Year Seven, Lecture 2: Roger Jackson - "Translating Saraha: Historical, Linguistic, and Cultural Challenges"

Abstract:

Saraha (the “Archer” or “Arrow-man”) is one of the most influential yet elusive of the
charismatic mahāsiddhas, the “great adepts” who embodied and gave voice to South
Asian Vajrayāna Buddhism in the last centuries of the first millennium CE. He left a
distinctive poetic and religious legacy in the Indic world and was profoundly important in
Tibet, where his works – especially his songs – were taken as the literary and spiritual
source of the various ideas and practices clustered around the tantric term of art,
mahāmudrā (phyag rgya chen po), the great seal. My lecture will focus on three key
challenges facing anyone who attempts to “translate” Saraha in the modern era: (1) The
historical challenge of locating Saraha as an actor in a particular place and time, (2) the
linguistic challenge of locating and translating Saraha’s “actual” words, and (3) the
cultural challenge of understanding his teachings in their proper social and religious
context. Our main lens for considering the historical challenge will be two early-second-
millennium hagiographies of Saraha; our lens for considering the linguistic challenge will
be several verses from his seminal work, the Dohā Treasury (Dohākoṣa), in their
Apabhraṃśa and Tibetan versions; and our lens for considering the cultural challenge
will be three (relatively) short texts attributed to Saraha: the King Dohās, the
Alphabetical Dohās, and the Ornament of Springtime. At the end of our time, we may be
no closer to “finding” Saraha than when we began, but we may at least get a clearer
sense of the challenges posed by such a search, which are germane to the study not
just of Saraha but of many of the premodern Buddhist teachers and traditions whose
words and deeds have informed the tradition over many centuries, and continue to do
so today.

Bio:

Roger Jackson is John W. Nason Professor of Asian Studies and Religion, Emeritus, at Carleton College, where he taught the religions of South Asia and Tibet for nearly three decades. He also has taught at the University of Michigan, Fairfield University, McGill University, and Maitripa College. He has a B.A. from Wesleyan University and an M.A. and Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin, where he studied under Geshe Lhundub Sopa. His scholarly interests include Indic and Tibetan Buddhist systems of philosophy, meditation, and ritual; Buddhist religious poetry; the study of mysticism; and the contours of modern Buddhist thought. His books include Is Enlightenment Possible? Dharmakīrti and rGyal tshab rje on Knowledge, Rebirth, No–Self and Liberation (1993), Tibetan Literature: Studies in Genre (with José Cabezón, 1996), Buddhist Theology: Critical Reflections by Contemporary Buddhist Scholars (with John Makransky, 1999), Tantric Treasures: Three Collections of Mystical Verse from Buddhist India (2004), The Crystal Mirror of Philosophical Systems (with Geshe Sopa et al., 2009), Mind Seeing Mind: Mahāmudrā and the Geluk Tradition of Tibetan Buddhism (2019), which received the 2020 Toshihide Numata Award for the “outstanding book in any area of in Buddhist Studies,” Rebirth: A Guide to Mind, Karma, and Cosmos in the Buddhist World (2022), and Saraha: Poet of Blissful Awareness (2024). He has written many articles, book chapters, and reviews, and presented regularly at national and international scholarly conferences. He was editor-in-chief of the Journal of the International Association of Buddhist Studies from 1985 to 1993, and co-edited the Indian International Journal of Buddhist Studies from 2006 to 2018. His current book project focuses on the place of Buddhism in the Beat literary and spiritual movement in mid-20th-century North America; he also is involved in a 10-year group project to translate the entire corpus of Tsongkhapa’s works, with the assistance of AI.

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