Symposium on “Cross-Cultural Transmission of Buddhist Texts: Theories and Practices of Translation”

23 July 2012

July 23–25, 2012, Universität Hamburg, Hamburg

Since the Buddhist intellectual history and culture of Tibet have been shaped by an enormous bulk of translated literature, namely, the so-called bKa’ ’gyur (“Words [of Buddha] in Translation”) and bsTan ’gyur (“Treatises in Translation”), one of the main concerns and interest of those of us involved in Tibetan Buddhist Textual Scholarship is theories and practices of translation, that is, mainly from Sanskrit (or other Indic languages) to Tibetan, but also, to a much lesser extend, from Chinese and Central-Asian languages such as Khotanese. The state-funded translation projects of ancient Tibet are known to be unprecedented in the history of mankind, both in terms of quality and scale. Another major translation project of Buddhist materials has been that into Chinese, by way of which Buddhism reached also Korea and Japan. Apart of having to deal with the outcome of these translation projects of the past, modern Buddhologists spend a great part of their time translating Buddhist material to modern languages.
As one of its activities for the year 2012, the KC-TBTS is organizing a three-day symposium on “Cross-Cultural Transmission of Buddhist Texts: Theories and Practices of Translation.” The symposium is to take place at the University of Hamburg on July 23–25, 2012, and will be funded by the KC-TBTS and the Fritz Thyssen Stiftung für Wissenschaftsförderung. Twenty-two invited speakers are expected to present their papers on various issues related to the topic.

• Click here to download the abstracts of the papers as a PDF file.
• Click here to download the timetable as a PDF file.

University of Hamburg, Main Building
Akademischer Senatssaal
Edmund-Siemers-Allee 1
20146 Hamburg