Further Study and Training with Serkong Rinpoche
Coming back to the account of my early years, after returning to Dharamsala from that initial time with Catherine in Bodh Gaya, I continued over the next few years to study intensively at the Library and to attend the public and many of the restricted teachings that His Holiness gave. I also continued translating for Serkong Rinpoche, especially tantric teachings for Alan.
Over the years, I translated various initiations, jenang subsequent permissions, and discourses on the long sadhanas, self-initiations, and fire pujas for Alan. Sometimes these teachings were for a group of other Westerners as well, sometimes for a small group of tulkus, and sometimes for just us two. Rinpoche even taught Alan and me how to draw the mandalas of the major deities and the measurements of their three-dimensional mandala palaces. He made models of some of their architectural features out of tsampa dough so that we would know how they looked.
This emphasis on tantra suited me perfectly during this period of my life. My university education had been one-sided. It had only developed left-brain intellectual abilities. I needed to balance it with right-brain creative, artistic abilities as well. I needed to train my imagination, and attempting the complex visualizations of tantra was the perfect vehicle for doing this.
I was especially excited to learn that each of the features of the figures I was trying to visualize – their faces, arms, legs, what they were holding and so on – represented different aspects of the teachings and that imagining all of them at once was a method for keeping in mind and integrating all that they represented. Motivated by love and compassion for all beings, the bodhichitta aim was to attain the omniscience represented by this imagery in order to benefit all these beings. This fit perfectly with my childhood aspiration to gain an integrated grasp of universal knowledge. That aspiration was not outrageous when put in the context of bodhichitta.
My university training, however, had been self-oriented. Although I had aspired to become a professor, my drive for universal knowledge was basically for my own benefit. I needed to balance it with a more altruistic approach. His Holiness had told me as much when he advised at my first audience with him that I needed to train in both wisdom and compassion. Serkong Rinpoche seemed to intuit what I needed and would not teach me anything unless I was translating it for others. My motivation to learn anything had to be to benefit others by sharing it with them. This has become a dominant theme in my life ever since, with the website and so on. Making the teachings accessible to the entire world has now become an all-consuming drive. I even begrudge having to go to sleep at night and can’t wait to wake up and return to my desk.
The only thing Rinpoche would teach me individually was Kalachakra, which he taught me in great detail and depth. Again, in hindsight, I think he did this so as to enable me to translate the Kalachakra initiation for His Holiness – which I later did, many times – and write the book, Taking the Kalachakra Initiation, renamed as Introduction to the Kalachakra Initiation for its second edition. So, studying Kalachakra, too, was for benefiting others.
In general, while translating, Rinpoche would not let me take notes. I had to remember everything. He would not even let me write anything down until I went home in the evening. To train me further, in the middle of teaching something with me as translator, he would interrupt the teaching, explain something about Kalachakra to me, and then go back to what he was teaching. Again, I couldn’t write down anything till I got home, and he would scold me severely if I didn’t remember everything.
Once, I accompanied His Holiness as interpreter on a visit to Holland. During a press conference, one of the reporters held up a tape recorder and requested His Holiness to record a message for the Tibetans in Nepal. He would be going there soon. His Holiness did so, in Tibetan, and then continued the press conference. At the end, the reporter asked His Holiness what he had said. His Holiness turned to me as he left the room and said, “Berzin, tell him what I said.” I was so grateful for Rinpoche’s training.
Improving My Translation Style and Language Skills
Rinpoche was very concerned about the translation terms that I used. The Tibetan terms had been chosen carefully by the old lotsawa translators and were full of meaning. You need to milk the meaning out of the words, he would say. Because of that, he would ask me what the connotation of the English word was that I was using for some term. When it didn’t correspond to the Tibetan term, he would explain the correct connotation. In this way, he would get me to come up with a translation that actually meant what the Tibetan meant, even though it was not the standard term that often had been coined by the missionaries for translating the Bible. This is how I came up with my new translation terminology.
At first, on Serkong Rinpoche’s recommendation, I translated every word, even names, as the Tibetans had done. But, following Geshe Dhargyey’s advice that the initial translations in the Kangyur and Tengyur were almost all later revised, I later revised this style and some of these terms when I found that they didn’t work. The model of the Mongolian translations from Tibetan seemed more suitable to our situation in English than the Tibetan model for translating from Sanskrit.
Before the Mongols started translating Tibetan texts, they already had contact with Buddhism from the Uighurs. Like other Central Asian translators before them – the Khotanese, Tocharians, Sogdians and Goktürks – the Uighurs merely transliterated many Sanskrit Buddhist terms in their translations, like “Buddha” and “bodhisattva.” The Mongols were already familiar with many of these terms. Because of that, when they later translated from Tibetan, they turned to the Uighur method and put key terms like “Buddha” back into transliterated Sanskrit. Since the English-reading audience, like the Mongols before them, was already familiar with terms such as “Buddha,” I decided it was best to retain them in transliteration, but with explanations of their connotations when appearing first in a commentary.
Nowadays, when I am basing my translations and research mostly on the original Sanskrit texts when available, I explain the connotations of both the Sanskrit terms and the terms the Tibetans chose to translate them, since frequently the two are quite different. I tend to favor the Sanskrit when choosing how to translate the terms. When primary sources are only available in Chinese translation, the latest AI tools have enabled me to locate passages relevant to my research, and I have started to translate and analyze them as well. My Harvard training in comparing Sanskrit, Chinese and Tibetan versions of texts and their terms has been invaluable.
Rinpoche was also concerned about increasing my Tibetan vocabulary. To help me with that, he had me start to go through a Tibetan dictionary and write a sentence with each word to help me remember it. We didn’t get very far before he let me stop, but I got the message he was skillfully trying to teach me. I had to work on my vocabulary.
To follow in the footsteps of the Tibetan lotsawa translators who were both scholars and accomplished practitioners, I needed to train not only in languages, but also in meditation. Serkong Rinpoche would not tell me what to practice. The motivation and initiative had to come from my own side. I then needed to ask if he had any objections to what I suggested – he invariably said he had none. I always based my tantra practice on long, full sadhanas and did them in Tibetan. Long sadhanas, Rinpoche said, were for beginners. The short ones were only for advanced practitioners who could fill in from memory what was being abbreviated.
Over the next years, at my own initiative like this, I undertook and completed two more preliminary practices and then the mantra retreats and fire pujas of the six anuttarayoga tantras I practiced daily and the mantra retreat of one of the kriya tantra practices. Sonam Norbu helped me with the fire pujas, for which I was very grateful. Rinpoche advised me, for all my retreats, to do just two sessions a day – one in the early morning and one at night – and to go about my usual daily duties, telling no one other than Sonam that I was doing a retreat. This style suited me perfectly.
Additional Training
Rinpoche also gave me invaluable advice on worldly matters. When an arrangement with Oxford University Press for the possible publication of an edited version of my PhD thesis fell apart, he pointed out the mistakes I had made in the negotiations and instructed me on how to make business deals. His advice has helped me greatly with the many business arrangements needed for setting up the Berzin Archives/Study Buddhism online presence.
To maintain my health during all my years in India, I went every week to Dr. Yeshe Dhonden, who was especially close to Serkong Rinpoche. My basic knowledge of Tibetan medicine has come from my wanting to understand how he was treating me for various imbalances that arose and from my personal experience with the treatments.
This special attention I paid to my health was reinforced by two memorable experiences during the 1970s where I learned firsthand about death. The first was when I was translating for a teaching on lam-rim by the abbot of Namgyal Monastery. I don’t remember his name. When he reached the section on how death can come at any time, he suddenly clutched his chest and stopped. His attendant told us all to leave quickly. The abbot had just had a heart attack and died a few minutes later. We were all in shock.
The second experience was when a young Canadian man, whom I didn’t know, died from carbon monoxide poisoning. Apparently, he had used a coal stove in his hut to warm himself overnight in the winter and the hut had had no ventilation. As a senior member of the Western community, the authorities asked me to take care of the body. Together with a friend, I went to the hut that served as the morgue, where we found him naked, lying on the concrete floor. As we picked him up, his body felt like that of a cold, dead fish. We took him in a jeep to the cremation grounds. Fortunately, a group of Tibetan monks helped us build a pyre of wood, lie him on top of it, covered with a cloth, and cremate him.
Translating for His Holiness the Dalai Lama
His Holiness the Dalai Lama has several translators, and depending on the situation and need, he asks one or another to translate for him. As my Tibetan language skills improved, I started serving as one of them, but only on rare occasions. This lasted from the late 1970s to the early 1990s. I was never his day-to-day translator.
At first, before I started orally translating for him, I took extensive notes on His Holiness’s teachings and, afterwards, read them to the Westerners. Then I did consecutive translations and eventually started the custom of doing simultaneous translation, with the Westerners listening on FM radios. His Holiness would choose me as the translator for some initiations, for some advanced tantra teachings and for some meetings with scientists, psychologists and non-Buddhist religious leaders. At those meetings, my task was to bridge their ways of thinking with the Buddhist ways. When translating, I would fill in the background information about their systems that lay behind their words, so that His Holiness could understand more easily. Once others, especially Tibetans, could take over translating in these various situations, His Holiness no longer asked me. There were other ways for me to be of service to him.
Whenever I did consecutive translation for His Holiness, Serkong Rinpoche would sit nearby, watching me carefully. Afterwards, he would scold me severely if I had violated any protocols of decorum, especially when in front of thousands of Tibetans. I quickly learned to be more mindful of Tibetan etiquette. The memory training he had given me proved invaluable, since His Holiness, when teaching, would usually speak for five or more minutes at a time before I could translate.
At some of these teachings, people were asked to submit written questions for me to ask the next day to His Holiness. Rinpoche would always go through them with me in the evening. Most were unclear in what they were asking and were far too long. Often when people ask a great lama a question, the lama understands it differently and answers a different question. To avoid that, he told me not to translate these questions literally, but just to tell him in one sentence what they were asking. He then told me to rephrase them in a way that fit into the conceptual framework of the Dharma. Only in that way would His Holiness be able to understand the question correctly and be able to give a fitting answer. He also rejected many questions and added others that were more appropriate to ask to His Holiness and would be of more benefit. In this way, I learned a valuable lesson on how best to ask questions to great Dharma teachers.
Lecture Tours with Serkong Rinpoche
I accompanied Serkong Rinpoche and his two attendants, Ngawang and Choentse-la, on two West European and North American teaching tours – one in 1980 and the other in 1982. Each included a stay with Alan and his family in their homes to give further teachings to Alan. Choentse-la had been with Rinpoche since childhood and had come into exile with him from Tibet. He was always with Rinpoche wherever he went and took care of him like a devoted son. He was very calm and quiet and helped Rinpoche with rituals. Ngawang was Nepali and was outgoing, well-organized and very intelligent. Rinpoche had chosen him as a teenager to be part of his household and had trained him to become his secretary, to write his letters and to run the household’s affairs. In fact, before he passed away, Rinpoche chose two young teenagers, Gendun Samdup and Thupten Sherab, to join his household. They became Rinpoche’s attendants in his next life and raised him like parents. Thupten Sherab took care of the physical work in the household, and Gendun Samdup went on to become a Geshe and ran the financial affairs.
Rinpoche had chosen me as well. I not only translated for him on these two Western tours, but made all the arrangements, wrote all the letters and got all the visas for him and the two attendants – all of this without the Internet. Through this, I gained the experience that enabled me to organize all my own lecture tours later on. By witnessing how Rinpoche conducted himself and gave the teachings on these tours, always adapting to the local cultures and audiences, ranging from children to academics, I learned how to conduct myself on my future tours. Especially helpful was seeing how he took everyone seriously, from stoned hippies to wealthy patrons, and treated them all with equal kindness and respect.
Rinpoche was always humble and informal. He told people not to spend a lot of money on hotels or on taking us out to fancy restaurants. He preferred, when possible, to stay in people’s homes and to eat with the families. I have followed his example in all my travels. It enabled me to learn more easily about the cultures and ways of life of my hosts in the varied countries that I visited.
Rinpoche was extremely flexible and creatively adapted to new situations. When conducting rituals, he would always improvise; for example, rather than using an expensive, ornate vase in certain ceremonies, he would use a milk bottle. When asked how to keep the commitment to make a tshog offering twice a month on the 10th and 25th according to the Tibetan calendar when you have no access to one, he replied, “Don’t Western calendars have a 10th and a 25th of the month?” Such examples taught me how to advise people in the communist countries about their Dharma practice in the face of the severe restrictions they were under.
The most memorable event of these tours was the private audience we had with Pope John Paul II in January 1980 in the Vatican, not long after he had ascended to the papacy. The purpose of the audience was to make first contact with him for His Holiness and to arrange for an eventual meeting between the two. What they shared in common, Rinpoche explained, was concern for religious freedom in China. This could be a starting point for their conversations. Translating for this formal audience taught me an important principle of good diplomacy – namely, to emphasize a topic of mutual interest to both sides. I would put this to good use in the years ahead.
Just as Rinpoche had foreseen that I had the karmic potential to become his translator, he also foresaw that I would become a Dharma teacher. I knew this because one evening, while sitting informally at the kitchen table of our host in London during one of our tours, he casually explained to me how to relate to my own teachers when, in the future, I became a Dharma teacher myself.
Serkong Rinpoche’s Passing Away
Rinpoche had a special relationship with Spiti, a valley on the Indian side of the Himalayas right on the border of Tibet. Historically, it had been a part of Western Tibet. Rinpoche had revived and reformed Buddhism there and had arranged for His Holiness to confer the Kalachakra initiation there in the summer of 1983. Up until then, Spiti had been a restricted area, no foreigners were allowed. This restriction was lifted, however, in time for the initiation, so I organized the permits and chartered a bus for a group of us Westerners from the Library to attend and for me to translate. We were the first foreigners to go to Spiti in modern times. Despite the rough journey there, we were treated with a taste of a land that was still like the old Tibet.
Shortly after we left Spiti, Rinpoche suddenly passed away there on August 29 after completing a retreat. He told a disciple that, using tong-len, the giving-and-taking meditation, he was going to take on an obstacle to His Holiness’s life, even if it meant losing his own life, and that’s exactly what he did. In retrospect, I think my being given a set of ritual garments and implements to wear and hold as one of the main disciples during that Kalachakra initiation was a parting gift from Rinpoche to me.
The last piece of advice I received from him, when I asked him a question about the Kalachakra initiation, was always to use logic and reason to figure it out, analyzing within the context of the complete system in which it occurs. He demonstrated how to do this in answering my question, and I have always followed this method ever since.
[For more information about Serkong Rinpoche, see A Portrait of Tsenshap Serkong Rinpoche. See also: Interview about Tsenshap Serkong Rinpoche – Dr. Berzin]
Rinpoche had already started me on a course of reading commentaries a few years before he passed away. He had said that you will never find a teacher who had enough time to teach you everything you would like to learn. Echoing Professor Kaufmann’s advice, he said that you need to read the texts yourself and only ask questions when there are passages you cannot understand. Like this, I had read through almost a dozen texts, mostly tantric commentaries, that he had recommended, and he had patiently answered all my questions. I made a rough translation of all the texts as I went along. Remembering the original plan that I had to study the Guhyasamaja Tantra when I had first arrived in India, Rinpoche included in my reading list the Tibetan commentary on this tantra used as the textbook for its study at Gyume, Lower Tantric College. From working through merely its first chapter, it became evident that it would have been impossible to understand it, let alone translate it, for my PhD thesis.
After Rinpoche passed away, His Holiness kindly agreed to guide my reading, answering my questions for several years when I couldn’t use logic and reasoning to figure something out. In this way, I went through scores of Tibetan texts, specifically focusing on sections that dealt with topics that particularly interested me concerning Kalachakra and anuttarayoga tantra in general. For this, I put to good use the research tools I had learned at Harvard.
One thing Serkong Rinpoche wanted me to learn was Tibetan astrology, especially the parts that derived from the Kalachakra teachings. I was only able to start these studies the year after Rinpoche had passed away. Gen Lodro Gyatso, the chief astrologer at the Tibetan Medical and Astro Institute (TMAI) in Lhasa and now reestablished in Dharamsala, accepted me as his student. He spoke with a heavy Amdo accent, which I couldn’t understand. So, Ngodup, Serkong Rinpoche’s cook, joined me in taking the lessons and translated his explanations into the Lhasa dialect for me.
As it turned out, we were his last students. Gen Lodro Gyatso suddenly passed away right after finishing teaching us the calculations for the Tibetan calendar and ephemeris. These are the parts of the discipline that came from the Kalachakra teachings. I never learned the parts that came from Chinese astrology or how to interpret horoscopes. However, what was more important, I learned the Kalachakra astrological terminology, none of which was in dictionaries. Based on what I had learned, I wrote an algorithm in 1985 for calculating the Tibetan calendar and ephemeris, which a friend used for writing an MS-DOS program for making the calculations. We donated it to the Tibetan Medical and Astro Institute.
Another thing Rinpoche wanted me to do was to receive the Hevajra initiation from Chogye Trichen Rinpoche, the head of the Sakya Tsar Tradition and the main Sakya teacher of His Holiness. He felt that making this Dharma connection with his old friend would be important for me in the future. Together with Gyatso Tsering, who later became the director of the LTWA, the two of them had founded the Council for Religious Affairs shortly after coming into exile in India. Soon after Serkong Rinpoche passed away, I travelled to Kathmandu and requested the initiation. Chogye Trichen kindly agreed and gave it to me privately. Receiving this initiation would open the door for receiving deeper Sakya teachings in the future.