Reports From The Mandala
Head Lama of TNMC
A session of the MRC Summer Seminar, ‘Understanding Buddhism through its Classic Texts’. Professors Gómez and Patil are at the bottom right.
Over the past decade, the Nyingma Mandala of Organizations has expanded dramatically and in unexpected ways. Existing organizations have continued their activities on behalf of the Dharma and all sentient beings, typically intensifying their efforts. At the same time, at least nine new organizations have been formed, adding new dimensions to the founding Head Lama’s vision.
In the reports that follow, we lay out recent developments throughout the mandala and introduce the work of our new organizations. We start with the work of TNMC, where the Head Lama is most directly involved: Yeshe De, Odiyan, the Light Foundations, and the Sarnath Institute. From there we move on to describe the structure and mission of the Nyingma Association of Mandala Organizations (NAMO), founded in 2011.
We go on to lay out the recent work of the organizations that belong to NAMO. As a structure for presenting this wealth of developments, we start with the organizations located in Sonoma County, then turn to developments in Berkeley, and finally report on the expanding efforts of our international centers, under the direction of Nyingma Centers.
Mandala Organizations In Berkeley
Nyingma Mandala of Organizations had its beginning in Berkeley in 1969, when Rinpoche founded the Tibetan Nyingma Meditation Center. In 1971, TNMC moved into its new home, an old fraternity house that Rinpoche named Padma Ling, Land of the Lotus. Padma Ling remains a center of community activity as a residence and place of practice and the site of ongoing art projects and editorial work. Its ample gardens are tended as an offering to the Dharma, and its stalwart bear statue, left behind by the fraternity, has been adopted as a Dharma protector.
The next development came in 1972, when Rinpoche founded the Nyingma Institute in another old fraternity house on the other side of the University campus. Active briefly at Padma Ling, the Institute moved to its present location the next year. We start our reports on the Berkeley mandala organizations with the Institute, which has now flourished as a gateway to the Dharma for more than four decades.
In 2009, the mandala expanded into downtown Berkeley. We had been looking for over a year for a new home for the Tibetan Aid Project, which had occupied the same building as Dharma Publishing and the Yeshe De Project prior to their move to Ratna Ling. In 2008, the opportunity arose to purchase two adjoining buildings in the heart of Berkeley. Although far grander in scale than what we had been looking for, the new buildings offered remarkable opportunities to develop new petals of the mandala. Renovated in secret for nine months as a surprise for the larger community, the buildings witnessed opening celebrations in the summer of 2009.
Mangalam Centers, a 26,000 square foot building next to the main Berkeley post office, built in 1913 and a Berkeley landmark, became the home of the Mangalam Research Center for Buddhist Languages; it also houses a grand temple, office and residential space, and common facilities for dining, community events, and instruction. In addition, it serves as the headquarters for Light of Buddhadharma Foundation, the Center for Creative Inquiry, and NAMO. The smaller building next door became the home for the Tibetan Aid Project, the Dharma Publishing Bookstore, Nyingma Trust, a work space for the Prayer Flag Project, and (initially), the Guna Foundation. In 2010, another opportunity arose—this time to purchase the large building next to the Tibetan Aid Project Building. Known as Armstrong College (later, Armstrong University), it was over eighty years old, also a Berkeley landmark and built by the architect responsible for Mangalam Centers. Because it had been designed for use as a business college, it was perfectly suited for expanding the educational dimension of the mandala. Rinpoche named it Dharma College. After extensive renovation, Dharma College celebrated its opening in 2011. Soon after, it became the new home of the Guna Foundation, which moved from next door. It features a vast public space that Rinpoche lovingly prepared as temple capable of seating hundreds, as well dining facilities and a large lower level that is currently used mostly for storage.
Mandala Organizations In Berkeley
Mangalam Research Center for Buddhist Languages
The Mangalam Research Center for Buddhist Languages was founded in 2009 to support the establishment of English and other Western languages as accurate vehicles for the transmission of Buddhism. It works closely with scholars and universities to explore the meaning of Buddhist terminology and the resources available in Western languages for communicating Buddhist teachings and insights. Two to three post-doctoral fellows live at MRC full time and contribute to its projects, and Luis Gómez, a well-known scholar in the field of Buddhist Studies, serves as its academic director.
MRC organizes symposia, conferences, and seminars that explore the language used in Buddhist texts. Its first public program was a two-week seminar on a newly discovered Sanskrit manuscript of the renowned Vimalakirti Nirdesha Sutra. Since then, more than 60 scholars have attended its programs, and MRC is now well known in the world of Buddhist scholarship. Its director attends academic conferences around the world, including the annual meeting of the American Academy of Religion and the triennial meeting of the International Association of Buddhist Studies.
In 2012 MRC received a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) to hold a four-week summer seminar for sixteen scholars called “Understanding Buddhism through its Classic Texts,” which took place in 2013. Led by Professor Luis Gomez and Professor Parimal Patil, the seminar introduced participants to the study and use of texts as teaching and learning material for exploring the Buddhist tradition across a wide range of disciplines and interests. This program was very well received, and we are applying to repeat it in 2015.
The other major focus of MRC activity since its founding has been to create a digital resource that could explore in depth the vocabulary of Buddhist philosophy in order to give translators the knowledge they need to create accurate translations. We call this new resource the Buddhist Translators Workbench, or BTW. In 2011, MRC received a grant from the NEH to help support development of BTW under its Digital Innovations funding initiative. We received a second grant in 2013, bring total funds awarded to $85,000, and we intend to apply for a larger and highly competitive grant in 2015. We plan to have a ‘proof of concept’ version of BTW online next January.
Work on BTW has gone far more slowly than we initially imagined, but as we go into the project more deeply, we have realized the potential for a truly unique approach to translation work, one that relies less on dictionary-style definitions and equivalents, aiming instead to analyze the language of the Buddhist body of texts in terms of shifting semantic fields that take into account the whole range of uses that a word can evoke. At present we are focusing on Sanskrit and on a relatively small selection of texts, but we plan to expand into Tibetan. We also hope to analyze with the same degree of depth the terminology available in English and other Western languages, with special attention paid to the philosophical language of the Western classical tradition.
Our work on BTW has attracted considerable interest. The director of MRC was recently invited to present progress on BTW at a two-day conference at Oxford University on digital innovations in Buddhism, to be held in September 2014.
In the spring of 2013, MRC applied to the State of California for authorization to offer a Postbaccalaureate Program in Buddhist Languages and Translation Studies. Our sense was that there is a real need for a program that could train future scholars and others in canonical Buddhist languages, with a special focus on the needs of translation.
The heart of the program is language training in classical Sanskrit or classical Tibetan. Entering students will take a summer intensive in Sanskrit, continuing their studies during the following academic year. Students will also take courses on Buddhist history and the Buddhist written tradition and a year-long post-baccalaureate seminar that introduces methods, ideas and approaches in the field of Religious Studies that will help prepare students for graduate work. Visiting scholars will offer intensive weekend programs, which students from our own centers may be able to attend as well. The program is currently under review by the State, and we expect it to launch in 2015.
In the past year MRC has offered its summer language intensive in Sanskrit, as well as a famous short intensive in Pali taught for many years by Richard Gombrich of Oxford, as well as an ongoing Sanskrit class. In addition to the NEH Summer Seminar, it also hosted small conferences in the fields of Abhidharma and Yogachara and on the Language of Meditation across Religious Traditions; as in the past, these conferences were attended by most of the leading scholars in the specific field under discussion. The latter program featured a panel discussion among several conference participants, followed by a workshop open to the public.
For 2015, MRC is organizing two conferences, one on the language of the Sutras and one on the concept of Philosophy as a Way of Life, an aspect of classical Western thought that has recently draw new interest in the scholarly world (thanks largely to the work of Pierre Hadot) and that major implications for valid approaches to introducing Buddhism to the West. We are also planning seminars for the public at large, featuring topics that address the question of where Buddhism and the West can best meet.
During 2014, MRC will begin work toward establishing a Mangalam Imprint, publishing works of academic significance that can help fulfill MRC’s core mission. We are currently collecting chapters for a book growing out of last winter ’s Abhidharma conference on the language for mind in Buddhism, and have plans to publish English translations of at least two key Tibetan grammars by an earlier generation of Western scholars. We are organizing our 2015 Conferences with the intention that they will lead to publications as well. Several grant proposals are also in the works.