Media

The global non-profit initiative 84000: Translating the Words of the Buddha, founded by the renowned Bhutanese lama, author, and filmmaker Dzongsar Jamyang Khyentse Rinpoche, has announced the establishment of a new assistant professorship in Buddhist studies at the University of Toronto.

The university’s Department for the Study of Religion has received a five-year renewable grant from 84000 to establish the assistant professorship, which is expected to enhance its growing Buddhist studies program. The holder of the new position will focus on teaching Classical Tibetan and conducting research related to the Tibetan Buddhist canon.

The University of California, Santa Barbara, has teamed up with nonprofit 84000: Translating the Words of the Buddha to commit to translating all 230,000 pages of the Tibetan Buddhist canon into English through a new project called the Buddhist Texts Translation Initiative at UC Santa Barbara.

Students from the university’s Buddhist studies department have already worked with 84000 on translations, but this project provides further support for training new translators and welcomes two editors from 84000 as visiting scholars.

The Buddhist studies program at the University of California at Santa Barbara (UCSB) has announced a new partnership with the nonprofit 84000: Translating the Words of the Buddha, founded by the renowned Bhutanese lama, author, and filmmaker Dzongsar Jamyang Khyentse Rinpoche. The partnership aims to further the work of the 84000 project in translating the entire Tibetan Buddhist canon.

The vision of 84000 is to make the entirety of the Tibetan Buddhist Canon—some 231,000 pages in length—available to English speakers throughout the world. It has relied upon skilled translators around the world including academics, Western monastics, and countless Tibetan teachers and masters.

The global non-profit initiative 84000: Translating the Words of the Buddha, founded by the renowned Bhutanese lama, author, and filmmaker Dzongsar Jamyang Khyentse Rinpoche, has published a special, freely downloadable edition of the classic Buddhist sutra The Hundred Deeds. Originally translated by 84000’s editorial team and made available for the first time in English in early 2020, this special edition of the sutra is accompanied by a series of illustrations shared by children from around the world during COVID-19 lockdown, as part of a Dharmic collaboration that 84000 hopes will offer a sense of hope during the ongoing pandemic with an emphasis on a profound message: that simple deeds often have outsized consequences.

On May 26, 84000, a California-based non-profit dedicated to translating the Tibetan Buddhist Canon into modern languages, released a freely downloadable special edition of The Hundred Deeds sutra. While 84000’s English translation of The Hundred Deeds was first published in February 2020, the special edition includes illustrations from children around the world who participated in #The100Deeds project—a collaborative effort to engage with the sutra’s 120-plus short stories and share its timeless lessons on resilience, empathy, and karmic responsibility.

On the occasion of the Lunar New Year, the global nonprofit 84000: Translating the Words of the Buddha is announcing publication of a new translation of an important sūtra known as The Application of Mindfulness of the Sacred Dharma. This scripture, one of the longest texts of the Tibetan Buddhist Canon, has never before been made fully available in English.

“The work may not be economically productive, but we humans really need meaning as well as material prosperity, and it is becoming obvious that the systems of ethics and morality that underpin society, and more broadly our goals and aspirations, badly need basic rethinking.”

The graphic designer Milton Glaser died on June 26th, on his 91st birthday. Glaser’s work is famous: everybody knows, for example, his “I ♥ NY” logo, or maybe his poster of Bob Dylan, or his work as co-founder of New York magazine.Lesser known, though, are his contributions to the visual presentation of Buddhism in the modern era.

Global non-profit initiative 84000: Translating the Words of the Buddha has reached a major landmark of 10 years of intensive scholarship, translating and preserving the sacred Tibetan Buddhist Canon. To celebrate the occasion and to raise awareness of the profound significance of this ongoing mission, 84000 is today launching a video and social media campaign featuring the voices of Chinese singer-songwriter Leah Dou and British actress Joanna Lumley.

Spoken by the bodhisattva Maitreya, the Rice Seedling Sutra is one of the most important Buddhist sutras on the topic of dependent arising, the basic Buddhist doctrine that everything depends on something else for its existence. Introduction by Rory Lindsay, editor at 84000.

How an idea sparked off the greatest Buddhist project in modern history… A similar project of this weight took place in Tibet in the 8th century, more than 1,000 years ago, when King Trisong Duetsen launched the translation of the Buddha’s teachings from Sanskrit to Tibetan. It set in motion one of the greatest cultural exchanges the world had ever known at the time, or since.

Terminology. Syntax. Diction. All words likely to send my mind wandering. And yet there I was, at the conference of 84000: Translating the Words of Buddha, in Bodhgaya, India, in a room full of high lamas and scholars who were convening to determine how to transmit Mahayana teachings to the world. It wasn’t just important. It was fascinating.