zhen pa bzhi bral - first line

1. OK, this is the first of the four attachments to be free from. tse 'di as mentioned before is this life, la is pointing to this life from something on the right side, or zhen. zhen is attachment, na is a particle defining when, and what it points to on the right side is chos pa, dharma practitioner, however it's negated, so it's no dharma practitioner.

One way to fully translate this is: You are no dharma practitioner if you are attached to this life.

As for the meaning, there are many, the obvious one is that one is pleasant with one's life, thus is not achieving for any spiritual realizations. Another view Jetsun Drakpa Gyeltsen points out in his commentary is that anyone who takes for granted what is presented as how things are, by parents, school teachers, friends, politicians, and so on, they are not trying to figure out themselves how the world really works, thus they are not dharma practitioners.

Basic Sentence Structures - The Verb "Is"

It's good to repeat from time to time! Let's just look at a very basic sentence structure, such as "HH Dalai Lama is a Buddhist."

In Tibetan, this could be: ye shes nor bu chos pa yin. HH Dalai Lama is known by Tibetans as ye shes nor bu, it's one of many titles and names, they don't call him Dalai Lama directly!

chos pa means dharma practitioner, remember the system of making words from other words by adding pa, po, ma or mo...

The last word is the verb yin, is, to be. Note there's another 'is' verb, this is yod, to exist. There are rules when yin or yod should be used -- more about that later.

Going back to the typical sentence structure, in Tibetan you state: HH Dalai Lama buddhist is. In other words, you have subject-object-verb. When translating, it's very common to first look at the starting point of the sentence, then skip to the verb, and go backwards, as the particles also point backwards. You should also be aware of nested sentences where a particle is pointing at a whole group of smaller parts, but that's a later story. Also, some sentences start with a connecting word, so don't always assume that the subject is the first word in a sentence.

Another word for dharma practitioner is nang pa. nang means inside, so nang pa could also be roughly defined as an insider. It's actually a good word, Buddhists are looking for solutions for problems inside their minds, not outside.

Homework: Spell out the same sentence using nang pa instead. Figure out what ye shes nor bu is when translated. Go through the Compendium of All Trainings by Master Shantideva, and find short sentences ending with yin, and figure out the subject, object and verb.

Complete Sentence - Karma is movement of the mind and what it brings about

Ok, now we have the second line from the fourth chapter of Abhidharma-Kosha defining what karma really is:


(click on the picture for a bigger image)..

de ni points at the the earlier sentene that talked about las (karma). So karma is sems pa, movement of the mind, dang (and) des (by that) byas (creates). In this case I translated it with a more flexible approach: Karma is movement of the mind and what it brings about.

Feel free to look up this sentence inside Abhidharma-kosha. It's also very good to memorize these two sentences. I someone asks you what's the Buddhist worldview about how the world is created, you could use the first line of chapter four, and if someone asks what is karma then, you use the second line, so you sound like a Geshe!

Complete Sentence - World is Created By Karma

Here's the complete, famous, sentence from Master Vasubandhu's Abhidharma-kosha text, based on the set of words we went through recently:


Click to zoom in.


This is the first line in the fourth chapter of this root text, dealing with Buddhist cosmology, how the mind works, karma, what are mental afflictions, and so on. The third chapter presented how the world looks like, so this is the punch line in the opening lines of chapter four dealing with karma. In other words, all those myriad worlds described in chapter three are due to karma sentient beings experience. The next line gives a quick summary what karma itself is, so maybe we should go through that one next. That way you could memorize the first two lines of this chapter, and explain to someone how the world works!

The other thing to note is that verses usually start and end with a long line called shad (SHAH), unless the last syllable has a ga letter, then there's no last shad. This is one way to separate sentences in verses.

The other note is that the verses were designed to be memorized, so they are of a certain syllable amount, for example in this case seven syllables, a classical format. This makes it possible to sing out the verses, or remember the parts, less or more than seven is a problem. It also causes the original translators to do very clever ways to either leave out words without causing problems with the meaning, or add filler words. We will see this from time to time when we look at verse scriptures.

PS: Click on the Abhidharma-kosha link above and use the find feature of your browser to find the specific line!

Homage - Complete Sentence

OK, based on the words and grammar we have gone through so far, we could build a complete homage sentence. I've included an image of the sentence, as not all systems have Tibetan fonts included :




Click on the image to zoom in.

As a home assignment you could go through the spelling and learn how each letter is forming the sentence, where things are stacked, and so on. You could also try to translate this text based on the earlier postings in this blog... Note that this could be a very common homage at the beginning of a commentary.

Check out the homage in the beginning from Bodhisattva Way of Life, from Asian Classics Input Project, does it look familiar? As a bonus project, look at the homage section in the Heart Sutra and figure out the additional homage objects mentioned.