MASTERS PROGRAM TRANSLATION PROJECT



From right to left: Nahoko Watanabe, Nerea Basurto, Birgit Schweiberer, Geshe Jampa Gyatso,
Dino Cirulli, Joan Nicell, Toh Sze Gee, and Olivier Rossi

Right from the outset of the Masters Program in 1998, the many foreign-language students in the program noted the sad lack of translations of the Buddhist philosophical texts in their respective languages. The high cost of translating and publishing such texts for a relatively small audience prevents the smaller Buddhist publishing houses from undertaking such projects, while the larger non-specialized publishing houses prefer to publish books by His Holiness the Dalai Lama and a few other contemporary Buddhist authors that sell to the general public. As an answer to our wishes, in the year 2000 a generous benefactor offered the Masters Program at Lama Tzong Khapa Institute €10,000 (about US$10,000) to fund the translation of already existing English-language resource books into other languages. This donation marked the birth of the Master Program Translation Project which has as its aim the funding of Masters Program students to do these translations, which will then be offered free of charge to the Buddhist publishing houses that are subsidiary branches of Wisdom Publications.

It was decided to begin this project with the translation of Meditation on Emptiness by Jeffrey Hopkins, an important resource for such commonly discussed subjects as the four noble truths, the fifty-one mental factors, the four schools, and the Madhyamaka Prasangika view of emptiness. Wisdom Publications and Prof. Hopkins expressed enthusiasm for this project as Meditation on Emptiness, which was first released in 1983, had never been translated into any other language. Six Masters Program students were chosen to translate this text:

• Ven. Nerea Basurto into Spanish
• Ven. Olivier Rossi into French
• Ven. Birgit Schweiberer into German
• Dino Cirulli into Italian
• Toh Sze Gee into Chinese
• Nahoko Watanabe into Japanese

By the end of 2003 both the Italian and Spanish versions were in the process of a final revision with plans to publish them in 2005, while the other versions were nearing the end of the first phase of translation. Ven. Nerea Basurto also translated many of the texts and commentaries that form part of the FPMT Basic Program into Spanish and Sophie Labrousse began the translation of some of these texts into French assisted by Ven. Olivier Rossi. Toh Sze Gee also translated the text A Necklace for Those of Clear Awareness from Tibetan into English for the Mind and Cognition component of the FPMT Basic Program.

As Thubten Pende, former FPMT Education Programs Project Manager, said: "There is no doubt that translations of valuable texts will contribute to the study of Buddha-Dharma around the world"; for this, the Masters Program thanks the anonymous benefactor and the students who have contributed to the realization of this important project.