Philosophy Professor Linda Patrik is collaborating with Tenzin Namdak, a Tibetan monk and scholar, to digitally encode ancient Tibetan texts and their English translations so they can be made accessible and searched on line. The project brings together Union's East Asian Studies Program and two international scholarly organizations, the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) and Nitartha International.
“Tenzin and I prepared for the work last summer by attending a training workshop at the University of Victoria, in British Columbia,” Patrik explains. “From a digitizing center in Katmandu, he is publishing ancient Tibetan texts as books but also intends to publish these texts as web pages and in CD form.” He and Patrik are working on encoding the English translations in this East Asian Studies/Freeman-funded project. (The Freeman Grant has now been extended for a fourth year at Union.)
TEI establishes an international and interdisciplinary standard that allows libraries, museums, publishers, and individual scholars to share research, teachings, and preservation efforts.
The undertaking formally began at the Nitartha Institute, which meets every summer in Canada. “Here,” says Patrik,”we meet for close collaboration one month a year, and for the other eleven months, Nitartha's translators work on English translations and its editors work on transcripts of Buddhist teachings. So each year, new texts are being made accessible.”
The Dzogchen Ponlop Rinpoche, the Tibetan teacher who heads the Nitartha Institute, is also called “the computer lama.” Tenzin Namdak, his assistant, manages the Katmandu center for Nitartha International, a New York non-profit educational corporation founded by The Dzogchen Ponlop Rinpoche to digitally preserve Tibetan texts and support the Tibetan educational system.
When these monks were forced to leave Tibet for India, they found that it wasn't practical to reproduce their sacred traditional texts in print, so they decided to digitize instead. So far, they've digitized 300 to 500 meditation, philosophy and ritual texts from the Nyingma and Kagyu traditions. (Texts from other traditions-for example, the Dalai Lama's Gelugpa tradition-are currently being translated in a parallel project at the University of Virginia.)
“At Nitartha” says Patrik, “we are working together to digitize, translate, teach, and preserve, using the technology of the West.” The Union College TEI team has learned enough to encode a 90-page document, “which I use in my upper-level Zen and Buddhism course. It's now in the last stages of being debugged; it will then be posted on the web.”
There is one more major step after that-to get the documents online in Tibetan script. This will take time, explains Patrik, “since Tibetan script itself is not yet in Unicode.” (Unicode is the universal character encoding standard which allows processing, storage, and interchange of text data, no matter what the platform, the program, or the language.)
“Tibetan has a very complicated script,” Patrik explains. “For example, there are no spaces between words, and sometimes words stack up five characters high.”
“In two years, we should be able to put text into Unicode, and then into TEI. It will then be possible to link translations in all other languages to the Tibetan text, paragraph by paragraph. TEI can also make texts searchable. Up to now, only Tibetans and a few other scholars and graduate students have seen the books.”
The living meaning of the teachings is preserved in debate and oral discussion between students and teachers. Patrik team-taught a course on Buddhist logic and debate at the Nitartha Institute during her stay. As she explains it, “The Tibetan way of strengthening the intellect is to allow the mind to concoct certain beliefs (that is, to make up its mind) and then watch itself deconstruct these beliefs (often in collaboration/debate with others), until the mind is empty of all beliefs. The Tibetans aren't so much interested in the mind as a thoroughfare for all thoughts, so much as a clearer space for accurate thoughts. They still do believe in ultimate truth. It's very un-postmodern of them.”
The teachings help develop a certain kind of capability called “analytical meditation,” which involves meditating on a philosophical passage instead of on a mantra or a candle flame. “It's a form of insight meditation, in which you use reasoning and conceptual thought to expose and examine your biases and presumptions. It is also taken up in formal Tibetan debates, which tend to be about philosophical notions of reality. This is different from Zen Buddhism's koan study, which is designed to frustrate the logical mind. In Tibetan analytical meditation, you're supposed to be logical, but you're supposed to carry it through till the conceptual mind exhausts itself.” Adds Patrik, “We Westerners tend to be conceptual, discursive-so this method takes this tendency and pushes it hard- and then in the silence of exhaustion comes an opening for something to happen.”
Topics of debate range from whether enlightenment is permanent or impermanent to causality (cause and effect). As she explains it, “It's a process of pulling out all the consequences of a belief until it collapses into absurdity, contradiction-and hopefully clears the way to a seeing that can't be done with the conceptual mind. It's a way not of learning, but of unlearning.”
Patrik says she came to enjoy debate the Tibetan way and has actually been teaching it in her courses at Union, at first in a feminism course in 2000. “It helps give women students a voice. They love the debating. When the monks who were here last spring engaged in a debate, the students loved that too.”
Patrik, on sabbatical this year, is working on a book on Buddhist feminism, focusing on contemporary issues, which women who are studying Buddhism might be interested in-including abortion, stem-cell research, and what it means to bow to a teacher-and to be a woman in a highly patriarchal religion.
New IDEAS
In another converging technologies initiative, Patrik's students are publishing the research of philosophy undergraduates in an electronic journal, called IDEAS.
The idea for IDEAS was born in late 2003, when Patrik and a group of students began designing an electronic journal in Asian Studies, and put out a call for papers, posting it on listserves, and distributing flyers at academic conferences. They hired a graphic artist to design web pages.
“The students and I make up the editorial board, deciding which articles to accept. For each article, the contributing student's professor has to sign off on the authenticity of the work. Submissions have come in from all across America and Europe. Two editorial board members send comments back to the author for revision. Students are now working on ways to publicize the e-journal, including sending postcards to Asian Studies programs (which these days means most colleges). Articles for the second issue are due in January 2006.”
Patrik believes this is the first electronic journal that publishes research articles by undergraduates in Asian Studies. “Interestingly,” she adds, “this generation is finding online publishing more valid than appearing in print.”
The IDEAS journal is at http://www.ideas.union.edu.