Dharma Wheel

so you think the tibetans were wrong to translate the sanskrit names into tibetan? I have been talking only about the translation of Tibetan into other languages. I advocate transcription rather than translation, and support the standardisation of a phonetically-based transcription system for writi...

dharmagoat wrote:What about proper nouns, like place names and people's names? These can't be translated.

I can see how the misunderstanding came about. It would have been clearer if I had said "These are better not translated."

wtf? vajrayogini= dorjenaljorma, hevajra=kyedorje ive seen english translations of names too like "diamond sow" for vajravarahi How would you translate "ཆོས་རྒྱལ་ནམ་མཁའི་ནོར་བུ་" (chos rgyal nam mkha'i nor bu)? Dharma King Sky Jewel but why would you want to translate his name? My point exactly.

gad rgyangs wrote:wtf? vajrayogini= dorjenaljorma, hevajra=kyedorje ive seen english translations of names too like "diamond sow" for vajravarahi

How would you translate "ཆོས་རྒྱལ་ནམ་མཁའི་ནོར་བུ་" (chos rgyal nam mkha'i nor bu)?

if you cant understand the tibetan you should probably just use english (or whatever ones native language is) except for the mantras. after all, the tibetans themselves translated everything into their own language, just keeping the mantras in sanskrit. I don't agree. And what about proper nouns, l...

yes, I learned that one when I studied with Nicolas Tournadre at UVa one summer, but even then we didn't really use it at all: we learned to pronounce Tibetan correctly from day one., learning the traditional spelling da-ra-ta-tra-kigu-tri (see you cant even really put that phonetically correctly i...

everybody and their mother have their own phonetic transliteration system, none of which are very good. easier to just learn how to pronounce tibetan. I agree. But some are better than others. The THL Simplified Phonetic Transcription of Standard Tibetan is an attempt to standardise a phonetically-...

Hello Yudron!

Morning practice: how do YOU start? Sleepily. When I am practicing properly, I wake up at 4:30 and do 25 minutes of śamatha mediation right away (my cushion is 1 metre from my bed). I will then return to my meditation at regular intervals throughout the day. I find that my meditation in the early a...

Oh yes, and if you smoke dope, even to celebrate a friend's success, you will be sent to a hell realm where you will be deprived of your genitalia and have nasty black-skinned, orange-eyed demons thrust red-hot iron rods into your lungs, roasting you from the inside out...

Marijuana seems to enhance the "special effects" one can experience in meditation. Because buddhist meditation generally dismisses such experiences as distracting side-effects, marijuana serves no useful purpose in buddhism. If anything, its effects interfere with proper meditation practice, and the...

They are often quoted in support of a view that 'really there is nothing to be learned, no discipline to be mastered, there is no real distinction between the wise and the foolish, everything is right just as it is ('bodhi and nirvana are hitching posts for donkeys'). So it always seems to let you ...

The transformative power of that experience is much more important than the experience itself. If you gain a lot from it, if it helps you greatly, does it really matter if it was a hallucination? Does it really matter if it was your mind playing tricks on you? Or what really matters is how that exp...

Maybe I am wrong, but what I am seeing here is basically the argument "the sutras weren't written down for centuries after the Buddha died anyway, so I don't accept them as true." Which to me seems like a largely irrelevant opinion to offer on a Buddhist forum. This issue is highly relevant. Is the...

Wesley - you don't have to see the teacher every week or every month. Maybe a couple of weeks a year would be good. Best wishes. Andrew Having a teacher that you meet regularly is very important if you decide to take up buddhist practice. If at this stage you are simply wanting to ask questions, I ...

No,well the point is i have trouble fully believing in one thing,one day you might think it is true owing to the "evidence",but if another day a bigger ,even stronger "evidence" might appear for let's say another faction,then how do I keep my faith? No matter how much evidence we have of something,...

Ikkyu, I am with you on this one. That video was quite clearly an attempt to manipulate the gullible by instilling fear. If that represents skillful means as taught by the Buddha, the I too have to question the value of the original teachings. These days people are educated in the ways that certain ...

What a despicable video. This is not the buddhism that I know.

I'm not sure the comment line (unlike the rest of it) supports good habits. I don't think it's a good idea to step back and judge one's meditation. Often the days that I think things were going well, I wasn't doing as well as I thought, and days when I thought it was going poorly, I could look back...

The way I see it, we use "buddh-ism" as the starting point. We dispense with the "-ism" as we proceed.