Regalia Untranslatable - Part One

“Time is short, the aspects of learning so many,
there is simply no telling how long life will last.
So, like the duck extracting milk out of water,
what you treasure most is the thing you must do.”*

*The text of the verse is from the late Michael Hahn's edition, although the translation is my own.  It tells us to live the good life performing deeds of genuine value. I would hold that translation is one of those deeds.  Still, translation can be a source of great frustration. In this verse the gces-pa could be translated as 'holding dear,' 'finding something attractive or cute,' 'valuing' and so on, and if I settled for 'treasuring,' it only means, well, that I settled for it, not that it closes the book on other meanings that weren't quite captured. The point is you ought to spend your life in an ethical manner doing what you love and loving what you do. Otherwise, it's a waste.

The translation process is, as we all know, fraught with anxieties, or a more Tibetanesque formulation, it’s filled with hope-fear (re dogs; རེ་དོགས་), meaning everything from the highest hope to the most dreadful dread. It seems to be built into the very act of translation, the idea that there is no such thing as good enough. We often feel inadequate. At every word or turn of phrase we get into heated internal debates which would be the better way to go with it, if there might be some better way to put it.

If translating causes us so much anxiety, why do it? Well, why do we have families (for instance)? Why do we have friends?  We do what we love, for better or for worse. It’s a kind of commitment, of course, but it does give us pleasure. We’re happy to do it. We hope other people will benefit from our efforts even when they have little idea what our role in the process is exactly, even with their lingering doubts about our capabilities and our honesty. We cheat on the truth and claim to deliver it unvarnished without missing a beat. No wonder they don’t trust us. We don’t trust each other and we doubt ourselves.

I want to think that what I have to say today is not just a pathetic cry for help, but something a little more positive than that. I would like to argue in favor of hope in difficult situations like the ones I’ll point out soon, when the passages we need to translate threaten to swallow us up and spit us out. No doubt we translators could just sit and exchange war stories all day long about our experiences on that front, but I’m not sure what that would accomplish. Would it really be a good use of our precious human rebirth?

So instead of griping I want to start by thanking everyone who was responsible for deciding I would translate the book you see here, but especially the donors, who gave me the freedom (and responsibility, of course, although I do thank them mainly for the freedom). I have them to thank for my new identity.

The front cover of the history by Mkhas-pa Lde'u - མཁས་པ་ལྡེའུ་

Back in 2010, for the first time in my life, I started waking up day after day thinking of myself as a translator. Sure, I’d done translations before. But not on anything like a permanent basis, and nothing on this scale. I liked it — I liked the new me — at least for the first two years. I was doing what I loved (actually, starting from 1989 when I first tried reading a few parts of the history book in question). After doing the original translation in the first year, I gave it a thorough going-over for another year. What I was left with at the end were the real difficulties!

What is this text? Well, just briefly, it has a little over 400 pages. It’s half a history of Indian and half a history of Tibetan Buddhism. Half of the first half is a biography of the Buddha. Much of the beginning of the second half is more about Tibetan royalty than Buddhism per se. It dates to sometime soon after 1261 CE, the date of the chronological source quoted at the end.

The author (more on that fascinating concept in a moment) is unknown apart from the name Mkhas-pa Lde'u, that I amuse myself by translating as Professor Riddle. Still, I believe there is some evidence that hints at who he was. He was part of a specific, if obscure, Dzogchen lineage that descended from Zhig-po-bdud-rtsi who died in 1199. A full volume of Dzogchen teachings of this lineage has been preserved in the Expanded Kama Collection of Kathog Monastery.

The author intended to complete an earlier history by a member of his lineage that was left incomplete. But he did it by compiling material, not by composing his own prose — So much so that I now think he didn’t write a word of it; well, except an apology at the very end — an apology for not being skilled in composition! — and even then just perhaps.*

(*I’m regretting saying these words already, since the apology at the end seems to be taken from the Bodhisattva's Way of Life. There are brief bits at the beginnings of both the India and Tibet halves of the book that do seem to be original even while they demonstrate his weakness as a Sanskritist.)

That’s why we can’t speak about his authorial style, tone etc. We would have to talk about the authorial style and tone of each of the authors he anthologized. I’ve long ago stopped complaining about his lack of originality, since I think he selected the very best texts to fill out his outline, and seems to have left them basically untouched in the process. And — this is a significant point — many of these texts in the Tibet half of his book would no longer be available to us (or not as extensively available to us) if he hadn’t quoted from them at length.

I should add, although there is no time to go into it in detail now, that at least one of the old texts incorporated surely belongs to the period of the Emperor Ralpachan (re. 815-838 CE). I have my own standards of historical truth that I try to make use of whenever practicable. I call this triangulation. One is, or ought to be, somewhat less than satisfied that two texts or artifacts point to the same historical event, rather one strives to find three texts or artifacts that in some way mutually support each other, preferably by separate authors, or even by people with otherwise conflicting points of view or the like (some people call this outside verification, but really, it often falls short of the three-way outside verification that I call triangulation). In this case, the text incorporated in the Lde’u history, as well as a pillar inscription written in stone and a Dunhuang document share some aspects of their vocabulary and phraseology as well as information on similar if not identical events. And there is even a unique fourth text incorporated into a still-later text that, even if it isn't necessarily as old as the other three, does point to similar events with identical actors. I will go into this in more detail some other time.

Occasionally he abridged these texts, it seems — in the life of the Buddha he alternated between two different sources — but I don’t think he did any other kinds of editing on them. He made transcripts of the earlier texts, and sure, he very likely committed some small errors in the process when and if these cannot be blamed on scribes, altering spellings and so on, as you would expect in any manuscript tradition, but he didn’t try to fix old and difficult vocabulary items and the like (as routinely happened to canonical texts when they were revised). For this, depending on our mood of the moment, he may be either praised or blamed.*

*I know I've had the problem of dealing with Trikâya Buddhology, Abhidharma, Nyingma tantras, archery, legal codes and 8th-century (obsolete) vocabulary wrapped up in the same package. In effect, you're being required to be an expert in every possible area of traditional knowledge both Buddhist and secular. I even had to study medieval weaponry to make myself clear about objects such as scabbards and hardened leather body armor....

Well, there is so much more to say about the Mkhas-pa Lde’u history, but I want to go straight to what I regard as one of the most obdurate of the remaining difficulties in it, with the thought that we could share ideas on how to deal with this and other passages like it.

Although I’ve included a bit of the context in the cutout above (from the first published version of 1987, pages 384-5), I want to concentrate on the part you see enclosed between the parentheses. This represents a traditional type of footnote (called mchan - མཆན་). For the moment I just want to point out that there are several opaque bits, like the gud-sa bang-so-can, me-tor ti-lig-can and so on.  Other items are perfectly intelligible, like the silver serving spoon with stags (dngul-skyogs sha-ba-can). You may see here below a page from the facsimile edition, showing how the footnote actually appears in the original manuscript, in smaller letters below the main lines of the text (click on the photo to enlarge it to readable size; if you need to hone your cursive reading skills, try taking the test). This is a list of the so-called Can-dgu (ཅན་དགུ་), or Nine Possessions, royal heirlooms, or indeed, regalia. We’ll talk more about regalia in Part Two.

Page from the facsimile of the manuscript kept in the Social
Science Institute in Lhasa

(Continued here)

Note:  This three-part blog represents a revised version of my informal notes meant to accompany a slide show presentation at the conference on Tibetan Translation held at Keystone, Colorado a few days ago.  All visual materials presented here are for educational and non-commercial purposes only. (That means you must not download them from here and then go on to sell them. You can and should download and use them for any educational and non-commercial purpose.)

It is possible to locate an audio version here.

Doublethinking? Think Again.

Tibeto-logic, along with all of Blogspot, is inaccessible in the People’s Republic of China, that is, to the people there. That means if you’re there you can’t get here. Even Apple since last year has made sure its iPhone apps keep things that way. Generally do-no-evil Google goes along with the power, but (refreshingly) it has been known to talk back. These are the conditions we have to start with here where we are. A blog about Tibetan studies cannot be seen in Tibet.

When His Holiness the Dalai Lama — by the way, perhaps the best person in the whole world, certainly an inspiration for anyone who might contemplate leading an ethical life* — travels in the world these days, the number of leaders meeting Him has taken an even further plunge since 2012.  Let’s see, how many people have taken Xi Jingping as a moral compass?  (Wait, we may have one here)

(*I would link you to a download of Ethics for a New Millennium, but am unsure of the ethical ramifications.)

Source:  Foreign Policy

And here we have it: a person recently listed 9th in a list of world leaders by Fortune magazine being snubbed or disinvited, turned away by South Africa, and even, believe it or not, snubbed by the Norwegian PM.  

But here my intention is to talk about freedom of speech (and the need to speak, and the need to refuse to be silenced), more than freedom of association, although the latter may be important to the former. I want to ask the Tibetologists, Where do you stand on censorship? And by censorship I mean to include the kind you do to yourself, thinking you or someone you know might get in trouble. Do you speak out against injustice and lies? I know, you are probably thinking to yourself it isn’t part of your job description, that it's a job for real professionals, the “_____ [fill in the blank].”

Think again, or at least read slowly and think about what Chomsky said in two paragraphs in his famous old essay of 1967:  

“With respect to the responsibility of intellectuals,* there are still other, equally disturbing questions. Intellectuals are in a position to expose the lies of governments, to analyze actions according to their causes and motives and often hidden intentions. In the Western world, at least, they have the power that comes from political liberty, from access to information and freedom of expression. For a privileged minority, Western democracy provides the leisure, the facilities, and the training to seek the truth lying hidden behind the veil of distortion and misrepresentation, ideology and class interest, through which the events of current history are presented to us. The responsibilities of intellectuals, then, are much deeper than what Macdonald calls the “responsibility of people,” given the unique privileges that intellectuals enjoy.”

(*Just a suggestion, try inserting "Tibetologists" whenever you see the word "intellectuals.")

and

“IT IS THE RESPONSIBILITY of intellectuals to speak the truth and to expose lies. This, at least, may seem enough of a truism to pass over without comment. Not so, however. For the modern intellectual, it is not at all obvious. Thus we have Martin Heidegger writing, in a pro-Hitler declaration of 1933, that "truth is the revelation of that which makes a people certain, clear, and strong in its action and knowledge"; it is only this kind of "truth" that one has a responsibility to speak. Americans tend to be more forthright. When Arthur Schlesinger was asked by The New York Times in November, 1965, to explain the contradiction between his published account of the Bay of Pigs incident and the story he had given the press at the time of the attack, he simply remarked that he had lied; and a few days later, he went on to compliment the Times for also having suppressed information on the planned invasion, in "the national interest," as this term was defined by the group of arrogant and deluded men of whom Schlesinger gives such a flattering portrait in his recent account of the Kennedy Administration. It is of no particular interest that one man is quite happy to lie in behalf of a cause which he knows to be unjust; but it is significant that such events provoke so little response in the intellectual community..."

Chomsky, hardly a great supporter of Tibet in those days if he ever was, still alluded to harsh things that he could have mentioned. He said, in a footnote, “There are various harsh things that one might say about Chinese behavior in what the Sino-Indian Treaty of 1954 refers to as ‘the Tibet region of China’...”  

More recently, he has been known to make half-hearted analogies between Tibetans and Palestinians:

"Seems to me there is a much closer analogy between the Palestinian occupied territories and Tibet right now. There are dissimilarities too. Thus, rightly or wrongly, Tibet is internationally recognized (by the US too) as part of China, so what is happening there is internal..." (keep reading if you haven't read enough)

With the increasing influence on universities of “Confucius Institutes,” there have been calls recently for renegotiating the contracts they have with U.S. institutions of higher learning. Now that China's relatively rapid economic rise allows it the luxury of buying up academics from all over the world, they are doing just that. In every field, not just hi-tech. In Israel, they aren't just buying controlling shares in cottage cheese factories and irrigation companies, they bought a whole technical school; and then there were the published stories about PAP training in crowd control tactics in the Negev... What is up with that?

“The improved ties have been highlighted by last week’s visit to Beijing by Israel’s military chief and a training mission to Israel by the Chinese paramilitary force that, among other things, polices the restive Tibetan and Muslim Uighur regions.”  [read more]

It's like George Orwell said,

“To know and not to know, to be conscious of complete truthfulness while 
telling carefully constructed lies, to hold simultaneously two opinions 
which cancelled out, knowing them to be contradictory and believing in 
both of them, to use logic against logic, to repudiate morality while 
laying claim to it.”

I would tell you what the carefully constructed lies are, but you know them all too well, no reason to insult your intelligence. Besides, I worry I won't be invited to that next big Tibetan Studies conference in Beijing, where there will be a free and open discussion about all the big problems in the field.

I think some of us are already there, morally neutralized, our critical faculties still there, somewhere, but in abeyance.  

Now try smiling in a mirror while making a concerted effort to distinguish between your objectivity and your neutrality.

Tenzin Nyinjey says, in response to a Time magazine piece: 

“There is a widespread misperception among us that any news about Tibet is good for our freedom struggle. It is true that mainstream media help us inform the world about the plight of Tibet. However, as much as media informs the public about certain facts, it indulges in obscuring the same facts. Instead of educating readers, it confuses them. Instead of advancing freedom, it becomes a stumbling block by siding with authority...’  [continue reading]

Hear that Chomsky?  It’s more than a little difficult to speak about doublespeak without slipping into it. In that respect it is the twin of common fronting. In the end the fools who deliberately started practicing it fool themselves.

It may not need saying, although I feel we ought to say it aloud anyway:  Common fronting means throwing out the window any chance for the honesty and trust that must initiate and continually support any friendship worthy of the name.

§  §  §

Index on Censorship has this interesting page with incidental insights on how things are in Lhasa of late. Have a look.  Have you noticed any good journalism coming out of Lhasa recently? Wonder why...

§  §  §

“One of the reasons why scholars have argued that universities need academic freedom is that they act as a critical conscience of society. But having academic freedom in theory is not the same as exercising it in practice. The main problem is self-censorship. It’s about who feels willing and able to speak out. Sadly, those with the most to lose rarely do. The universities have kept their heads down while their students have placed theirs very firmly above the parapet. To our collective shame and embarrassment, it is the students, and not the universities, who are the critical conscience of Hong Kong society. They are the ones who have spoken truth to power.”

- Bruce Macfarlane, Hong Kong professor, here.