A Gathering of Brilliant Moons by Holly Gayley

Author:Holly Gayley
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Wisdom Publications

1. Do Khyentsé Yeshé Dorjé was a teacher to Patrul Rinpoché, who served as a teacher to the Third Dodrupchen, Jikmé Tenpai Nyima. For brief biographies of these figures, see Tulku Thondup 1996. Do Khyentsé and Patrul Rinpoché were also known respectively as the mind and speech emanation of Jikmé Lingpa, who revealed the Longchen Nyingthik, a widely practiced set of esoteric Nyingma teachings.

2. A later reference places the dialogue in Repkong, where a thriving ngakpa community still exists today, though Do Khyentsé himself was a native of Golok and taught extensively throughout Kham.

3. It is possible that The Babble of a Foolish Man as the title of the work refers to Do Khyentsé himself or the old ngakpa, given his self-deprecating comments. I translate luntam as the “babble of a foolish man” according to the preference of Ringu Tulku, with whom I first translated this work at approximately the same time that Rosemarie Fuchs completed her translation of the same text. Her translation is embedded within Ringu Tulku’s commentary in Daring Steps toward Fearlessness (Ringu Tulku 2005).

4. With that said, there are a number of technical terms that I render in Sanskrit, since the Tibetan would be too obscure and an educated reader of Buddhist texts will often more readily recognize the Sanskrit than an English translation.

5. In adding bold headings to mark the overarching framework of the ngakpa’s explanation, I am lifting the outline straight out of the original text without adding any numbers or words. The only change is formatting the translation in a way that will allow the reader to follow along more easily.

6. There is one exception, a stanza in five lines toward the middle of the text. While the Tibetan does not indicate breaks in the stanzas, I add them here for semantic clarity.

7. Throughout my translation of The Call of a Sacred Drum, I use “adept” for naljorpa, which translates the Sanskrit yogin, rather than ngakpa, which translates tāntrika, though the terms overlap semantically in Tibetan.

8. See discussion of the etymology of this term on page 8. For a further resonance of the term shal, suggesting the context of a direct encounter, see Malanova 1990.

9. Thank you to Alak Zenkar Rinpoché, who pointed this out to me at the Tsadra “Translation and Transmission” conference in Keystone, Colorado, in October 2014.

10. This view of translation is similar to how José Ortega y Gasset describes translation as a utopian task in “The Misery and the Splendor of Translation” in Schulte and Biguenet 1992.

11. The other was Jikmé Gyalwai Nyugu, one of Patrul Rinpoché’s primary teachers.

12. For a short biography of the Third Dodrupchen, see Tulku Thondup 1996, 237–50.

13. This is an alternative name for the First Dodrupchen, Jikmé Trinlé Özer, one of the two main disciples of Jikmé Lingpa, who brought the Longchen Nyingthik teachings to eastern Tibet. It was the First Dodrupchen who recognized Do Khyentsé as the mind incarnation of Jikmé Lingpa and served as his main teacher.

14. The twofold division of the saṅgha refers to monastics, both novice and fully ordained, and ngakpas or tantric practitioners.

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