Still In India

I am still away traveling in India. The Translator's Conference was over last week and I have been traveling and doing research since then. Most of the work has been non-Sakya related, however I am now in Manduwalla the home of Ngor Magon. The back end of the monastery where the monk's quarters are located is directly outside my bedroom window. I also plan to visit the new Gongkar Monastery about a half hour drive from here back towards Paonta Sahb and Chandigarh,and then visit Sakya Center in Rajpur.

The image above is a prayer to Sakya Pandita Kunga Gyaltsen composed by Jamyang Khyentse Wangpo. It is designed as a visual diagram that can be read in almost every direction. It is very large and painted at the entrance way to the old Dzongsar Institute main temple which is now Deer Park Institute. A new Dzongsar Institute has been built a few kilometers away. There are two other prayers done in the same way, a Shakyamuni and a Longchenpa prayer. I will upload these to the HAR database when I return to New York.

Translators Conference - Hosted by Khyentse Foundation

I will be attending the Translators Conference in Bir, India, during the month of March 2009. New updates to the SRG Blog may be few and far between. Be patient there is lots more to come with images from the major Sakya monasteries of Tibet, new biographies and links.

New Websites & Blogs

The Jonang Foundation website is well worth looking at and book marking. It is the most important and reliable Jonang site so far on the internet. The Jonang, Bodong, and Shalu traditions are the closest Tibetan Buddhist schools to Sakya both philosophically and especially in Tantric tradition and lineage. Khyentse Chokyi Lodro went so far as to say that these three were branch schools of Sakya.

TBRC has a new Blog addition to their website. The website overall is intended for an academic audience as well as Tibetan Lamas and teachers. It is essentially written in Tibetan language or Wylie transliteration. The Blog is a great addition to the site by allowing everybody an insight into the workings of this vast bibliographic database.

Sakya Resource Centre: (NOT the Sakya Resource Guide). "The present site is devoted to the study of the Sakya school, one of the major religious traditions within Tibetan Buddhism. Launched by dedicated students (undergraduate and doctoral) of Tibetan studies who do research on prominent Sakyapa masters (see also Current Research Projects), the website provides access to scholarly resources and distributes free e-texts that are useful for religious-historical research on the Sakya tradition and its representatives. It highlights valuable research tools that are available via the web, and has begun to host a collection of significant texts in digital form. At present, our inputted text material focuses on the Sakyapa-s during the late fourteenth and fifteenth century, a period characterized by a still-ongoing doctrical exchange between the different traditions that gave rise to numerous saints and scholars. In future, we aim to provide a comprehensive research platform and plan to extend our text input activity and cooperation with researchers and institutions in order to build up a free digital text archive for research and reference into the Sakya tradition."

"For questions or suggestions pertaining to this website, please contact the Sakya Resource Centre at info@sakya-resource.de. We also ask you to contact us if you notice any errors in the e-texts." (Taken from the SRC Home page).

The Thirteen Golden Dharmas (New Images)

A new set of images depicting the Thirteen Golden Dharmas has been uploaded to the Himalayan Art Resources website. These images are from a Mongolian version of the Rinjung Lhantab of the 4th Panchen Lama. The Rinjung is based on the text of the Jonang Lama Taranatha. He compiled a very large collection of sadhana practices many of which came from Sakya lineages. This collection is very good for looking at Sakya deities that are not commonly depicted such as Red Tara, Red Sarasvati, and the Twenty-one Taras according to the system of Suryagupta

All of the Mongolian images from the Rinjung Lhantab are slowly being uploaded and catalogued. This is a complete illuminated text currently belonging to the Volkerkundemuseum der Universitat Zurich, Switzerland and the same subject matter as contained in the publication Buddhist Iconography by Lokesh Chandra.

Two New Sakya Publications

Two new publications in the WSTB series (Vienna Studies in
Tibetology and Buddhism).

WSTB No. 68. Jowita Kramer "A noble Abbot from Mustang. Life and
Works of Glo-bo mKhan-chen (1456-1532)" (2008) 334p. ISBN:
978-3-902501-07-3. EUR 26.00

WSTB No. 69. Pascale Hugon "Trésors du raisonnement. Sa skya
Pan dita et ses prédécesseurs tibétains sur les modes de
fonctionnement de la pensée et le fondement de l'inférence" Édition et
traduction annotée du quatrième chapitre et d'une section du dixième
chapitre du Tshad ma rigs pa'i gter (2008) 2 vols; 854p. ISBN:
978-3-902501-08-0. EUR 52.50

Orders can be placed at the WSTB website.

Profile of the Web Author

A new profile has been added to the Himalayan Art Resources website. For those of you who care to know where I disappeared to for the last 10 years then look to the HAR website for a profile. It was primarily written by James Shaheen of the Buddhist Tricycle Magazine.

We are trying to give the HAR website and staff a higher profile so that we can be in a better position for grant applications and fund-raising. We live in difficult financial times and New York, the epicenter of North American finance, seems to be hit harder than other places. This is probably because it is also the center of financial corruption. On a positive note, New York is also the museum capital of the world and probably has more Himalayan and Tibetan art than any other city in the Western world. See the New York City Outline Page.

Zimwock Rinpoche Returns

After many years of leading a quiet life away from the spotlight Zimwock Rinpoche of the Tsar sub-school of Sakya (biography) has returned. Zimwock Tenzin Trinley Ling has been established as Rinpoche's seat in Kathmandu, Nepal. Zimwock and Chogye are the two principal Labrangs (houses) of Nalendra Monastery (history) in Phanpo, Tibet. The previous Zimwock was regarded as a Mahakala emanation and passed away in Dharmsala, India, in 1963. (For more information please see the biography of Chogye Tri Rinpoche. Also see the Project to Rebuild Nalendra Monastery).