SSIUK Lecture: The Khyentse Vision Project: The World of Jamyang Khyentse Wangpo and Translating His Works with Casey Kemp

The Khyentse Vision Project: The World of Jamyang Khyentse Wangpo and Translating His Works

The editorial director of Khyentse Vision Project (KVP) will introduce Khyentse Foundation's new initiative to translate the collected works of the meditation master, scholar, and terton Jamyang Khyentse Wangpo (1820–1892). Khyentse Wangpo was a central figure of the nineteenth-century Rimé tradition in Derge who worked closely with Jamgon Kongtrul Lodro Thaye (1813–1899) to produce the well-known encyclopedic volumes of Tibetan Buddhism known as the Treasury of Knowledge and the Treasury of Precious Instructions. Khyentse Wangpo’s corpus—his Collected Works along with his collection of visionary teachings known as the Seven Transmissions—remain largely untranslated yet contain a wealth of Buddhist teachings, histories, songs, tantric liturgies, and termas. These collections reflect the range of the major literary genres relevant to Tibetan Buddhism in the nineteenth-century that continue to be transmitted to this day.

The mission of KVP is to bring together translators, Himalayan khenpos and scholars, and editors to produce translations of Khyentse Wangpo's texts for living Buddhist communities. KVP publishes its translations freely on its website and is currently building out an immersive reading room to provide easy accessibility to the translations, source texts, and related research. This presentation will give an introduction to the scope of the project, will provide an overview of the contents of the collections, and will discuss some of the translations that have already been produced. 

See more about the KVP at: https://www.khyentsevision.org/

ABOUT THE SPEAKER:

Casey Kemp received her BA in Religious Studies from the University of Canterbury, New Zealand, and a Master’s of Philosophy in Tibetan Studies from Oxford University. She has studied and practiced Buddhism for more than fifteen years. Casey has edited and translated several 84000 sūtras and was formerly an editor for Shambhala Publications and Snow Lion. She is currently completing her PhD dissertation through the University of Vienna on the subject of luminosity in the Mahāmudrā tradition.