This morning (Monday August 16th) marked the commencement of the 12th IATS conference. The opening included a general welcome by Tsering Shakya; followed by a brief welcome, a few jokes about wearing ties, and an exhortation to find a way to transmit the important knowledge held by “the world’s brain trust on Tibet” to wider audiences by Paul Evans. More welcomes followed with Pitman Potter making a comment about the IATS program being the culmination of the development of the Tibetan studies program at UBC and great support was shown for Tsering Skakya’s heroic work helping to make this year’s IATS a reality. After three light speeches, Charles Ramble gave the official IATS presidential welcoming address.
Dr. Ramble began on a somber and touching note by recognizing those colleagues who had passed on since the last IATS conference. A minute of silence was observed and then Dr. Ramble reminded us all of those colleagues who could not attend due to political issues, refusal of permissions to travel, or visa denials. Perhaps this kind of sensitivity is one of the great qualities that lead Dr. Ramble to be elected the president of IATS in the first place. Then again, he may also have got in on his wit, which was displayed in style after beginning on a serious note. Dr. Ramble extended his metaphor of relating attending IATS conferences to the ancient olympic games so far that it managed to come back around and delight everyone.
One of the most interesting things I would like to highlight from his speech was the time he spent making note of the fact that “scholars and work groups not associated with universities constitute a vital part of Tibetan studies.” He noted clearly that some of the most significant developments in Tibetan studies occur outside of academia and this work rarely appears in academic journals. However, he noted, IATS conferences are places where “unsung heroes” can present their research. And speaking of publishing… Some of the IATS conference proceedings are being made into digital texts! Some are already finished and others may be made available online, “in the future”, at thlib.org. This most exciting news rounded out the speech, along with the words, “let the games begin.”
Monday, August 16th, Panel 4: Contributions to Tibetan Literature: Texts, Genres and Generic Terms
There were really too many great papers to discuss here, but I must admit to feeling that the most enjoyable was Giacomella Orofino’s “The Long Voyage of a Trickster Story from Ancient Greece to Tibet“.
Unfortunately I missed most of Dan Martin’s lively discussion entitled, “Literary Tributes and Meaningful Attributions: A New History of the Ding-ri-ba verses of Pha Dam-pa Sangs-rgyas.” Here he discussed some of his findings related to his research on the different versions of The Tingri Hundred: The Last Will and Testament of Padampa Sanggyé. (pha rje btsun dam pa sangs rgyas kyi zhal gdams ding ri brgya rtsa ma). In fact, Padampa’s Tingri testament is found in several versions of varying length, not just in 100 sections as the title indicates. One of the point’s I was able to catch at the tail end of Dan’s talk was that he found evidence of a kind of “moralizing” of the later versions of the texts, and the older terms were progressively updated in different versions, which seemed to get smaller over time as well.
While other papers opened a discussion about genre much was provisional and nothing particularly concrete came out of the discussions that I heard. One interesting paper was given by Peter Verhagen of Leiden University entitled “Tools of the Trade of the Tibetan Translators.” This paper included a list of texts which Dr. Verhagen believes were used as tools by the early Tibetan translators of Sanskrit texts.
After a long day of fascinating panels, in which one and all suffered without air-conditioning, a wonderful banquet was held out of doors at the beautiful Museum of Anthropology.
We were lead through the museum and I was even treated to a short description of the creation story of the Haida people of the Northwest.
Here, Raven is seen coaxing the first peoples out of their clam shell. According to this fascinating version of the creation story, human beings are here reluctantly and were perhaps even tricked into living on the Earth. Raven is like Coyote of the plains, or in Tibet, perhaps we could say the trickster ཉི་ཆོས་བཟང་པོ་ (Nyi chos bzang po) or ཨ་ཁུ་སྟོ་པ་ (a khu bstan pa).
Inside the museum…
Tomorrow I hope to have the time to blog about several of the fascinating papers given at the Madhyamaka panel which saw Kevin Vose, Yael Bentor, Jeffery Hopkins, Tom Tillemanns, Jose Cabezon, Donald Lopez and quite a few other “rock stars” of Tibetan Buddhist studies all in one room. There were no fist fights but the verbal banter, eye rolling, and smirking was something special to behold. Tune in next time for some in-depth reporting 😉
