Due to the kindness of Tsadra foundation, the collected works of the third Karmapa are available. See rywiki.tsadra.org/index.php/3rd_Karmapa . This is the whole collection in PDF format. Most likely you need to install the Nitartha Sambhota font to read it.
Anyway, we are entering the golden age of material available on Internet, even whole collections of important teachers. We just need more translations now.
I just saw that the excellent LotsawaHouse web site created a special Jamyang Khyentse Wangpo mini-site. It has all kinds of translations, and also one short Tibetan text, byang chub lam bzang. This has also been translated in the translations section.
I won't give any clues, but you should be easily able to find it by opening up both the Tibetan text and the translation in separate windows, and learn by investigating how this two-page text was translated. A nice Sunday morning hobby!
There's a new page over at dharmadictionary where we are trying to list places wherefrom to order Tibetan texts, classical Tibetan Buddhist texts, commentaries, and so on.
Feel free to create an account and add more sources if you know of any places, so that others could also know where to find various texts.
Here's a nice free book, Tibetan grammar and phrasebook by Silvia Vernetto in collaboration with Tenzin Norbu.
It's a nice 70+ PDF based file, covers a lot of the basic grammar, how to form sentences, pronouns, verbs, and so on. And it's free, in the tradition of giving to others.
See Tibetan on the Mac, a new blog by Michael Essex that will document all kinds of issues when using MacOSX with Tibetan fonts and other tools.
Many of us use Mac systems for Tibetan editing, so this is a good way to learn about all kinds of issues and tricks. It's been about ten years since I first heard that Unicode will finally work with various operating systems, and I think that day will happen very, very soon. MacOSX 10.4 is close to good, still glyph problem with stacked fonts, but hopefully that is fixed in the next major release.
Meanwhile, check out Michael's great new resource, I will add this one to the blogroll.
Zangthal is a very nice web site with translations of Tibetan texts from Karen Liljeberg. She gives out all her material for free. The PDF files also have the Tibetan, so you could learn by reading her translations. Nice!
Here's another interesting hobby in case you are bored, try to type in various Tibetan words and sentences as Wylie into Google (or your favourite web search engine), and be surprised what you could find.
For example, if you search on stong pa nyid and Nagarjuna, there's a good chance you will find the material I will use soon for the verse.
Anyway, it's an intriguing way to find surprising material on the web -- we are indeed getting to a point where you could do very interesting research in Tibetan material using all kinds of resources. Just make sure that the sites have qualified material, there are sometimes places that are, hmm, let's say interesting.
I've been trying to find a good commentary to be used in future blog entries, and I think I found it today. This is Maitreya's Distinguishing Phenomena and Pure Being, by Mipham, translated by Jim Scott under the guidance of Khenpo Tsultrim Gyamtso Rinpoche, ISBN 1-55939-215-0, Snow Lion.
The reason I like is is because:
We have mentioned Tibetan Buddhist Resource Center before, but did you know what you could do lineage research with the database provided?
Let's take an example Je Tsongkhapa's Sakya background, do a search on persons and tsong kha pa, and you get a reference to his ordination name page, or blo bzang grags pa'i dpal. You get all the writings of Je Tsongkhapa. In addition, at the bottom there's a list of his teachers, we know that Rendawa, or red mda' ba, was a Sakya, but hmm, no red mda' ba in the listing... Do a new search for persons, and you get his page, based on his other name gzhon nu blo gros. Ok, now we could compare the pages and indeed see Rendawa is in the listing, and go to his page. According to this page he had ten teachers, and you could go backwards in time and establish the lineage this way.
What did we learn? Well, there are various ways to establish lineages via known so called rnam thar texts, these are the biographies of famous teachers. But TBRC is really establing itself as a resource where you could do detective work and find out all kinds of cross-relational lineages, for example find out the Sakya lineage behind Je Tsongkhapa.
The other thing we learned is that Tibetan teachers have had many names, you need to learn to figure out the ordination name versus the given name, or another name given by their students as a homage, or a nick name... We will talk more about that later.
We will next look at how to learn to read titles presented inside TBRC, it's kind of cool to see what various teachers wrote.
Speaking of 'byung ba chen po, just for fun try to type this into Google and see if you get results. Try with other Tibetan words spelled as Wylie.
I would expect there will be more and more hits in future.
This leads me to the soap box. This is an interesting time we live in, there's' a network of knowledge that is slowly expanding. There will be more and more Tibetan material available for direct searches via any search engine. Same with RSS feeds, blogs, online translation tools, and much more.
We just need to both upload more knowledge, and build more connections between various services. The next post is about an amazing online web site that maybe some of you know about.
Here's another good source of original Tibetan texts that have been re-edited for fixing typos and so forth, Downloads from the Institute of Tibetan Classics. This is the group that is publishing 30 key Tibetan texts, called the Classics of Tibet Series. For example the Kalachakra commentary Ornament of Stainless Light translated by Gavin Kilty and the Lo Jong commentary called Mind Training translated by by Thubten Jinpa. was created by this group. This institute headed by the main translator of HH Dalai Lama, Thupten Jinpa.
The forthcoming Lamdre collections of translations by Cyrus Stearns is also one of the projects.
These PDF files correspond to the book translations, so you could follow along and see how the translations were done.
If you have followed along the entries, there have been examples of words and structures, as well as references to online Tibetan texts at Asian Classics Input Project. You could always do searches in the text material on the past and future words and structures. The idea is that the more you see the patterns in use, the more familiar you are to them, and after a while you naturally translate in your mind the words based on past habituation. A little bit like how karmic imprints operate, actually.
For example, the just mentioned Stages of Meditation by Master Kamalashila (part one) has many words and structural patterns earlier mentioned. You could figure out the Sanskrit title, Bhavanakrama (yes, the Tibetan says zh'a which is usually Bha), and in Tibetan bsgom pa'i rim pa. We have mentioned bsgom pa or bsgom before, meditation, so rim pa is new, that's stages. Remember the use of pa, ba (or po, bo) to make nouns of other words such as verbs) the 'i thingie is another particle we will mention later, a genitive particle, usually means of, and remember that particles connect something from the right to the left...
One way to get up to speed with Tibetan translation is to examine existing translations of a common text, and see how it's done -- this with an option to first try to translate the text, and then see what the outcome is, comparing it with various other translations.
One of the most famous Indian Buddhist commentaries is Shantideva's Bodhisattva Way of Life. It has been translated into English many times. Here are some references where to download original Tibetan texts, and so forth.
Here's a site where you could get the Tibetan as a PDF file. A commentary by Khenpo Kunpal including some input in Wylie is here. You could get the Asian Classics Input version here.
Check out Tibetan Buddhist Resource Center, you could order individual pechas as PDF files from this place, or whole collections, for example the collected writings of the Five Patriarchs of Sakya is available there. They ask for a donation, but it's for a very good cause, Gene Smith is the main reason a lot of the Tibetan texts are available for us here in the West.
PDF files are handy, as you could zoom in on tiny details, especially withi smudgy words, and when you are not sure if the letter is a DA or an NGA (one of my main headaches).
