October 2-5, 2014 | Keystone, Colorado, USA

Keynote | Room: Castle Peak | 9:00am, October 4, 2014

Translation and Transmission Conferencewith Janet Gyatso

Janet Gyatso(Harvard University)

Janet Gyatso (BA, MA, PhD, University of California at Berkeley) is a specialist in Buddhist studies with concentration on Tibetan and South Asian cultural and intellectual history. Her books include Apparitions of the Self: The Secret Au-tobiographies of a Tibetan Visionary; In the Mirror of Memory: Reflections on Mindfulness and Remembrance in Indi-an and Tibetan Buddhism; and Women of Tibet. She has recently completed a new book, Being Human in a Buddhist World: An Intellectual History of Med-icine in Early Modern Tibet, which fo-cuses upon alternative early modernities and the conjunctions and disjunctures between religious and scientific episte-mologies in Tibetan medicine in the six-teenth–eighteenth centuries.

Janet Gyatso’s Presentation

TRANSCRIPT Janet Gyatso Keynote

Translation & Transmission Conference 9:00 AM, October 4th, 2014

Introduction by Holly Gayley:

This morning we are moving on from the topic of translation to transmission. And then on our final day, tomorrow, we will put them together and talk about translation and transmission, though there are so many overlaps, I’m sure that we will already start this today. It’s my pleasure and honor to introduce Janet Gyatso, who is the Hershey Professor of Buddhist Studies at Harvard University and also the Associate Dean of the Divinity School.

Janet has been a pioneer in Tibetan Studies in so many ways starting with her early work on Terma and opening that area up to the inquiry of other scholars and to the general public. She is probably best known for her pioneering and groundbreaking work on autobiography with the publication of Apparitions of the Self. I sort of think of that, a little bit like opening a sbas yul [hidden land], that she opened the door for this incredible subfield in Tibetan studies to suddenly take off and flourish, and now it really is a thriving area of inquiry and translation. She is also now doing something similar for the field of Tibetan medicine. Her book that will be coming out soon, Being Human in a Buddhist World, explores the role of medicine and also questions of early modernity in Tibet. Throughout all of this she has had a sustained interest in gender, in all these different domains, and of course is co-editor of an anthology on Women in Tibet. She has been a generous mentor to many and is a wonderful scholar to read Tibetan texts with, one of the real leading thinkers and theorists, I would say, among scholars of Tibetan studies. Please join me in welcoming Janet Gyatso!

Janet Gyatso:

Thank you very much, and thank you Holly for the very kind introduction. I want to thank Tsadra and all of the organizers for inviting me. This is a really interesting conference, and I am really glad to be here in this, in some ways, historic moment of scholars and practitioners, scholar-practitioners, practitioner-scholars, getting together and recognizing all the multiple connections that we have with each other and attempting to forge a conversation, which is really great. I’ll also say, for me, it is seeing so many people from a long time ago, I feel like my life is flashing before my eyes and I’m just worried that I shouldn’t die right after this conference! But, it is really a pleasure to be here, to be part of this, and I just wanted to pay homage to the surroundings and the weather, it is just unbelievable outside today, the ground, the zhi, the whatever.

And, maybe I didn’t read carefully enough my instructions, but my talk will be both about translation and transmission, maybe a little bit more about transmission. I want to start off very much responding to many of the things that were said yesterday; a lot of interesting ideas came up that there is a lot more for all of us to talk about. I’ll add to something a lot of people were already saying about how translation is a very special pleasure and in my case definitely really the most pleasurable thing that I do in the field. Why that is, is maybe not so much of a mystery. I am both talking about oral translation and textual translation. Oral translation in particular, I thought that Catherine Dalton’s comments yesterday about becoming invisible—also what goes along with that, there is the very special pleasure when you put yourself aside and you are listening to what the teacher is saying, there is a way in which you are merging with the teacher’s ideas, the teacher’s being, the teacher’s way of talking, and it is really a great chance to get very close to the teacher; you are really speaking for the teacher. That in itself is such a relief. Like, not to be me, and to speak someone else’s words, especially someone really amazing. That is really great.

Textual translation too is a great pleasure and a great privilege. I think it is not so much, I feel, a moment of intimacy with the author, but with the text itself: listening to the text, letting the text speak to you. Of the many interesting issues that Prof. Bellos brought up yesterday, one of them was about the question of why we have these foreign terms, xenisms, in our translations. He mentioned a few reasons, but one thing I don’t think he mentioned was that it is sometimes the case where we actually know what a term means, say in Tibetan, we understand it very well, but we can’t find an English word that captures all the resonances or even the proper resonances, and we feel it is just better to leave the word in the original language. I’ve always tried as much as possible to translate terms because they are so interesting.

One example, harking back to my own experiences translating the life story of Jigme Lingpa, there is a term: nyam-ur,1 which literally means experience and—actually ur is a hard word to translate, it is like an onomatopoetic word for something intensifying. For what exactly it means, I remember being with Khenpo Palden Sherab, who was extremely generous with me and we read the whole text together, and I had a long period translating texts with him. I remember trying to pin him down, what exactly does nyam-ur mean, and what are the linguistic parts? And in other, many other contexts trying to pin down the grammar, the syntax, why does he put these words in exactly the way that he does? And there was a moment of humor and laughter when we realized the topic that we were talking about was some kind of really—you know, Jigme Lingpa is talking about spacing out into the unarticulated emptiness where everything is all the same, and there is no language at all, and this is just a space of experience. And I am saying, wait a minute, I want to get the exact meaning of this exact word! And he is saying, that’s really not the spirit of what you are translating! But I felt I needed to get the words as close to the metaphors of the original text as possible, and to convey that extra-linguistic experience that it was trying to convey. So it is a very

1 Wyl. nyams ‘ur

hard task and I certainly agree with what many people said yesterday about translation certainly being an art. And maybe that’s one of the great pleasures of it too: it is a very artistic thing, it is a very creative act.

Anyway, my talk today is going to be on the topics of translation and transmission, and maybe framed in the larger category of tradition, which I am not actually gonna talk about so much, but is certainly tradition in the sense of preserving or transmitting something from the past to another place, and what is entailed with all of those things. And maybe also, I’ll be gesturing to issues about some of our assumptions about authenticity—a lot of people yesterday were talking about getting something right—and also about authority, getting it right, getting it good. I will be talking both out of certain categories that come out of Tibetan and Buddhist history more generally, and I will be mixing them with some of my own thoughts where I am trying to carry what these things mean a little bit further.

What is transmission really? And how does transmission relate to the act of translation? How do you get transmission? I also want to try to talk about what some of these things might mean outside of the ritual context, the specific, even Tibetan context. How do we generalize a notion of transmission that might, in fact, be relevant to people who are translating texts completely different from Tibetan Buddhism and so on? Might some of what Tibetans say about transmission and also what we experience as part of the act of translation, how that might have something to contribute to a larger question about translation more generally in the humanities, let’s say?

Transmission of knowledge. I want to say transmission of knowledge is—and I shy away from the word “intention” for reasons I tried to begin to talk about yesterday—but, I think of knowledge more as a kind of space: a certain space, a certain orientation, perhaps even a certain desire. I think it is important how we conceptualize what it is that is being transmitted. Also, the relationship between the linguistic dimensions of what is being transmitted and the extra-linguistic dimensions, and how those two things relate to each other.

There is also certainly something very important about time. Transmission is a very Janus-faced kind of phenomena where it is looking both to the past—this is where tradition comes in, something that you are maybe receiving from the past—and also passing on to the future. So it is going in two directions. And that is also of course true of translation. Translation is also taking a text that is pre-existent and giving it to the future. I really want to say that translation is really a subtype of transmission. In a certain sense, translation is a more limited phenomena because it is very much dealing specifically with words and the transformation of those words into another form. And maybe, in a certain sense, translation is more oriented toward the future than it is to the past, although certainly issues of the past come in.

I will also note that there is a lot more that Tibetan Buddhism says about transmission than about translation. Transmission is very much about the whole relationship between guru and

disciple. Transmission is very fundamental to the primary presumptions about what education entails altogether, what it means to learn. What we find in Tibetan texts about translation is far more limited. It is very interesting, and I will talk about it a little bit, but it comes up mostly in very specialized contexts of translating from one language to another especially in the context of canonical translation. Whereas transmission you might say is also about translating the content of the canon. It does relate to the canon, to the degree that the canon is understood to be Buddha-word or Buddha-realization or enlightenment, but again it is not always in a word to word way but it also entails a kind of reckoning with a deep meaning, or deep content.

Anyways these are just very general concepts. I’m going to go through a couple of sets of categories and just think about what some of them mean.

For example, there is a common three-fold set of terms, which are not invented in Tibet but are found in Indian Buddhism especially Mahāyāna Buddhist sutra tradition, which is related to the whole issue at hand having to do with the nature of Buddha-word or buddhavacana, three ways that buddhavacana is created. Here, the whole question of how buddhavacana actually comes into existence, and the whole issue of the authorial “intention” or not and so on is very relevant. There are three kinds of Buddha-word: through mouth, through blessing or inspiration, and through permission.

What does mouth mean? Mouth means in particular, what the Buddha spoke through his mouth, so to speak. It is just a simple idea of how the actual human Buddha spoke himself out of his mouth to others.

Then there is also this idea of blessing or inspiration. Often it’s the case you see in the Buddhist sutras that the Buddha is actually sitting there, the Buddha goes into meditation and somebody else speaks. It is actually specifically out of the blessing or the inspiration, sometimes the word pratibhāna or some version thereof is used, where omeone else actually speaks the scripture. This is so, for example in the Heart Sutra where it is actually spoken by Avalokiteśvara. There already you have interesting issues that come up. What does it mean for the Buddha to be inspiring the other person, and the other person is like a mouth piece and speaks it? Maybe a kind of translation is already happening because what you get from the Buddha, it seems, is not the words themselves, Avalokiteśvara is making up the words out of this inspiration. What does that mean?

Finally, there is this notion of permission, which is a little more distant from the Buddha: the Buddha gave somebody permission to preach, or the Buddha told someone else that he should teach (it is usually a he) a particular text. Permission is a very key term, and I want to return to that in a little while in my comments.

Let me go through another set of such categories. This is a common trio in Tibetan Buddhism; I don’t know of it in Sanskrit Indian Buddhism, in India Tantra, the trio of wang, lung,

and ṭri.2 This is very squarely about transmission per se. Wang is abhiṣeka, the ritual initiation, and it is usually in this order: you get the wang first (I think some of you might argue with me on this), you get the ritual abhiseka, and then you get a lung, which is a really interesting thing that I believe Tibetans made up. There is this idea that you need to have the whole text read to you. Usually the lama will do it, there is a group of students there, and he goes really really fast through this text, and you are kind of sitting there and wondering, “What is going on?” and “Why am I doing this?” He is going rurururururu... rurururururu... [reading very fast], but you are getting the lung. And then, ṭri is the explanation, so that of course makes a lot of sense. So when he is doing the lung you can’t hear what he is saying, even if you are a completely native speaker and you know this tradition very well; he is going too fast. But ṭri is when they slow down and give you the explanation.

What is going on in that context of lung? That is what I want to focus on just for a second. I think it is something about being there. I think lung has a great deal to do with permission. It is like you have been dragged over—not the coals—but you have been dragged over the words. You and the lama together have either spoken or heard the word together, each of the words, and it kind of gives you the key. You are now allowed to read this. So there is something about permission, and it is really about the fact of being there. It is not really what you are getting in a certain way. Anyway, it is something to think about, let me keep it out there as a question, what is going on in lung?

So for a larger question, all of these kinds of transmission, many people get. Usually there are a lot of people at a wang, often many many people. There are many people at a lung, many people at a ṭri, and I was just wondering what is the difference between the different ways that different people receive transmission? How do we know when transmission has really occurred or that transmission is successful? Whatever that might mean. Is everyone in the room receiving the transmission in the same way? In other words, is it merely that you have to go through the ritual, and as long as you have been there, even if you haven’t been concentrating, that you have gotten the transmission? Or not?

We do read a lot of stories in Tibetan Buddhist biography, hagiography about very special moments of transmission, when somebody, like I think in the story of Machig Labdrön she is getting a transmission, I believe it is a wang, and she flies out in the middle, and she doesn’t need to hear the rest, she got it. So that is clearly a story that her transmission was clearly superior to everyone else who was there. But what is really going on in that?

Sometimes we also read in tantric sources of a kind of physiological––from the tantric perspective––description of what actually happens in transmission. There is something about the tantric channels, and the thigles,3 and the cakras, or certain kinds of bodily experiences or visions. That is what I think is really interesting and curious. How is it the case that when you are in a room

2 Wyl. dbang, lung, khrid 3 Wyl. thig le

and the lama is saying something, or showing you something, or even just looking at you, or clunking something on the top of your head, that it actually changes your physiology, your substances in your body, or your very experience or maybe the actual structure of your inner subtle body? How does that happen? How do words or some sort of action in your relation to another person affects you so deeply? I think that is a really interesting question.

I am not going to answer these questions I’m just going to raise them.

Another trio, I think this is the last one I have here, a really interesting one, comes from Nyingma sources in general. It is also an account of the formulation or creation of Buddha-word, and it is also about types of transmission. The first one is mind-to-mind transmission, called the gyalwa gongyü4 in Tibetan. The second is the so called, “transmission in symbols,” rigdzin daigyü.5 The third is “into the ears of people,” gangzak nyen khung gi gyüpa.6

So the mind-to-mind transmission is said to be a totally direct and unmediated transmission. The things that are said about it are that in mind-to-mind transmission, there is no difference between the teacher and the disciple. They are exactly the same. They have the same realization, but it is just something that is continually happening. That alone is again a really interesting idea. Why do they bother to call that transmission? If you have two people, but they are exactly the same. Why does it have to be transmission between them? Just one of my many questions.

The second one, the transmission in symbols, this is all kinds of things and also really fascinating. Everything from showing you an object, for example a mirror, which is not just any object. Someone flashes a mirror and obviously you see yourself in the mirror, and then you realize some really important thing. Or it might be a gesture that the teacher does towards you, or even like a glance, a special kind of glace. There are lots of stories of the siddhas, it is not only in the sort of conventional ritual context. But you’re walking in the market and some ḍākinī of some kind sees you and goes like that [makes a gesture], and then you get the whole transmission. It can be linguistic, but it’s usually a very short and pithy phrase like, “You’re an idiot!” or something. Or something like, “Practice hard!” something that just strikes you. Sometimes it’s bird-talk, a lot of stories in the Nyingma tradition talk about some bird comes and says just “quack quack quack,” but for you, you are actually getting this transmission.

The third one, “into the ears of people,” refers to when a teaching is actually conveyed in full-fledged linguistic form, so when you tell, or write, or give a full-fledged teaching in the way that it would be encoded then in the text of buddhavacana.

4 Wyl. rgyal ba dgongs rgyud 5 Wyl. rig ‘dzin brda’i rgyud 6 Wyl. ̌gang zag snyan khung gi brgyud pa

In each case, you would say that there is a kind of translation going on in this transmission, but the closer that it gets to the word-by-word, I would say, the more mundane and clumsy it is, the less effective in a certain way, the less immediate, the more mediated, the less bodily, or mind-bodily, and the more linguistic. And so here we have to wonder if translation of text is something that we understand as a totally linguistic activity, but at the same time it demands transmission. There is some way in which you need to have, in some sense, a transmission. Or, you need to have, in some way, taken up the text in some profound way in order to be able to translate it you ought to understand it at least. How does that non-linguistic form that this scheme is holding out, how is that translated into words? What is the bridge? What is the pathway from this completely, explicitly non-linguistic form of realization into words? This is again, something that bears thought.

I think that at least one clue is in these descriptions of these three kinds of transmission, especially in the first one. Conceiving of this “mind-to-mind transmission” as a transmission, I think that one of the things that they are saying—this is just a thought that I have had for a very long time—is that there is some kind of idea that experience itself, enlightened experience itself, or knowledge, or whatever that is, is fundamentally communicative. There is something about knowledge that is always in process. It is not static. I could build a big argument about this from the perspective of compassion. Bob Thurman yesterday was citing the really great passage from Vimalakīrti where Śāriputra can’t talk, and the Goddess tells him, “You idiot, you have to talk!” You always have to be talking, and even Vimalakīrti’s great silence is itself a form of communication. You have to be transmitting. It is even beyond compassion. There is something in the very nature of knowledge that has to be transmitted. I think that is really important, and I would also add that there is something in the very nature of knowledge or experience that has permission in it. Or, at least the potential of translation. It is there to be translated.

I want to also dwell on the symbolic for a moment. Why is that such a key moment in the accounts of the formulation of Buddha-word? I would say that this symbolic form of transmission is mediated but only slightly. It is kind of an effort to get away from the mediation or give as little mediation as possible. But it is really important for the question I raised before of how does this completely non-linguistic experience get translated into something mediated? How does immediate get translated into something mediated? The symbolic transmission has something that kind of has its foot in both worlds, so to speak. It is almost as if you don’t want to say anything at all, but you want to say something, but it is going to be minimal.

This is also a very fruitful place to think about how this relates to more general experience, not only in the Tibetan Buddhist context, but in a very general human way. For example, do we just as people, in general, have a special liking or a special use of the subtle nudge, the raised eyebrow over the explicit propositional sentence? Is there something really nice about that? I actually can’t do that, like raise one eyebrow, but those who can do that it’s really great.

One thing we can say, what’s so nice about that is it’s very intimate, it goes from one person to another who both already have had some kind of deep understanding between them. It often happens in a case where the explicit utterance would be inappropriate either because you want to communicate something privately to someone in a crowded room where you don’t want everyone else to hear. So it is only between the two of you. Or, it may just be in a context where there is a lot of other stuff going on and for you to say something would be inappropriate because someone else is speaking.

I think it also just happens in general when there are moments in our lives when talking, in a sense, breaches intimacy. There is something about, you don’t want to talk in very very intimate moments. And I think that we often strongly desire to have that kind of communication with someone else where words are not necessary at all, or perhaps where just one or two words do the trick. It’s kind of a relief. And it’s also, I’d say, highly pleasurable because exchanging a secret sign with a friend or speaking in code, or using abbreviations has a certain pleasure attached to it for some reason on its own.

For example, my post lady comes by and I yell out to her, “T.G.I.F!” (thank god it’s friday!) you know, and she laughs. She is laughing not only because of our shared pleasure that yes, we are really happy that it is Friday because Saturday is coming up and we don’t have to work, but it is also about the fact that we share this code, and the fact that we both know it. There is something really pleasurable about sharing with someone else in that context.

Anyway, what I am trying to say is I think those insights help us understand why this kind of symbolic communication was also so really important in these very esoteric tantric Tibetan communications. Alright, so I am going to leave that also out there; I’m putting out a lot of things and sort of leaving them.

I want to make now a second larger point, which has to do with the drive or the desire to transmit. This relates already to this point that I was making about the mind-to-mind transmission. From the beginning there is something about knowledge that wants to be communicated. I am going to give an example from my own book on Jigme Lingpa, which certainly was everything about translation and transmission, a very special moment in the visions of Jigme Lingpa when he has his first amazing vision of Longchenpa, Longchen Rabjampa. What this vision is about is both Jigme Lingpa’s desire to connect with Longchenpa, but also Longchenpa’s own desire to transmit to him. So I am reading my translation of Jigme Lingpa’s vision and his account of it. It says:

So when I first saw him, he was in good health, beautiful in the dress of the three dharma robes. If one were to look at him as if he were a Buddha, it would not be inappropriate. And I distinctly heard the sound of him praying, and he was saying, “May the heart mind continuum of the meaning to be expressed be transferred to you! May it be transferred to you!”

Actually already in that, you have this whole heart-mind continuum, which I won’t get into, and then the meaning to be expressed. But he is saying may that get to you. And he says:

May the transmission of the words that express be completed! May it be completed!

So that is the end of his quote. And at the end Jigme Lingpa says:

At that such unbearable faith and veneration arose in me that I was as if about to faint. Having no time to do prostrations I grasped together the lama’s two hands and I placed them as a diadem on my great bliss cakra at the top of my head. And I said to him Know! O omniscient dharma king! Lama Khyeno! I beseeched him almost fainting with veneration. And to me he said, “In later times, someone saying that will come!

So he hears Longchenpa saying that and he says:

I understood that Longchenpa was complaining because as he said in this text called the Khamdu Metok Trengwa...7

...which I translated as, Congestion with a Rosary of Flowers. It is a particular work written by Longchenpa...

As he said there, there were beings low in merit during the time that he actually was alive who had lacked faith and devotion. Due to the force of their perpetrating much perversity, his heart had become dejected. And so I said to him, Remembering your kindness and teaching and benefit beings in your dzöd dun,8 and all of your nyintik9 treasures, I continually am in veneration of your great qualities, equal to those of a real buddha indeed.

So he is hearing Lonchenpa complaining that his message never got across because he didn’t have the right disciples, and Jigme Lingpa is trying to comfort him. He is saying, well you know, I have read all of your works; this is the sort of thing you can imagine when know one ever reads your books, so many life times ahead, I read it, and it really meant a lot to me! And so he is comforting Lonchenpa, don’t worry, there are people who read your books! And when he says that to Longchenpa, Lonchenpa says to him,

Oh noble son, just now the understanding of the continuum of the meaning has been transferred to you. The transmission has just taken place. So implant a life set in practice and teach widely to fortunate ones, and by the way, your songs come forth extremely well.

7 Wyl. kham du [?] me tog phreng ba 8 Wyl. mdzod bdun 9 Wyl. snying thig

So he praises him, that was nice,

And as he was saying that I, Jigme Lingpa, thought to ask for more teachings, but the vision of his body sunk into space like an optical illusion.

And so he was gone, bam! It is really a kind of amazing vision, and it is really about Longchenpa wanting to give transmission. And what was missing in his life? What is missing is portrayed in terms of kind of life issues. It is not some esoteric account of getting the meaning that causes some kind of experience of rigpa or something like that. It is more about just having disciples who are good people, something that makes you happy.

I want to take this moment to talk about this from a really striking account about the nature of autobiography because this relates to Longchepa’s concerns about his life and whether his life had meaning. Again, I am thinking of about how Bob Thurman’s talk last night was really very touching talking about his life being that he failed, but he still has hope, that we will continue to carry out his ideas. It is a really important thing, thinking back on your life.

I am going to look very briefly at a work by Jacque Derrida, which is an analysis of Ecce Homo by Nietzche, so that is Nietzche’s autobiography. He brings to the fore with this idea that is very relevant with what I am trying to get at, which is something he calls a completion of contract. Let me just read what he says, this is a little bit arcane, but let me just go through a few lines from this. Derrida says:

He never knows in the present with present knowledge whether anyone will ever honor the inordinate credit that he extends to himself in his name, but also necessarily in the name of another.

Now the thing about the name of another, I am going to have to skip, but he says:

The consequences of this are not difficult to perceive. If the life that he lives and tells to himself [autobiography they call it] cannot be his life in the first place, except as the effect of a secret contract, a credit account which has been both opened and encrypted.

This sort of does sound like the terma tradition.

...a credit account which has been opened and encrypted, and indebtedness and alliance, then as long as this contract has not been honored, and it can only be honored by another, for example by you. If this credit account that he has opened has not been honored by someone else, then his life is a mere pretense, his life doesn’t in fact totally take place.

I am translating that back into the Tibetan context. Something about knowledge or enlightenment is a kind of contract that you take out with others that you need others to receive. You need it to be received by another in order for the contract to be completed.

Jeremi Plazas� 10/27/14 10:39 AMComment [1]: Not this word. Can’t figure out what though.

It is the genius of Jigme Lingpa to realize that he had to comfort Longchenpa. Also this kind of remarkable dimension of that vision that Jigme Lingpa has is of the time disparity. He is seeing Longchenpa in the past, and even while Jigme Lingpa is there in the future trying to sort of make contact with him, and he is saying, Hi Longchenpa, I am here! ..and you are great, Hi! and Longchenpa says, in later times someone saying that will appear. It is as if he is hearing an echo in the future of something that is going to happen, and he is taking comfort from that. It is as if they are not connecting, until again, Jigme Lingpa puts his hand on his head and says, I’m here, I’m here! and then somehow that transmission happens. It is actually in that desire of connection between these two human beings.

I am now going to skip a little bit of what I have planned here because I really want to have enough time to talk about some of these ideas.

Let me bring up one final issue, or one set of categories as ways to think about some of the issues that are important both to translation and transmission. These are just my general categories, which is the distinction but also the inter-connection between communicativeness and receptivity.

I was really struck by what Professor Bellos said yesterday when he was talking about the adaptive translation, that kind of translation that is both trying to receive and represent what the text itself says, but also really wants to sort of transform itself into the idiom of the target audience. He says that especially in the case of the adaptive translation, it has a lot to do with reading and writing practices as well: the ability to read well and the ability to write well. He actually was talking about the material conditions a long time ago and the way that people translated, but I think it also has something to do with the actual capabilities of the translator. It is very very important to be a really good reader, and also to be a really good writer, to know what formulating teachings, what formulating ideas, what communicating is all about: issues about language skills, the ability to come up with words that are appropriate in a particular context that are really precisely targeted for another person, the ability to see what another person needs to hear, and to sort of pull out the air those words that the person needs to hear, that is the whole general notion of men-ngak,10 or the special kind of instruction, the idea of inspiration that I already spoke about, being in touch with a kind of inspiration that will inform the way that you are articulating particular Buddhist teachings, also the ability, which I think is very much tied to the formulation of Buddha-speech, this notion of emanation or nirmaṇa; it is not only about what you say but how you present your body to others, and bodhisattvas or other high teachers who are able to kind of change their bodies to look in a certain way.

I am sort of halting here because I realize time is running out and I have a whole bunch of other things to say. I am actually going to skip a bunch of stuff. I am going to go to one last thing and I really want us to talk about this, and I can give you the full version later. 10 Wyl. man ngag

On the other side of communicativeness, what is involved in receptivity? So let me just end on this idea. You can get a lot of ideas from various sources in Buddhist theory or Buddhist ideas about how one cultivates receptivity, how one cultivates the ability to hear what is being communicated, take it in, and then somehow translate it and give it to someone else. Certainly we read lots of works on attention, faith, the whole idea of being an empty vessel, not being filled up so you have room to receive. There is a really interesting idea that I’m taking from Theravada Abhidharma, actually in Buddhaghoṣa, a really interesting idea called kaya-vidñapti and vac-vidñapti,11 which has to do not with the usual vidñapti we hear about in Yogācāra kinds of ideas, but how to read someone else’s body and how to read someone else’s speech, how to see in the very gestures what they are communicating and how to hear in their voice, even before they say something, what they are going to say, so being very attuned to very minute and finely grained signals that you are getting from the teacher.

This goes back to what I was saying about the act of oral translation when you are there in the presence of the teacher, itself, it becomes particularly relevant. I think something also about the puzzle that I raised about how does what the teacher say translate into not only your own experience but even your physiology or your actual physical make up? Something about receiving or modeling the actual bodily being of the teacher.

Here I am going to give you an example from Tibetan medicine, which I found very striking, a very well developed tradition in the Tibetan world that takes a lot from Buddhism but also has its own ideas about a lot of things, which are a little bit different perhaps than the Buddhist context. But certainly the idea of mengak is really important in medicine as well. Mengak is really important because it’s how the teacher conveys to you how to perform operations, how to do surgical procedures, how to massage, techniques, certainly taking pulse. A lot of that is a kind of bodily knowledge that has to be conveyed in a variety of means, verbally but also through demonstration, and how important that is. One of the pieces of advice that they give to the student of medicine, just reading from a translation of the early texts on the physicians medical education it says:

If the teachers mind is small, then make your own thoughts small. If his is big, make yours big. If he has big desires, or if he likes farming, or if he likes to fight, or if he likes the dharma, or if he likes to play, and so on [so whatever]. Whatever sort of behavior and orientation [a really interesting word by the way, “orientation”] that the teacher has, by whatever means there is to please him, and in whatever order, you should follow suit and respect him.

So in other words they are saying, if he likes to fight, you should like to fight. If he likes the dharma, you should like the dharma. Something about actually becoming the teacher, I think is maybe a key to the ways that this knowledge that is being transmitted to us is being then appropriated and really naturalized in our own very bodily way of being and experience, which I think is a very important

11 Transliteration spelling unknown.

skill, as hard as it might be, it is not something completely out of reach, something we do have access to, and maybe that is what I want to put out on the table about translation and transmission. Thank you.

Question and Answer:

Question One:

So thank you very much for that wonderful talk. I’d like to share some of my experience with this whole issue of transmission because maybe it will help to, a little bit, de-mythicize. Because transmission is certainly not an act of the teacher throwing a football to you, and you catch it, and you know, now I’ve got it. It is a dependently-arising phenomenon as we all know from our Buddhist teachings. One of my great teachers was Yongzin Ling Rinpoche the late senior tutor of His Holiness, and in terms of some type of transmission, I don’t know if you would call it transmission, but the experiences that I had with him particularly in the very very early stages when I was still learning spoken Tibetan and studied written Tibetan at Harvard. When you were in his presence he had such clarity that it gave you clarity, and even though with other people that I met, other teachers that I met that I might not have had that same type of connection, with him because of that clarity I could understand what he was saying. So is that a transmission? I don’t know.

Or when he was teaching one thing that struck me very much, was he was giving an explanation, an initiation-explanation of Vajrabhairava, Yamāntaka, and he would just point around him to the various features of the palace that he was describing because obviously he could see it, and this was something that was tremendously inspiring that I could see the maṇḍala, but it is also a type of transmission in a sense by a type of gesture.

There is another type of experience, which is in terms of permission in a sense. Another of my great teachers, Tsenzhab Serkong Rinpoche, who I was an interpreter for and was very very close to him for about nine years, he would teach, and he would teach for maybe an hour or two hours, something like that, and I would be interpreting, and then he would say to me, “Now you summarize for all the students everything that I said!” You know, in terms of the teaching he was giving. So is that a transmission? Is it an authorization? Is it a permission? or is it a training for someone to be a teacher themselves? So all of these things get mixed together.

And in terms of an oral transmission, I believe this arose in India with the whole situation of nothing having been written down, and in order for any teaching or scriptural source to be passed on you had to hear it, and so you have thö jyung sherab,12 the discriminating awareness that comes from hearing. And so you had to be absolutely certain what the words were, and so for that reason you had to listen to them, and so the tradition of lung arose from that.

12 Wyl thos byung shes rab

Now what I had always thought early on, naively I suppose, was that there was some sort of tremendous understanding and so on, that was given along with a lung. But then the situation arose that my teacher Tsenzhab Serkong Rinpoche had received from his father who was a tremendous Kālacakra yogi and incredible figure who had a vision of Tsongkhapa of Drange Lekshe Nyingpo and had a special transmission of that, that Serkong Rinpoche had and he gave to very few people. I received it. Now the young Serkong Rinpoche, the Tulku of that, wanted to get that transmission. I had never studied it. I didn’t know the text. I didn’t understand the text, but I asked His Holiness’s permission, His Holiness the Dalai Lama, to give the oral transmission to the young Serkong Rinpoche, which I did. So what actually is being transmitted? This is a very good question: what is being transmitted?

Janet Gyatso:

I appreciate you sharing that, and I just wanted to share a parallel story that you somehow reminded me of. Once being in Nepal at Shechen Monastery when Dilgo Khyentse Rinpoche was still alive, and being in one of these large monastic assemblies, all the lay people and white people were way at the back. And there was one moment when there was a row of very young monks amongst all the others, and there were these moments when they had their hats, big hats, on, and then they would take them off, and then they would put them on. But at one moment, two young monks were all excited about wearing the hats, and they were kind of talking and joking with each other but hadn’t realized that for everyone else in the room, it was time to take their hats off, and they still had their hats on. Dilgo Khyentse Rinpoche up on the stage kind of caught their eye. It was really great, and he goes to them [Janet Gyatso makes Rinpoche’s motioning gesture of taking off hat], and with his amazing smile actually, and that for me was like the greatest transmission; it was so immediate and beautiful, even more important than anything about the actual content of what they were talking about.

Question Two:

Thank you for your really interesting and insightful comments. I just wanted to pick up on a couple of points. One was your mentioning the pleasure and relief that can come about in the context of interpreting and not having to be yourself for a moment, and at the end you were speaking a little bit about this idea of becoming the teacher, and that reminded me of something that Lama Chönam said yesterday that I thought was so beautiful. We talk about translation as being something extremely complicated and complex, and it is. But also, I wrote down what I was trying to say because it is so beautiful and so simple. He said, “you become the speech of the teacher, that’s all.”

And I think that’s really important that we think about that aspect of when it really happens that you are able to actually communicate. In a sense that is exactly what is happening, you are

becoming the speech of the teacher, and that’s incredibly beautiful, and it is an incredible simple thing as well.

Janat Gyatso:

It is a great experience, yeah.

Question Two:

And the other thing I wanted to ask actually: you mentioned this question of extra linguistic communication of what is happening, what is being transmitted beyond the language, and I think about that a lot. Oral interpreting for a certain context, especially the context of stuff like the pointing out instructions, which I would feel absolutely incompetent and incapable of translating for were it not that my teacher puts me in the situation where I have to do it. But also part of what also gives me confidence is that I feel that a lot of what is actually being communicated doesn’t have anything to do with me, in that context specifically, that there is something very much extra-linguistic that is taking place, and I was wondering if you had any more comments toward that aspect or that topic.

Janat Gyatso:

Right, well I think I would answer both of them together. In one sense you are becoming the teacher, but in another sense you are not. You’re becoming the speech of the teacher, but you are speaking in a language that the teacher ostensibly doesn’t know, and to that degree you are yourself, and you know what that idioms are, you know what the resonances of any particular word are, and so what does it mean to not be yourself? What does it mean to not be yourself but speak in language—I mean short of the teacher being an enlightened buddha that actually knows English but is choosing not to speak English for some reason, I mean let’s set that aside. Let’s say that the teacher, the great teacher, doesn’t know English. You are using your knowledge. So there is something of “you” that’s there. Very much so.

And as I was speaking, I realize that I don’t want to actually say that any of that communication is extra-linguistic in some sort of profound way. I think to the degree that that very primal moment of mind-to-mind transmission is couched as a “transmission,” as a movement from one to another, it is already not linguistic in the usual sense that we think of, but it has some semiotics. Actually that is the word I am looking at. It is not fully non-linguistic, I am for a very long time influenced by people like Kris Deva who have wanted to say that there is no kind of experience or knowledge that is in some degree is semiotic. It has a kind of representation and the mere fact that it is moving from one to another, means that some translation is having to have happen, and so there is some language involved there.

Question Three:

Thank you for the wonderful talk, and I particularly really appreciated the point you made about rigdzin dai gyüpa as transmission: sort of simple as somehow having the feet on both sides of fully mediated and unmediated. It’s an interesting way of looking at this trio.

A couple of things: one is I would like to humbly let you know that the first trio does exist in Tibetan texts, the buddhavacana, the scriptures that are spoken by the Buddha.

Janet Gyatso:

Oh yeah...

Question Three:

Because you mentioned it not found in the Tibetan tradition, but in the Chinese Mahāyāna tradition. The first the trio.

Janet Gyatso:

It is in Tibetan, but Tibetans did not invent it. It is already in Indian Buddhism before it comes to Tibet.

Question Three:

Yes, but your reference was more to the Chinese tradition, but it doesn’t matter.

Janet Gyatso:

I didn’t say that. I know what I said.

Question Three:

Alright sorry, but it is in the Tibetan tradition coming from the Indian tradition, the three. But my question has more to do with language related questions. For example, when we were producing the Tibetan rendering of the title of this conference, we were struggling with the word, “transmission,” which me being a native Tibetan, if there is a word, I should automatically get it. So which means, it doesn’t exist in Tibetan. But on the other hand, the discourse on transmission is so wide spread when you think about Tibetan tradition, you know transmission of this transmission of that. But transmission as a verb, stand alone construct, seems to be problematic.

Janet Gyatso:

Gyüpa, “gyü” is not...

Question Three:

Well to gyüpa is to come through. But gyüpa as a noun is really kind of a lineage or... yeah, one could say gyüpa is a transmission. If you take “gyüpa” as a transmission, then it is the same as the lineage, the succession lineage.

Janet Gyatso:

Yes, they are related.

Quesition Three:

So the question I have is this: if you look at English translations of Tibetan text or lama’s teachings, I don’t read them much because I read in Tibetan, but the little that I read, when I look at it from the perspective of someone who is totally unexposed to the Tibetan world. There are words like “transmission” and so on that are riddled in the text, so I wonder to what extent we are using terms like this in a very specialized meaning without making the effort to somehow maintain the link to the larger context.

Janet Gyatso:

Which larger context?

Quesion Three:

For example, there is like a cultural transmission. So when two cultures come into contact, there is a cultural transmission going on, there is a lot of discussion about how knowledge gets transmitted. So this is a larger [idea]. So I was hoping that you would make a very specific discussion of the transmission in the context of Tibetan tradition to this larger idea of what transmission is. For example, what the cultural context is. Maybe that is a conversation tomorrow. So that is one question I wanted to ask you.

The second is, you know sometimes I worry when we talk about transmission, the student getting it, and lama giving it. There is sometimes sort of an unintended danger of reifying something, and I wonder if you have thought about that in a potential. What is it when you get it? And sometimes that kind of reification kind of gives you the license not to be critical. You know, you sort of stop there, and that also has its own sort of downside. So if have you thought about those? Thank you.

Janet Gyatso:

Yeah, well I completely agree with your issues. I actually think the word “transmission” does represent a major concept in Tibetan, but the way that we use the word “transmission” that is a very buzz-word in this context here. We all know what transmission means in a very particular way. I mean the larger English meaning of “transmission” of just moving something from one place to

another has taken on a very special meaning in the context of people who are practicing Tibetan Buddhism, which I think it is already trying to relate to a different kind of cultural context where different kinds of practices are already happening.

So we are, in some sense, cognizant of that cultural transmission as well, and that was also what I was trying to get at. Cultural transmission is one thing, a sort of huge topic, I was actually trying to talk about bodily transmission, which the way you hold your body, the way you gesture, the way you move, the way you talk, your attitude in talk, and your attitude in listening, that already packs in lots of cultural presumptions, and in fact, for me one of the most important things that I have ever learned is really how to listen. Learning what the meaning “lo las” or “la so”13 in Tibetan, which is like “yes sir,” “yes sir.” It doesn’t really mean “yes sir” it just means, I am taking what you are saying. It is not an attitude that I was used to growing up. In my household, which was like “Yeah you said that, but that’s wrong, that’s wrong, shut up, let me say my thing...” So that already is happening.

So what was the other thing? Reification. Well that is the whole point. It’s not reifiable because it is always in process. So that is part of the point that I am trying to make, is that if knowledge is always in process, it is always looking for a recipient. It is always looking for communication. Something has to happen and therefore it has to keep changing. And like we were talking about with Catherine about this idea of it’s not being you, but in a certain sense it is you. You need to have a critical sort of capacity to translate well. And you are going to be changing it. There is no way for that not to happen, but that’s nothing that anybody ever expected not to be the case.

Question Four:

I just wanted to ask if you could please share with particularly the junior or aspiring translators the personal practices, be they dharmic or very mundane, which have helped you to become a person of great diligence and insight, so that we could sort of become like you. Transmit now! [Sci-fi sound effects] [Laughter].

I made a joke, but I am totally not joking!

Janet Gyatso:

I don’t know, ha ha! Okay, you know, the only thing that I can say is I do believe that there is a really important cultivation of attention in hearing what other people are saying. I don’t know, it is nothing about me, but it is something some people are better at doing than others. Some people, when you talk to someone else you sort of see the expression on their face you understand what they need and you kind of get what their emotional sort of meaning is that they are trying to convey to

13 Wyl, lags so

you, and lots of times we don’t do that because we are so caught up in our own head and our own ideas and desires. And so the more that we can cultivate the ability to pick up cues, sort of shut our own self up a little bit and listen to others... you see amazing things. The closer you look, the more amazing it gets. And I’m not sure how diligent I am or inside I am not a diligent person. I am a crazy person, so that’s... [laugher].

Question Five:

Hi, I really appreciate the speaking on transmission, and I think maybe I would love to hear the part you skipped in your talk, but we will have to do that later. I really want to bring it back to the level of translation, and I work on Prajñāpāramitā, the eight thousand line at the moment, I’ve had the explanations, I’ve had the commentators telling me what it means, and it was all in my mind originally about how do I understand the meanings in order to be able to translate them, put them in my own words. And while I was reading it—this is going back to your idea of bodily communication, something else that is being communicated, but actually I just have the text in front of me with a lot of other words to supply. And while I was reading the text I started to realize that within the text there are other things that are going on. Sort of like, for instance, an example would be when he is comparing the merit earned by building stupas to the merit earned by writing out Prajñāpāramitā, he doesn’t just say, “it’s a million times more, it’s a billion times more”, they repeat the entire page of paragraph, word for word, that goes through all these things, and then he comes to the next point and yet the only change is he goes from a million to a billion, and then you repeat again. At first I was feeling like, who is going to read this? Who is going to listen to this? Because again: words, listen, read. But, I started to get exhausted myself, and this exhaustion was very clear to me as an effect of that literary style.

Janet Gyatso:

Which literary style of the text?

Question Five:

Of repetition, it was inconceivable, but if he just told me it’s inconceivable, it wouldn’t have a punch line. You know, it is like a joke you have to bring somebody through it. I had to have my mind blown by going over it and over it and this is just a very simple example. I started to pick up on the fact that every chapter had its own joke, its own set up, and its own punchline.

Janet Gyatso:

I am sure that’s true.

Question Five:

And it was doing its own thing, and so I started to learn that because of my respect for the text, I didn’t just say this as a ramble. This is rambling, this is not said as well as it could be said. That’s what Conze did, he eliminated five pages and he said, “...neither a billion, ...neither a trillion” he just took that out.

Janet Gyatso:

That’s often done.

Question Five:

So I’ve been hearing this because of working in this highly esoteric text. I’ve been hearing this thing, which is sort of the prioritizing of meaning even within words, and truth value even, but there is something to the effect of words that also is related to this transmission/translation quality. And then, everyone knows that it is very difficult to translate a joke into another language, especially one that centers around words, and when I am translating the Prajñāpāramitā Sutra, I am sitting there thinking: first of all, what is the joke? And then trying to get the joke, in Sanskrit, and then trying to think of how I can make that joke in English.

Janet Gyatso:

Stop thinking about all that stuff, just relax.

Question Five:

You say that, but I feel if I’m not trying to find a way to translate the joke, then I am just translating the words.

Janet Gyatso:

But if you are too worried that you can’t make a joke so that’s part of the problem.

Question Five:

Explaining a joke doesn’t make it funny.

Janet Gyatso:

That’s right exactly.

Question Five:

This is a question of transmission, is it really when we are translating these various genres are we able to transmit them in our culture by just translating words? That’s the question.

Janet Gyatso:

Well no, I completely agree with you, and it is part of what I was trying to get at, and I realize that one of the things that was developing when I was thinking about what I wanted to say was there’s maybe a slight difference between the example of the oral translation and the textual translation, and I was emphasizing in the oral translation your interaction with the person who is speaking, the human being, but in the textual translation, I think it really has to do with your encounter with the text itself. And one thing just related to what you were already saying is I think it’s really important as a translator also to sort of read the text over and over again and try to allow the text to speak to you on its own terms. There is something about, I think you are completely right, the way the text is set up, the rhetoric, its use of repetition is extremely important. All kinds of dimensions of the literary techniques and strategies, which are not always just about meaning per se, but the text itself. That is why I wanted to get away from this idea of intention.

There is something that happens when things get textualized that the text itself does its own work. And I think the fact that you recognize that there is something about the repetition of hearing over and over again, “rurururururururu... ...a hundred... rurururururururu... ...a thousand... you know... rururururururururu... ...ten thousand...” something is happening to you that is sort of habituating you, naturalizing you, forcing you to slow down, to shut up, to sort of hear what the text is trying to tell you or what the text is saying. That takes a lot of skill, and I completely agree with you, so even thinking that there is a joke there per se might get in the way. It is something like looking for the meaning, looking for the joke. The joke will come out naturally if you listen to the text itself long enough.

I mean it is really a puzzle. What happens when you put your pen on the paper, or you write on your computer? What kind of state of mind are you in when speaking even? You kind of are not thinking, just... like words come out, and so it is a really mysterious process at that very moment when you are actually... you are just speaking out of a space, which you have some how been put into by virtue of what you just heard, so to speak. Anyway, you are very right to talk about the issue of meaning. Especially word by word meaning is going to lose some of the implications of the way that the sentence is put together or the way one sentence relates to another, the way of the pacing, the timing and all of that.

And I just want to point to Robert Thurman once more. Whatever one might say about his translation of the Vimalakīrti Sutra I will say that the spirit, you must have been in a great state when you translated that text because the spirit of Vimalakīrti—it is a really really funny text also, there is a lot of life in it, and that had to be that something—that you allow that or you were in that space itself to kind of convey that kind of animation, which is a really great thing. I mean the text itself is a really great text.

[Robert Thurman says something from the audience which was not audible on the recording. Everybody is laughing]

Marcus Perman:

Thank you so much Janet, that was wonderful.