Verses from the Center – A Buddhist Vision of the Sublime, by Stephen Bachelor – Some notes and reflections – A WORK IN PROGRESS

Wild notes

– The frame: dedication, contents, preface. Appendix: Conditions, combination, confusion. Notes.

Personal note:

• Whom would I want to talk, write to?
• Whom do I wish to honor, having read (not yet, or only partially, in terms of marking, looking up unknown vocabulary) the book twice?
• Honestly, in first place the author himself in his many roles:

As writer, translator, poet, scholar, teacher, monk, pilgrim. And here, most as translator.

In second place (and sometimes while reading him intensely, he owns the first place): Nagarjuna.

Without this enormous dedication and expertise in Tibetan and in interpreting ancient texts (by Stephen Batchelor) we would not be able to enjoy emptiness a la Nagarjuna. I so appreciate this empathetical approach, almost therapeutical, towards a human being from another culture and time.

How I will deal in presenting my favorites … does it make sense? Which one? For whom? We will see. My hope and goal is to submit something dense, succint, consistent, but still playful, raising curiosity, elevating spirit, calling up joy.

dedication

The dharma taught by buddha

hinges on two truths:
Partial truths of the world
and truths which are sublime.

Without knowing how they differ
you cannot know the deep:
without relying on convention,
you cannot disclose the sublime;

Without intuiting the sublime,
You cannot experience freedom.

                                                 ~Nagarjuna“

At the end of the book:

For Gautama
In whose embrace
Dharma was shown
And opinions vanished

~ by Stephen Batchelor?

„Afterword“ (p.  137)

As in my eyes this chapter contains the very best, profound words, I ever heard, concerning the ‘Art of Translation’, I will quotate those reflections I find most inspiring:

„Ever translation of a classical text is governed by two imperatives: to be faithful to the original, and also to make it intelligible to readers other than those fir whom it was written. This tension becomes all the more apparent when working with a text that is not only ancient but from a culture other than one‘s own. Such a translation cannot but be an interpretation.“ (p. 137)

„Yet beneath every clear and confident statement on the printed page lie conscious and unconscious layers of unstated beliefs, intuitions, preferences, antipathies, uncertainties and desires.“

„On finishing a chapter [while translating as literally as possible from Tibetan into English, my note] I out the Tibetan aside and treated my literal English translation as the first draft of a poem, which I worked and reworked through numerous drafts until arriving at the text that satisfied me as both consistent with Nagarjuna‘s original as well as accessible to a contemporary reader.“ (p.139)

„From an experiental perspective it was important to me that I should HEAR the text as it would have been spoken by my Tibetan teacher, the late Geshe Rabten.“

My note:

Now we will hear something most important, deepening the idea of „hearing the spoken word“. This is not known by many, but I learned it by my teacher for creative writing, Lutz von Werder, book-author, co-founder of the Institute for Creative Writing in Berlin, Professor for social work at the Alice Salomon University, Berlin. The closeness of the Oral History and Creative Writing is stunning, once one has got an ear for it, and Stephen Batchelor is trained in this access to writing and the written word.

„Tibetan tradition understands the nature if a text sich as ‚Verses from the Center‘ to be that of speech. The printed copy is merely a record of the spoken word; its value is diminished once the oral tradition in that tongue has died out.

Having chosen to emphasize the POETIC rather than the philosophical dimension of ‚Verses from the Center“, my aim was to be able to hear Nagarjuna‘s voice. I tried to capture the playful and disconcerting quality of his logical moves through wordplay, internal rhymes, jarring contrasts , apparent non sequiturs and unexpected echoes of non-Buddhist sources. I was conscious of influences as diverse as those of John Keats, T.S. Eliot and John Lennon on the formation of my Nagarjunian voice. I was not content with a chapter until I could recite it our loud in a way that (to me at least) something of the pulse of emptiness.

My note:

„The pulse of emptiness“: Wonderful title of something I would love to write one day. But apart from this, I know exactly what Batchelor is talking about, and this discovery and cultivation of the spoken word in the the written one, is, what made me most happy and, I suggest, also successful in my vocation job. I am trained to hear and write with the same ears he is talking about.  For today I have to end here, but will continue with those quotations and also with a collection of my favorite verses by Nagarjuna.

Stephen Batchelor’s last words: let us enjoy their humbleness, depth of consciousness and love:

“ Nagarjuna constantly reminded me of how my choice of words was contingent both on the fallibility of my understanding and the ambivalence if my motives.”