On the auspicious day of Saga Dawa Düchen, we celebrated the birth, awakening, and parinirvana of the Buddha with an introduction to our latest publication: The Perfection of Wisdom in Twenty-Five Thousand Lines.
Speakers
John Canti | Senior Editor @84000: Translating the Words of the Buddha
John Canti studied medicine and anthropology at Cambridge University (UK) and qualified as a doctor in 1975. While still a medical student he met and began to study with some of the great Tibetan Buddhist masters of the older generation, especially Kangyur Rinpoche, Dudjom Rinpoche, and Dilgo Khyentse Rinpoche. After some years of medical work in northeastern Nepal in the late 1970s he went to the Dordogne, France, to complete two three-year retreats at Chanteloube, and has remained primarily based there ever since.
John is a founding member of the Padmakara Translation Group, was a Tsadra Foundation Fellow from 2001-2012, and was awarded the 2016 Khyentse Foundation Fellowship. In 2009, when 84000 first started, he was appointed editorial chair of 84000, and in 2023 has become senior editor.
His interest in the Kangyur and Tengyur has continued to grow as the project has taken shape, and he feels more and more fascinated by their origins and history, their range of content, and above all by the significance of the extraordinary body of literature the two collections have preserved.
Joie Chen | PhD Candidate, Buddhist Studies, Harvard University
Joie is a PhD candidate in Buddhist Studies at Harvard University, where her research looks at the confluence of various modes of learnedness in Tibetan Buddhism, in particular how the language and visual arts play into the formation of a learned Buddhist person. She holds a BA in Film Studies and English from Yale University and an MPhil in Tibetan & Himalayan Studies from the University of Oxford.
