The Nalanda Translation Committee And their Annual Newsletter

Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche was unique among Buddhist teachers in the West in that he put an enormous effort into tailoring the path for Western students. At the time, most Tibetan teachers trained their Western students as if they were native Tibetans. There were long hours of rituals and chanting practice, all in Tibetan, before students even understood the basic tenets of Buddhist view and how to meditate, let alone the Tibetan language.

Trungpa Rinpoche knew that in order for his students to fully experience the teachings, they had to understand the words, and that meant translating the teachings into English. When students had established a foundation in the mindfulness awareness practice of shamatha-vipashyana, Rinpoche began introducing a few liturgical practices, but only after giving extensive explanations and first translating them into English. These were limited at first to daily chants and the Sadhana of Mahamudra.

In order to do this Trungpa Rinpoche gathered a small group of students with a keen interest and at least some capability in languages to learn Tibetan. He spent many hours working with this group to create a deep understanding of the material being translated as well as to develop a very precise vocabulary for key terms and concepts. Rinpoche called this group the Nalanda Translation Committee.

Since its inception in 1974, the Committee has translated an enormous number of chants and practices ranging from the Heart Sutra and the Kagyu Lineage Chant to the two complex hundred-page sadhana practices that form the heart of the path Rinpoche offered to his students. It is purely thanks to the Nalanda Translation Committee that all of the traditional practices that make up our path are available in English, along with extensive instructional manuals. And now both the translated texts and these manuals are eagerly sought after by practitioners from many other teachers due to their clarity and beauty. 

Unbeknownst to all of his Western students, Trungpa Rinpoche authored a large number of texts while he lived in Tibet, when he was between the ages of 4 and 19. Rinpoche’s nephew, Karma Senge Rinpoche, has spent the past twenty years searching out and compiling these hundreds of pages composed by Trungpa Rinpoche before his escape from Tibet in 1959. This collection totals about 400 pages and spans a diverse range of topics, including practice liturgies, practice instructions, biographies and poems and songs.

For the past 10 years, the committee has been focused on translating these early writings of Trungpa Rinpoche. To share their progress in this work, the Committee publishes an annual newsletter which also includes choice selections from the texts they are currently translating each year. For various reasons this newsletter is only available in print. We encourage you to sign up to receive this newsletter and in doing so learn more about our teacher and his youthful activities, and especially his early literary output.

In the Dharma,

Jane, Gene, Derek

WMC Senior Teachers