THE SNOW LION NEWSLETTER

Truly universal in character, Nalanda University was comprised of a diverse educational community of Buddhists and non-Buddhists, ordained and lay, engaged in advanced post-graduate courses and pursuing degrees in all of India's classical "outer" arts and sciences (linguistics, medicine, astronomy, sociopolitical theory, ethics, art, and so on) as well as all of her classical "inner" arts and sciences (philosophy, psychology and mind science, meditation, yoga, and so on).

Tibet held a special role in the internationalizing of this renaissance culture, and can indeed properly be deemed to be the heir to this renaissance educational system. The campus and curriculum of its own first monastic university, Samye (est. 749 CE), was modeled on the Indian university of Odantapura. As the renaissance culture took root and spread across Tibet, Tibetans rapidly established scores of similar institutions and sponsored hundreds of Tibetan scholar-adepts to travel to Indian universities for advanced education. These Tibetans so impressed the Indian pandits that Vikramashila University established a unique, dedicated "Tibet House" for visiting Tibetan scholars. Historian S. Dutt has explained Tibet's leading role as follows: "After the turn of the eighth century...Tibet...took the place of China in cultural intercourse with India. It had started already with Thonmi Sambhota's residence at Nalanda when Hsüan-tsang also was there. The comings and goings between Tibet and eastern India of Tibetan lamas and Indian Panditas... never came to a stop till the last days of the Palas [early 1200s].... At Vikramashila, Tibetan lamas seem to have been held in great esteem. At least one Tibetan scholar is known to have been appointed a dvara-pala [gate-keeper] of Vikramashila.... Indian monks of these Pala establishments seem thus, through contacts with the lamas, to have become conversant with the Tibetan language.... Indian monks... not only wrote original works in Tibetan, but also translated a large number of Sanskrit works into that language...." (1962: 351)

It has been estimated that the classical Sanskrit texts amassed in the Indian university libraries numbered in the millions, over one hundred times the classical Greek and Latin holdings of the Library of Alexandria. While much of the explicitly Buddhist tradition was later lost in India, essential treatises were systematically translated into Tibetan by teams of scholars during the 7th-12th centuries CE. The resulting collection, preserved as the Tibetan Tanjur (bstan 'gyur), consists of translations of over 3,600 classical Sanskrit works by over 700 Indian authors. The texts of the Tibetan Tanjur thus provide the essential key to unlock the knowledge not only of the classical Indian inner and outer arts and sciences but also of all the later Tibetan innovations which, rooted in this Indic tradition, were developed and refined for over a millennium in Tibet's own monastic curricula.

Scope of the Tanjur Translation Initiative
In recent decades, Indo-Tibetan scholarship has progressed markedly and a new generation of highly skilled and dedicated scholars has emerged. With improved critical and technological tools, scholars have been producing ever more translations, revising the pioneering works of their predecessors and sharpening the critical edge of Buddhological, textual, and comparative methodologies. Moreover, dedicated publishers such as Snow Lion and Wisdom have emerged to initiate translation series of classic Buddhist texts to ensure that these works receive wide distribution. Nevertheless, it must be noted that all these efforts have resulted in the translation and distribution of only approximately 5% of the Tanjur texts. At this rate it can be assumed that a comprehensive translation of the entire Tanjur will take several more generations to complete. The importance of this project and the urgency of our current global circumstances mandate that this timetable be accelerated.

The American Institute of Buddhist Studies (AIBS) believes that the time is now ripe to address the translation of the Tanjur in a more comprehensive and systematic way. Toward this end, in affiliation with the Columbia University Center for Buddhist Studies and Tibet House US, AIBS has recently established two new translation series, the Treasury of the Buddhist Sciences and the Treasury of the Indic Sciences. The AIBS Tanjur translation initiative represents an historical first attempt to systematically assess, translate, and present this Tanjur corpus as a whole, with the goal of producing a coherent, consistent, integrated set of annotated translations.

In joining this broad-based endeavor, AIBS brings its important affiliation with Columbia University's Center for Buddhist Studies. Columbia's long-term commitment anchors AIBS institutionally with the financial endowment for the Je Tsong Khapa Chair of Buddhist Studies, entrusted with the overseeing of the translation of the Tanjur.

The AIBS principal and networked scholars and researchers have been working slowly but surely on this historic project for over 30 years, have trained a generation of brilliant translator-researchers, have developed drafts of over a dozen key works, have made significant progress in developing computer resources to accelerate the translation process dramatically, have established the two Treasury series and published the first three books (with four more in press), and have held the first of a proposed series of international conferences to mobilize the community of concerned scholars and researchers to assure the humanistic and scientific relevance of these series.

AIBS has calculated that it would take one qualified scholar approximately 580,000 hours (300 years of full-time work) to produce critically translated and edited editions of all the 3,600+ texts of the Tanjur. Ten scholars dedicated full-time to this project could thus complete it in about 30 years. Given the many other commitments that modern scholars have, AIBS is planning to organize a rotating team of up to 30 scholars working part-time, with a support staff of four full-time editors and producers, to complete the project in about the same 30 years.

Leadership Opportunities
AIBS is currently seeking sponsorship for these initiatives. While individual books can be supported with an average $30-50,000 subvention per book, AIBS is seeking an initial $800,000 over three years to establish a firm foundation for this translation enterprise and to publish an initial 24 books. Such a grant will seed a quantum leap in its long-term $14 million initiative to complete in three decades the whole series of scholastically critical, scientifically contemporary translations of the entire Tanjur. The completed set will span approximately 500 volumes averaging 400 pages each.

For further information regarding supporting this initiative or submitting translation proposals, visit American Institute of Buddhist Studies' website at http://www.aibs.columbia.edu, or contact Executive Editor, Thomas Yarnall, at ty37@columbia.edu.