Khyentse Foundation is pleased to announce the official launch of the Kumarajiva Project (note: website is currently only in Chinese). KF’s latest translation effort focuses primarily on translating into Chinese all the texts in the Tibetan Buddhist canon that are not currently available in the Chinese canon. After a successful pilot project and several years of extensive research and planning, the Kumarajiva Project is now prepared to dive into the immense task of translating more than 130,000 pages of Tibetan texts into Chinese.  Watch Dzongsar Khyentse Rinpoche introduce the project. The Kumarajiva Project is known in Chinese as 圓滿法藏-佛典漢譯計畫, the transliteration of which is “Yu’an Man Fa-Zang.” The Chinese name translates roughly to “enriching the treasury of the dharma” or “making the treasury more perfect than it already is.” The “treasury” refers to the Chinese Buddhist canons. Also, there are numerous texts from other Buddhist canons that are not available in Chinese. The vision of the Kumarajiva Project is to make all Buddhist texts available in Chinese, starting by translating the texts that are available in Tibetan but not in Chinese.

Each entry in Decoding CCP begins with the term or phrase in English, Chinese and Tibetan. Each deploys, wherever possible, China’s official translation since China makes much effort to translate its slogans into English, Tibetan and many other languages and maintains lists of officially approved terminologies. This is the core methodology that makes Decoding CCP unique. Those official versions are the party-state performing itself, declaiming as true the perspective of the performer. It is the position of “speaking from”, which linguistics theorists call epideixis. Implicit in this speaking position is not only the right to be heard, but also accepted and believed, as tools in China’s efforts to expand discourse power. Only after listing China’s epideictic stance in three languages does each Decoding CCP entry move on from “speaking from” to “speaking to”– from epideixis to apodeixis. To speak to puts us in the position of hearers, reactive to CCP’s speaking position. How hearers hear the performative declamations of the party-state’s legislative voice is key. Neither Tibetans nor the wider world dismisses China’s propaganda as nonsense. It requires careful consideration, not kneejerk opposition. So Decoding CCP takes care not to propose counter-propaganda to China’s official propaganda. The transition from epideixis to apodeixis takes the user on a journey to see through official eyes and then through the eyes of those most targeted by CCP formulations, especially the recalcitrant ethnicities who stubbornly remain themselves and refuse to assimilate. This is a journey worth taking. It reveals multiple viewpoints and leaves users to make up their own minds as to what conclusions to draw. We can cross rivers of uncertainty and arrive with greater insight by looking both ways. This is the Tibetan tradition of worldmaking and remaking. It is how Tibetans, thrown into exile, found their feet in very different worlds. It is how the 97 per cent of global Tibetans who remain in Tibet roll with China’s new world order yet keep their feet.

Vaše vstupenka do Asie, Váš průvodce Orientem....

Orientalistický Expres, z. s. je sdružením českých současných i bývalých studentů a dalších členů akademické obce, jejichž badatelský zájem se soustředí či soustředil na některý z regionů Orientu v nejširším možném významu tohoto slova.

BuddhaNexus is a text-matching database with visualization capabilities that draws its data from Buddhist literary corpora in Pāli, Sanskrit, Tibetan, and Chinese. It allows users to conduct intralingual searches (e.g. searching among texts in Chinese only) of individual volumes for textual matches across the collection in question. Additionally, users are also able to produce Sankey visualizations of connections within different collections in the same language, which offers an intertextual view across collections, sections within collections, and within single texts.

The ERC funded research project BuddhistRoad creates a new framework to enable understanding of the complexities in the dynamics of cultural encounter and religious transfer in pre-modern Eastern Central Asia—the vast area extending from the Taklamakan desert to Northeast China. This region was the crossroads of ancient civilisations. Its uniqueness was determined by complex dynamics of religious and cultural exchanges gravitating around an ancient communication artery, known as the Silk Road. Buddhism was one major factor in this exchange; its transfer predetermined the transfer of adjacent aspects of culture.

International Dunhuang Project (IDP) is a ground-breaking international collaboration to make information and images of all manuscripts, paintings, textiles and artefacts from Dunhuang and archaeological sites of the Eastern Silk Road freely available on the Internet and to encourage their use through educational and research programmes.