Audio recorded at Tibetan Buddhist Institute, Adelaide. Transcript auto-generated and AI-corrected; may contain errors.
About this talk. In this 142-minute seminar, Kyabje Rinpoche teaches English-to-Tibetan translation methodology using a single passage about Atisha’s purpose in coming to Tibet. He walks students through systematic grammatical analysis of the English source: identifying subject clauses, relative clauses, and subordinate structures. He then maps English case functions to Tibetan particles and cases—dative, instrumental, ablative, and the crucial topicalizing particle ni—demonstrating how Tibetan “frozenness” (which elements are fixed, which flexible) determines word order. Students learn Tibetan-specific rules: honorific verbs for venerable figures, the behavior of verbs of motion, and how instrumental clauses nest and move within sentences. Throughout, he emphasizes that translators must grasp clause hierarchy and connectivity in English first before reconstructing in the target language. Pitched at students with English fluency who are actively learning written Tibetan.
File metadata (for organising)
File: 2012-05-03 – KR.mp3
UUID: aa3e2359-5e5f-45c7-ba97-bea3b8fc1aa6
Teacher: Kyabje Rinpoche
Collection: Dependent Origination
Date: 2012-05-03
Recorded at: Tibetan Buddhist Institute, Adelaide
Words: ~4,839
You can’t stop on an imperative. Wow. This but Congratulations. Thank you. You’re the first student I have who has not only memorized it, but memorized it in one week.
Congratulations. Well, still that’s the way to go. That’s the way to go. When you recite it, recite it thinking of the meaning of the words and start thinking in Tibetan. Yes.
Yes. Know? And then it’ll do your grammar a world of good because it leads to the interiorization of grammar. Congratulations. Congratulations.
Congratulations. That’s that’s a good This is this is what I tried to memorize. That one that that stuff there, I I feel like already. This is the preliminary process or something like that. The first one is easy.
You know it by heart. Right? K. Very good. Then you have to continue repeating it every day.
It’s well anchored, you know. And then if you want to memorize something else for next week, I am wide open. You know? And one thing which would be Well, I’ve been doing that since we’ve been in the intensive. You know, there’s a Tibetan policy.
Whatever you do, you have to keep that rhythm of work. So this you’ve set yourself a standard. What’s two verses. Two two stances. That’s good.
That’s good. And those of you who want, you know, it is hugely beneficial, but it’s it has to be done the German way. It has to be done every day. If you don’t memorize every day and you don’t recite every day, it goes as fast as it can. It just flies, you know.
And it’s also the best mental hygiene against Alzheimer’s for those of you who think of the future. So how did you find your English translation for today? How would you how would you start translating? We’ll take our first paragraph. Right?
This one here. How would you start to translate? What would be the procedure, the methodology? Well, to Yes. Exactly.
Very good point. Very good point. So what would that be? So you you have to analyze really carefully your English. Your goal is something akin to a word by word translation.
Alright? First question you raised, Anthony, was what the subject was. So what is the subject? Everyone agrees. Everyone agrees.
That’s speaking a language which calls for the constant use of grammar. Your subject here is the purpose of Atisha’s going to Tibet. That’s your subject clause. Isn’t going Because Isn’t Tibet in English, wouldn’t Tibet be the direct object? Within that clause.
What’s your verb? Yes. This is this. If you don’t get that, you can’t even begin to translate it in Tibetan. That’s why those of you who speak French or German, you have a definite edge for this sort of language.
Right? So it is either the purpose alone or the purpose of Atishas going to Tibet which is what? Which is to spread the Dharma in Tibet as well as to purify the practice of the teachings. Okay. Then you can break it further by reading this as a relative clause and this another subclause.
Then what would our next step be here? If we take this and we start handling the clauses. Alright? Clause one. Right?
Verb. Right? And what are your other verbs in this sentence? To spread. Yes.
So going is not a verb. Right? Well, it is a verb in Tibetan, but it’s not the verb we’re talking about here. The question question is is basically basically if if you you break break it it up, up, this this is is your your subject subject clause. Clause.
So far so good. Let’s say we put it in green. It’s the actor. And then Atisha’s going to Tibet is what? It is all this.
So in Tibetan, what sort of verb would rule or would be involved in this type of construction? We call them equative verbs. Right? Right? Exactly.
Then you have an equation between what and what, the green and the rest here. Then if you look at your subclauses, wars to spread the Dharma in Tibet as well as to purify the practice of the teachings of the Buddha, your relative clause is a subclause, isn’t it? Okay. Now how far does the relative core clause stretch or range? I’ll erase one these little parentheses.
We do it on the computer. It’s a little bit more elegant. Are you sure? Yes, exactly. So what is it?
We’re trying to establish a hierarchy of clauses here. If you’ve worked with computers, it’s basically a hierarchy of algorithms or subroutines, you know. This is what we’re doing here. Which had degenerated is what? It’s a relative clause and technically it’s an apposition here.
It is inserted if you want within the sentence. Which had degenerated. Then what are the rest of the sentence? Mhmm. So we’re teaching ethics.
What is in general? Yeah. Half the term is right. Apposition. Preposition, apposition, supposition, it’s an apposition.
In general, End of stages of the path in terms of the hierarchy of clauses, where does that go? So clearly, and the stages of the path, what is being done with the stages of the path? They are being taught. Right? So it is still part of this clause.
Right? And you could put it here as long as you keep in mind it is part of this clause. Right? Now what about in particular? What is in particular?
Grammatically? Apposition. Exactly. So this is how you would start in English. If you don’t do this in English, then you can’t do it in Tibetan.
It’s not possible. Then we have the problem that verbs in English aren’t always verbs in Tibetan. Verbs in Tibetan are not always translated as verbs in English. So when we identify a verb in the English sentence, that doesn’t mean we always translate it as a verb in Tibetan, but it’s a first go. Right?
Now we will go one one step further in English. We’ve said this was a subject clause here. Right? Now this clause here would be in which case? In terms of Tibetan cases.
To spread the dome in Tibet as well as to purify the practice of the teachings of the Buddha. Yeah. Why? Benefit and intent. Yes.
Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Benefit and intent.
So then, what I’ll do is I’ll put this in blue. I can’t put the whole clause in blue because it becomes very confusing with the other colors. Now what about and we’ll do it like this. This is what my professor of analysis at Zurich Polytechnic called a naive approach to analysis. So this is our dative clause.
Right? Now inside the dative clause, we have an as well as. As well as in English amounts to a conjunction. It’s not a conjunction, but it amounts to a conjunction. In Tibetan, what would it be?
Concordant conjunction. Exactly. A concordant conjunction. So you can break it up like this if you want. Then the second two here will be in which case?
Dative. Dative is when, You have a dative clause. In English, we have to mention both tools. In English, we will in Tibetan, we’ll only mention one. Right?
Now the problem we have now is our clause here, which was identified by Melissa as an instrumental. What would be the other option for this clause, by the way? An ablative. After. After.
Through after. Ablatives can be ablatives of reasoning. It’s not really what is said here, but Tibetan does use that or not. The name in Tibetan especially, but instrumental is a classic way to do it. Alright?
So through teaching ethics, how far does our instrumental clause range? Yes. So if we put our instrumental, which is action, let’s say, in orange, then all of this is our instrumental clause. And this is in red. Normally, you normally, it should be an instrumental, but the Tibetan language likes to use the ne particle of the ablative for reasons.
Never but for reasons. So do you think we have a better sense of how to translate this into weapons? It’s become clearer. Is there anything else you have to flesh out? I don’t think so.
Would you have to try to translate it now? Sounds good. I may ask you to spell, however. What I’ve heard of what you’ve done is very similar to what we have done. The one difference is that obviously our war work here for the time being is the English word order.
We haven’t changed that. Right? But if we were to now put this in the Tibetan word order, it would read basically pretty much like this. Right? Then your verbs would be going where?
To the end. To the end. Right? Is that it? The manner in other words.
Can I look at your copy? You’ve got all of the individual clauses right, basically, but the linkages of the problem. No. The contents are pretty good, actually. It’s not bad at all.
The linkage, that’s that’s what we have to work. How to link these subclauses into one large that is problematical for all of us. Then, Anthony would you like to confident are you of your version? Melissa? I’ll tell you what.
I’ll show you my version and we’ll work through it and then I’ll ask your input for big block. Oh, okay. Okay. You know the students have been working hard when you hear that slightly hysterical tone to their voice. You know, that’s a dead giveaway, isn’t it?
You’re not far from that. On the bus. Yeah. On the bus. That’s what they they do at GCHQ.
Then I don’t want to give you more than I have to. So So I should I should call a Tisha Dror rather than That’s not wrong. You do encounter it. You do encounter it, but Georgie is like the standard. You have I have there’s not a lot of space on our screen, so we have to do it a bit like this.
So first, title. Is English. From English, Tibetan, do here is your Latin, it’s really the accusative, into Tibetan to translate. Here it’s a verb functioning as a noun. You know, it’s a normalized verb.
Translation from English into Tibetan. Now you can see the first problem you have is how to indicate your subject clause. How do we do that? Normally, don’t have to, right? Yes.
You In the complex text, if you don’t put a ni, people get lost. It’s not compulsory. You can put a but a ni is a standard way to do it. So that’s what we have here. I will so this is our subject clause.
Right? Now this in and of itself we’ll we’ll first go through the words together. Joe or Jay is Atisha. Right? Peh Tibet.
Peh Paa to go. Right? Honorific. You have to use a honorific for Atisha. What do we find in the honorific verb if we don’t Goldstein normally gives them if he doesn’t?
No. It’s very difficult. You No. No. There’s there’s Goldstein normally gives them you end up having you know them.
That’s basically it. So Peppa, honorific to go. Getsul, we saw during the intensive, we translated it as a necessity. So I want you to use the words you had seen. You could purpose would be in Tibetan, but you don’t know that word.
You know, so you use it. Here is a demonstrative. It is the way Tibetan translates your definite article the in English. This is sufficient, right? You don’t need the knee.
But if you drop it with a sentence like this, things are going to get pretty unclear quickly. Therefore, you put the knee. Usage of the ni’s, the topicalizers, and the continuatives are yes, ma’am. Very good. No.
It’s very good. It’s very good. It is more classical as an expression. I tend to write a very modern Tibetan. Then in modern Tibetan, the have all been dropped, you know, but really you you should use do actually.
Then your verb here, I’ll put in red. So is that clear? Please. Normally, yes. Has it has the other few cases.
Mhmm. It has imperative. Yeah. The verbs of motion are complicated. Verbs of motion, verbs of emotion, verbs of thought in Tibetan, verbs of motion never take the instrumental, the ergative.
Then this is a rule which is actually more broken than practiced. That you will hear Tibetans who try to speak elegant Tibetans say, You hear this a lot. They put it in this instrumental because they think it is the high way of expressing themselves, the correct way of expressing it is wrong. You know. You hear a lot.
I went is wrong. But I think one of the reasons it’s euphonic, it sounds better, frankly, So that’s a bit the problem with verbs of motion. The language, we’ve put things in very cut and dried ways during the intensive to make it clear. Languages don’t function in cut and dried ways, you know. You have a process of of trans ference, which is occurring all the time.
With the ergative, it happens a lot. Many Tibetans don’t know how to use it well, you know. Then next step. Okay. So we identified our subject here, right, in English.
We said that the verb which corresponded to this subject was which verb? Yes, Your equative verb was. So what happens to that verb in Tibetan? No. Goes to the end of the sentence.
Right? The subject here is not Atisha. The subject is the purpose. It’s the purpose we’re talking about. Now within this subject clause, Atisha is actually a subject.
You could see him as a subject, depending how you translate it. But the topic here, and that’s what the ni makes really clear, is gutsul. Right? Then you have your yin at the end. The no is simply your finalizer.
Right? Then the next step what was the purpose of Atisha, this whole block here, to spread the Dharma in Tibet as well as to purify the practice of the teachings of the Buddha, is covered here. So we’ll go back to the English. His purpose was what? To and we have, you remember, a whole locative dative clause here, to spread the Dharma in Tibet as well as to purify the practice of the teachings of the Buddha which had degenerated.
So if we look at Tibet, then his purpose is what? His purpose is, first, to spread the Dharma in Tibet. Yeah. Now that is here. Dang.
So we have an and or as well, you know, to purify to purify the practice of the teachings of the Buddha. So the Buddha here is the teacher. Means a teacher. Buddha shakyamuni. He’s purifying what?
He’s purifying the practice in which had degenerated, qualified by read in Tibetan as grammatically, Which had degenerated, I have translated in Tibetan grammatically as look, in English, we have the practice which you have in English a relative clause, then how did I translate that in Tibetan grammatically? Nyamlin is practice. What is Nyampa grammatically? Canopy. An adjective.
It’s the degenerated practice. It’s a purification of degeneration. It’s not wrong. It’s a little bit different in meaning. If I wanted to be really precise and to translate which had degenerated exactly as in English, what would I have to do here?
Instead of instead of where would the have to go to convey which degenerated in this sentence? Where would you put it? Any other suggestions? It has to go here. The practice which had degenerated of the teachings.
But it looks and it sounds much nicer in Tibetan to have your after in which case grammatically it is an adjective, like white man, the man who is white. You can also convey that by that relative. So far, so good. Means the teacher of the Buddha. Then that would be somebody else.
Yes. Yeah. It’s not used it’s certainly not used for the Buddhist teachings. So the Buddhist teachings are Tenpa. Tenpa, we talked about in the intensive.
Tenpa is a teacher. Tenpa is what is taught. It is used uniquely or exclusively for the Buddhist teachings. You would never speak of the Tenpa of Khensur Rinpoche for instance. It will be inappropriate.
Here is redundant, but it’s a standard way of formulating things. Alone is enough to indicate that we’re talking of Buddha Śākyamūni. Therefore is the teacher. As you know is Buddha. Means to overcome, who has overcome, who has gone beyond.
Then it is a Tibetan etymological it’s Tibetan gloss of Bhagavan. So Bhagavan Buddha the teacher which refers to Buddha Śākyamūni. If you put Samgya alone, it doesn’t refer to Buddha Śākyamūni. It refers to any Buddha of which there have been a countless number. So far so good, right?
So you can see the construction is quite evident here. Perla Chodhara, to spread the Dharma in Tibet, you have a locative as well as the practice of the Buddha, the practice of the teachings of the Buddha, which had degenerated, dakparnanwa, to purify. Dakpar here can be read either as an adverb constructed from a noun or which is I think the better way to read it, can be read as a complex verb, a composite verb. Why? Why couldn’t I just put, let’s say.
Honorific. We’re talking of the deeds of Atisha, the purpose of Atisha’s coming. But we have to use a honorific for Atisha. So what’s really important here in this sentence is to identify clearly your subject. If you don’t identify clearly your subject, you cannot construct the sentence correctly.
Then if we move onwards, through teaching ethics in general and the stages of the path in particular, here, in general, we said is what? It’s an apposition. Right? Now our entire clause here, starting with this one, is in what case? It’s an instrument.
Right? You can. It’s a very good question. Does anyone have any suggestions? What did we say about Tibetan syntax, I think, a week or two ago?
What is frozen? Yes. And within that, your instrumental clauses, they can go anywhere. You have a lot of flexibility. Your verb is frozen.
Your verb is, like, fixed. So I I there’s nothing wrong with putting it after? Not at all. Not at all. No.
No. No. That’s perfectly okay. You can put it before or after. What is frozen is this sequence, one, two and three.
Right? That is frozen. Then your instrumental clause, it can come before your dative or after your dative. The problem if it comes after your dative is how are you going to convey this here? If you have a break, a hiatus between your dative clause and your verb, how do you convey that?
You will notice that we didn’t translate the dative in Tibetan by a dative. Right? Yet it is technically a dative. So then if this is our instrumental clause, through what? We have a we have a hierarchy here through teaching what?
In general, this is an apposition. It can again go almost anywhere. Ethics. Is in general. It is originally.
It’s a frozen form originally. Then means in general. Is this something you should know? You’ll meet it all the time. Oh, that’s different.
But there’s no. No. That’s like this. You could say, Then how would you put it? It could come after It couldn’t come after the verb.
Right? But it can come before the noun that qualifies or it can come after it. If it comes after the verb, what happens? It’s no longer part of this clause. That’s the problem.
But within the clause, you have a lot of flexibility. So your instrumental here rules both subclauses. If you look at the English, this is your instrumental particle, right, in English through. Now it actually rules this whole clause. You do not have to repeat it.
And likewise in Tibetan, you can see your instrumental here rules the totality of clause through teaching ethics in general and young, in particular, again an apposition you see from the English, so it can go before the Lamrim or it can go after the Lamrim. Both are possible. Really? Yeah. It’s an apposition.
Can put it but you The the the the the the Lamp of the Path. The In Tibetan, the same thing. Excuse me, ma’am. It’s possible. I was gonna do it for you.
It’s a little bit a Tibetan will recognize the meaning. It’s it’s a little bit concise, but it’s very good. For clarity sake, it’s a little bit like the knee. The knee is unnecessary. The d itself is only included because of the v in English.
It is actually unnecessary in Tibetan. If you omit both of them, your sentence becomes quite ambiguous in Tibetan. A reader might wonder exactly where the subject clause starts and ends. Then a kind author will make the reader’s task easier. In Tibetan classical treatises, you’ll find the construction of ours.
Something else, So through teaching ethics in general and or as well as specifically, through teaching Now why do we translate by as an ablative here? Right? You have two choices. Right? It could be an instrumental or it could be an ablative.
Is there a difference in meaning, in connotation? When you put the ablative, what are you conveying? After. Time. The instrumental doesn’t convey that.
Both are correct. You could perfectly put instead of You can have instrumentals nested with instrumentals. You can have this as much as you want. Tibetan loves this, you know. But there’s a slight difference of condition.
Both convey reason, but if you put the ablative nen, we mentioned it’s an ablative of reason, it means that first he composed Bodhipathapradīpa and then on that basis, Lamrim was taught. There’s a chronological sequence. Whereas if you put it’s decomposing of Bodhipathapradīpa which imparted the teachings of Lamrim. But that you choose. Do you see how the syntax works?
Mhmm. That’s different. You could say, but it’s never used in that. Is the particular within the universal particular polarity. So Tibetan debate has this concept of universals which used to exist in Aristotelian philosophy like the great, the beautiful, etc, and a particular within the category of the universal of the great would be the great man.
In colloquial Tibetan, ziraktu exists, it’s very rarely used. And the polarity in general in particular is almost always. Really means specifically. In Tibetan means the quality. Quality.
The quality. So No. You have to add you have to add an auxiliary to turn it into a verb. It’s a noun, actually. Alone.
Right? Grammatically is an adverb. Right? Is an adverb and is also an adverb. Right?
So It’s temper. Temper. Teaching in general, teaching in particular. How could it be yin? Right?
You know? Not really. I mean, we see this year Tibetan we see this year Tibetan enjoys our positions, you know, very much. Christine, is it okay or is it dizzying? So do you have any questions on this?
We’ll stop here before the tea break and start with the next big block after the tea break. You see how to do it, basically. You have to if you want to make a decent translation, you really have to break it up in English first. Well, there’s no right or wrong translation, but you’re you’re aiming for something as close. Is the main point.
Very well. The things to identify your subject, the main verb of your sentence is what? Yeah. Equative. Equative verb.
You see, differentiative, non differentiative and equative. Equative verbs establish equations. This man is white. They are neither differentiative nor non differentiative. Sort of.
I mean, Equative verbs, when they function as equative verbs are in in something like a frozen present. Yin is a frozen present. You can speak of that an equation in the past, in the present, or in the future. Then the moment you use, the moment you try to convey a tense with an auxiliary like song, you lose the equative component. I think you’ve summarized much of the problems of Tibetan politics and culture.
Joking aside, it’s true. I mean Tibetan is a phenomenally ambiguous language. It’s phenomenally ambiguous. We oops. Have to do it down here.
Then basically, you have to find an auxiliary for instead of Nangwa, which is not invariable. The problem is I can’t really think of one. So is invariable except in the imperative. Is invariable. Then what you could use Yeah, that’s correct.
The context here, it’s taken for granted that the reader knows Atisha lived a thousand years ago. Then if it couldn’t be taken for granted, then you couldn’t translate it like this. You’d really have to find here an auxiliary. Then obviously. Then that’s done, you know.
Do you find this helpful or is it incredibly difficult and frustrating? Both. Okay. That’s very good. Okay.
They they intended to be very difficult because the goal really now is addressing how these clauses are connected. I I take for granted most of you can string up a decent short sentence in Tibetan. I mean, we’ve done that during the intensive. So the problem now is you’ve got a sentence with multiple elbows and knees in English. How do you convey that in Tibetan?
If you can do it from English to Tibetan, can do it back from Tibetan into English, you know. Yeah. Exactly. Definitely. I mean, you have to know to translate these complicated sentences.
When this is said and done, in a practical real life translation, you cannot inflict a one page sentence on an English reader. Therefore, but this is real life translation, as soon as you have the possibility to do so, which means after a continuative, obviously after a finalizer, sometimes even after a conjunction, you break the sentence, obviously. Then another thing which I do systematically, it’s I’ve only started recently is I insert, numerals within the subdivisions. There’s no reason why not. There’s absolutely no reason.
It does not in any way betray the meaning of the text. It makes it clearer. Alright? So here for instance in English what I would do, if I was translating this text from Tibetan into English, I would say, was I or one, to spread the Dharma in Tibet, as well as two, to purify the practice of teaching because the goal is to make it obvious to an English reader. Right?
Then there’s a big debate about outlines. Tibetan does not have tables of contents like we do. So the outline is actually interwoven with the text. That’s why you end what we saw last year, these number one, number two, number three. Now I used to translate them within the text.
I’ve stopped doing that. Instead, you just create an outline as in English and you put your titles with your numbers. It makes it much easier for the reader. But yes, Ralph, indeed, given half a chance, you should cut the sentence. But the goal of this exercise is to understand how this long complicated Tibetan sentence functions and the reason we have to do that is because Tibetans, like the Indian scholars, are very fond of presenting someone else’s view for one page with utter conviction and then qualifying it with one small particle on the next page.
And if you don’t catch it, which is Lamrim’s case, you lose it completely, you know. This is very common. So you you have to be on the lookout for the end of the clauses in those small ma re is a classic, you know. If you have a long Tibetan sentence, you know, uttered with complete conviction which ends with ma re. Ma re means it would seem that it is sure the author disagrees.
You know. It is sure. So it’s a translator’s nightmare because you’ve gone So I think it’s tea break time. If you view these things as crossword puzzles, for those of you who are chess like chess games, you know. It’s like just you crack it quietly, you know, one way and then the other and then, you know.
You have a big plus. You have you have intonation. Like, you see, we if you were to read this, you would read that the intonation would give you half the meaning. The intonation is giving you half the grammatical info. Otherwise, it would be very difficult.
But the big problem when you translate orally is your tempel, you never know is it a genitive or is it an instrumental? And that context decides, you know. Excellent. Excellent. We have to stretch our minds when we’re young, right?
Later on.
Key terms in this teaching
- dependent origination pratityasamutpada (Skt); ten drel (Tib)
- Also called dependent arising. The way that the self and phenomena exist conventionally as relative and interdependent. LYWA
- lamrim
- The graduated path. A presentation of Shakyamuni Buddha’s teachings in a form suitable for the step-by-step training of a disciple. LYWA
Definitions adapted from the Lama Yeshe Wisdom Archive glossary, as taught in the Gelug tradition.