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DTSTART;TZID=America/Chicago:20261106T100000
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SUMMARY:Year Seven\, Lecture 2: Roger Jackson - "Translating Saraha: Historical\, Linguistic\, and Cultural Challenges"
UID:647925@northwestern.edu
TZID:America/Chicago
DESCRIPTION: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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URL:https://planitpurple.northwestern.edu/event/647925/CvYQoEsh
CREATED:20261023T050000Z
STATUS:CONFIRMED
LAST-MODIFIED:20261023T050000Z
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