Customer Reviews

Translating Buddhism from Tibetan

5 star:		(5)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Joe Wilson's book is an outstanding achievement. Any serious student of literary Tibetan should own a copy, along with Goldstein's Modern Literary Tibetan, Beyer's Classical Tibetan Language, and Erik Schmidt's Rangjung Yeshe Dictionary.

Wilson has achieved an effective (though in some respects unusual, and debatable) synthesis of grammatical approaches based on Latinate, English-language and traditional Tibetan grammars. Though expert readers will find much of this information redundant, students in the first three or four years of formal study stand to gain much from this book.

Translating Buddhism from Tibetan will be particularly useful for students who wish to read Buddhist scriptures or study Tibetan scholastic commentaries. Most of the examples in the book are drawn from one of these two genres. Students interested contemporary and secular Tibetan literature should consult Goldstein's book mentioned above; those interested in a more deeply researched, scholarly discussion of Tibetan syntax and morphology, or in archaic forms of Tibetan language, should have a look at Beyer.

This is the first book I bought at the start of my journey into Tibetan. The overall strategy of this book is to build an hybrid Tenglish (Tibetan-English) language, which should gradualise and faciltate the student's approach to Tibetan texts. I regard this idea as essentially flawed and therefore I basically agree with the less enthused reviewers.

Still, this is a honourable work and it may be useful for a first, cautious approach to classical Tibetan. If you want to plunge into the real thing right away, I suggest you buy Stephen Hodge's "Introduction to Classical Tibetan" (if you can find it).

I am less enthused about this massive tome than the other reviewers. I have a feeling that the book has failed to make the transition from a very lively university course to a textbook. The approach using all the different 'dimensions' is rather idiosyncratic. There problem is that there are few other choices when it comes to Tibetan textbooks. There is a heavy reliance for examples on the literature of logic. In my opinion more examples from practice-related material would have been useful. Too much reliance is placed on traditional Tibetan grammar for my liking. And that romanisation is unnecessarily complex. Still, it is a very significant work, and inspite of its short-comings, is still the best in this small field.

Hi guys, well i've been living in Nepal for the last 4 years and i can tell you that learning tibetan (and by this i mean really know it) its really hard, but i found that wilson's book is actually great not only coz it does work but also coz it provides you with the tools to do it... its the best next thing just after learning tibetan from tibetan grammarians

so what i would suggest is...

get wilson's book, then if you are completely new go through the whole book, coz it provides basic concept on Buddhism and lots of vocab (all really useful)... if you are a bit more experience then learn by heart apendixes 4 and 5 which deals with verbs, and clases which are a primordial part of tibetan (but for some reason some "serious" books dont even mention them... oh by the way tibetans do study tibetan talking about cases)...then move on to...

Craig preston's how to read classical tibetan... which if you don't know by heart appendix 4 n 5 is rather useless... but otherwise excellent to show how to make the complex sentences (pages long at times) into short and readable clauses or sentences... besides it also completes wilsons lack of talk or not wanting to talk about transitive and intransitive verbs (which they also exist in tibetan and are of great importance when trying to get across the right meaning)

last but not least... in my experience there have been tons of mistranslations all over the place even by "famous" translators... thats why i recommend Tony Duff's excellent Illuminator dictionary...

until the day that someone explains tibetan grammar the way tibetan study it and understand it these are the tools for anyone who is serious about learning tibetan, and when the time is right go and get teachings on tibetan from a tibetan grammarian... then the whole world is open to you... once again i think these are the best for whats outer but once you see the real thing you wont go back...

Very useful book for learners with a constructive introduction to Tibetan sentence structure and a useful basic vocabulary for classical Tibetan. Start with this book if you want to learn to read Tibetan and get a good basis. With the next edition please give us a lighter version an add an index!

I have very mixed feelings about this book, but feel compelled to give it 4 stars nonetheless. Why? Because what you can get here, you simply can't get anywhere else. The only other decent introduction to Classical Tibetan that exists (so far as I know) is that by Stephen Hodge, and it is much smaller and will simply not give you the depth of grammatical knowledge of vocabulary that this book can. Some reviewers have complained about the "Tenglish" approach, but I can't really think of any other way to present Tibetan grammar in a comprehensible way. Goldstein does the same thing, though less explicitly, in his "Essentials of Modern Literary Tibetan" (in all the transliterations) and it works for me.

Another reviewer commented that the book is overly pedantic in its detailed explanations and grammatical quibbling - well, what does one expect from a 700-page tome on archaic (more or less) philosophical grammar and vocabulary? You didn't think Classical Tibetan was going to be a walk in the park did you? In any case you can simply skip over the details when Wilson gets a little too in depth.

The major problem with this book as I see it is that it is fairly unbalanced. Meaning, in the first 7 chapters or so there are essentially no sentence/vocabulary exercises, leaving you to somehow (by rote, was my method) memorize some 150-200 terms that are introduced (and not easy ones - 'non-associated compositional factors' comes up, e.g.). This improves though, with quite a few exercises in the later chapters. This added context and required practice/effort really helps you to memorize the vocab and understand the grammar better. Presumably these were left out of early chapters so as not to discourage the student or to make it easier, but instead it just means you have lots to memorize without much contextual help - a big mistake, in my opinion.

Which leaves me at the final point, which is that this is a necessary book, I think, for anyone interested in Classical Tibetan. The field is simply too small. The only other 'intro' level books really are Craig Preston's "How to Read Classical Tibetan" series (two volumes so far, hopefully more to come), but these really aren't introductions. They presuppose thorough knowledge of how to read Tibetan and an understanding of its grammar, as well a fair vocabulary. He was also a student of Wilson's, so all his terminology and explanations etc. follow Wilson's style and terms.

In short: yes there are problems, sometimes it is a bore and overly pedantic, there are not nearly enough exercises for a self-learned... but you need this book if you want to learn Classical Tibetan. So get it and wade through it - it is worth it.

This book has been a superb aid in learning Tibetan for me. I started learning Tibetan last year at age 48 with Lama David Curtis and Joe Wilson's book (especially the "Tenglish") has been a wonderful support. It really works for me.

Though the approach of the book takes some getting used to, it's very well researched and will definitely be a great help to serious students of literary Tibetan.

Joe Wilson's book is an outstanding achievement. Any serious student of literary Tibetan should own a copy, along with Goldstein's Modern Literary Tibetan, Beyer's Classical Tibetan Language, and Erik Schmidt's Rangjung Yeshe Dictionary.

Wilson has achieved an effective (though in some respects unusual, and debatable) synthesis of grammatical approaches based on Latinate, English-language and traditional Tibetan grammars. Though expert readers will find much of this information redundant, students in the first three or four years of formal study -- and especially teachers of Tibetan language -- stand to gain much from this book.

Translating Buddhism from Tibetan will be particularly useful for students who wish to read Buddhist scriptures or study Tibetan scholastic commentaries. Most of the examples in the book are drawn from one of these two genres. Students interested contemporary and secular Tibetan literature should consult Goldstein's book mentioned above; those interested in a more deeply researched, scholarly discussion of Tibetan syntax and morphology, or in archaic forms of Tibetan language, should have a look at Beyer.

The first 5 or 6 Chapters are very useful for the Beginner but afterwards it becames increasingly difficult. It hard to understand the explanations on more advance grammar. I think that unnecesarilly tries to explain many concepts instead of teaching the howto of the language as in the first part. I think I should be reworked (at least the last part) in order to make the student to be able to use the grammar at least for some basic reading. I think I should include more practical examples of reading and interpreting texts. Vocabulary alone is not enough. So I guess that considering the few book about this subject this is a good one after all despite the shortcomings.