to plan and implement a variety of public lectures and workshops that promote the study of canonical Buddhist literature.
The initiative will fund students working on 84000 translation projects as well as programming that analyses and enriches Buddhist text translation from historical, theoretical, and practical viewpoints.
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