The Second Lotsawa Translation Workshop

Until now the stories, voices, and concerns of Buddhist women in Tibet have been difficult to locate and translate in order to make their perspectives available to contemporary Buddhist communities in the west. A key impetus for the second Lotsawa Translation Workshop comes from the Buddhist nuns at Larung Gar in eastern Tibet who recently published a groundbreaking compilation of 52 volumes of writings by, for, and about Buddhist women in the Tibetan language. Titled the Ḍākinīs’ Great Dharma Treasury (Mkha’ ’gro’i chos mdzod chen mo) and published by the Ārya Tāre Publishing Committee in 2017, this compilation opens up new horizons for the translation of Buddhist texts from Tibetan. It includes a wide swath of genres and texts from across the centuries, including canonical accounts of early Buddhist nuns, the life stories and songs of experience of eminent Buddhist women in Tibet, accounts by female delogs who travel to the realms beyond death, works of Buddhist philosophy by Larung Gar khenmos, supplications to female tantric deities, and advice to nuns and yoginīs practicing meditation in retreat. Inspired by the Ḍākinīs’ Great Dharma Treasury, the theme of this Lotsawa workshop is translating Tibetan texts by and about women across time periods, including a wide array of genres and time periods ranging from classical Buddhist texts to modern Tibetan women’s writings.

The idea of this workshop is to foster an intensive and immersive experience over four days in order to offer practical support to newer translators and graduate students, incubate fresh approaches to the translation of Buddhist texts from Tibetan, and cultivate a greater sense of community among those engaged in translation. Most of all, we are looking for frank and probing discussion among all the participants—senior and junior, practitioner and scholar—on the many issues at stake in questions around gender and translation. Such discussion will lead to new strategies for translation.

The format for the four-day workshop will combine keynote lectures, panels, and break-out sessions in the mornings and then dedicate the afternoons to working on translations-in-progress in small groups. There will be four Workshop Sessions over the course of the workshop, so that each participant and some presenters will have ample time allocated for discussion and feedback on their translation-in-progress.

Some of the guiding questions we seek to explore during the Lotsawa Workshop are the following:

• – How should we weigh the relative values of fidelity to the Tibetan source text and our wish to create inclusive Buddhist communities for the future?
• – What norms and guidelines can we establish for Tibetan translators to use gender neutral language whenever possible and appropriate?
• – Are there themes, genres, and stylistic differences associated with women writers and female voices in Buddhist texts? How can we best render these in English?

The goals of the second Lotsawa Translation Workshop mirror those of the first iteration:

1. To connect theory and practice in crafting literary translations of Buddhist texts from Tibetan into English,

2. To forge a “community of practice” around translation through experimentation, dialogue, and feedback, and 

3. To make short Buddhist works of Tibetan literature available to practitioners, undergraduates, and the general public through publishing thematic anthologies of translations.