THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO KĀLIDĀSA IN TIBET: MESSENGER POETRY IN TRANSLATION A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED TO THE FACULTY OF THE DIVISION OF THE HUMANITIES IN CANDIDACY FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY DEPARTMENT OF SOUTH ASIAN LANGUAGES AND CIVILIZATIONS BY ERIN HILLARY EPPERSON CHICAGO, ILLINOIS JUNE 2017 Copyright © 2017 by Erin Hillary Epperson All rights reserved CONTENTS LIST OF FIGURES ……………………………………………………………………………vi ABSTRACT……………………………………………………………………………….......vii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ……………………………………………………………….....viii A NOTE ON TRANSLITERATION ……………………………………………................... xii CHAPTER ONE: Translations and the Spread of Kāvya in Tibet…………………………..... 1 1.1 Introduction ……………………………………………….……….…………….... 1 1.2 Tibetan Buddhist reception and appropriation of Sanskrit Poetry and Poetics……..3 1.3 Tibetan Translations: A Brief History………………………………………...…… 6 1.4 Previous Scholarship on Tibetan Translations …………………………………….11 1.5 Euro-American Scholarship on the Tibetan Cloud Messenger………………........ 15 1.6 Tibetan Scholarship on Cloud Messenger………………………………………… 18 1.7 Outline of Project.…………………………………...……………………………. 22 CHAPTER TWO: Lives of the Lotsāwas ……………………………………………………. 26 2.1 Introduction……………………………………………………………………...... 26 2.2 Who translated the Tibetan Cloud Messenger? ………………………………….. 29 2.3 Monks, abbots, and ritual specialists by day……………………………………… 32 2.4 ...Sanskrit specialists and translators by night? …………………………………... 41 2.5 The limits of ‘Buddhist’ (nang pa) as a category…………………………………. 58 CHAPTER THREE: Translation as an Act of Interpretation………………………………… 64 3.1 Introduction……………………………………………………………………….. 64 3.2 Tibetan Interpretations of Sanskrit Mood Ornaments (rasa-alaṃkāra)………….. 66 iii 3.3 Trope of ‘viraha’ in the Tibetan Cloud Messenger………….…………………… 87 3.4 ‘Men who abandon their women’. ……………………………………………….. 90 3.5 Intensification of nying-jé nyam and ‘service for the sake of others’……………. 96 3.6 Miminization of the ‘erotic’ within gekpé nyam and ‘Women tormented by desire’…………………………………………………………………………….. 107 3.7 Towards a Buddhist Interpretation of the Cloud Messenger …………………….. 121 CHAPTER FOUR: Translation as Literature: “Jangtsé and Namkha Pel, authors of Cloud Messenger”? ……………………………………………………………………………………125 4.1 Introduction…………………………………………………………………………125 4.2 The Use of Meter in Trinki Phonya……………………………………………….. 128 4.3 Sacred landscapes and path imagery ……………………………………………… 142 4.4 “What is a cloud, but a mixture of smoke, light, water, and wind?” ………………155 4.5 A Bodhisattva-messenger ………………………………………………………… 166 CHAPTER FIVE: Authors, Authority, and Imitation: The modern Tibetan reception of Kālidāsa ……………………………………………………………………..………………… 178 5.1 Introduction………………………………………………………………………... 178 5.2 Early Tibetan readership of Cloud Messenger………………………………..…… 180 5.3 The Beginnings of a Genre: Imitation and Commentary……………………….…. 182 5.4 Discursive Commentarial Responses to Trinki Phonya…………………………….188 5.5 Commentarial responses to geography in Trinki Phonya…………………………. 189 5.6 Commentarial responses to themes of renunciation and compassionate mood…… 196 5.7 Authors, Authority, and Tradition: Finding the Limits of a Translation………….. 206 iv 5.8 Commentary is the Sincerest Form of Flattery……………………………………. 208 5.9 Imitation and the Invention of Tibetan sandeśa-kāvya…………………………… 219 5.10 Clouds, Convention, and Creativity ..…………………………………………. 229 CONCLUSION: Trinki Phonya’s Contribution to the ‘Genre’ of Messenger Poetry………… 230 Messenger poetry as a genre…………………………………………………………... 232 Kālidāsa in Tibet: Blurring the Borders of Translation Studies………………………. 236 APPENDIX I: Concordance of phoeneticized Tibetan names and terms……………………. 238 APPENDIX II: English translations for selected Trinki Phonya verses with corresponding Tibetan verses and concordance for Sanskrit verses .…………………………………………. 240 BIBLIOGRAPHY……………………………………………………………………………... 285 v LIST OF FIGURES Fig 3.1a Verses where viraha and related words are translated as spang/spong ba......................94 Fig 3.1b Verses where viraha and related words are translated as bral/'bral ba…………………..94 Fig 3.2a Grammatical subject experiencing 'bral ba: Male yakṣa …………………………… 96 Fig 3.2b Grammatical subject experiencing 'bral ba: Female lover ………………………..... 97 Fig 3.2c Grammatical subject experiencing 'bral ba: Inanimate things …………………...… 97 Fig 3.2d Grammatical Subject experiencing 'bral ba: Unspecified…………………………… 97 Figure 4.1a Nine-syllable meters (From Monlam Standard Tibetan Language Software)……. 131 Figure 4.1b Eleven-syllable meters (From Monlam Standard Tibetan Language Software)…. 132 Figure 4.2 Trinki Phonya Verse 1 metrical comparison…………………………………….... 138 Figure 4.3a Sankrit place names rendered in Tibetan transliteration …………………………. 148 Figure 4.3b Sanskrit place names translated fully into Tibetan……………………………..… 148 vi ABSTRACT My project explores the translation and transmission of Sanskrit poet Kālidāsa’s poem Cloud Messenger (Meghadūta) into Tibet as a case-study for understanding the Tibetan reception and interpretation of Sanskrit poetics. More broadly, because the Tibetan reception of Cloud Messenger transpired in a formative period in Tibetan literary and cultural history, an analysis of this translation demonstrates how cross-cultural literary encounters—between India and Tibet— engendered the transmission of this popular South Asian genre of messenger poetry in Tibet. My central thesis for this project is that the fourteenth-century Tibetan translation of Cloud Messenger is usefully understood as simultaneously a Tibetan Buddhist reinterpretation of Kālidāsa’s original piece, and a Tibetan poetical innovative work, thus a contribution to the genre of messenger poetry itself. vii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I wish to thank the late Michael Hahn to whom I dedicate this work. Beyond his prodigious and meticulous scholarship on Sanskrit and Tibetan poetry, I am indebted to his kindness, and his generosity of spirit. His intellectual support during my first few years of work on this topic was considerable and I am immeasurably grateful. I wish to thank my committee members—Wendy, Christian, and Matthew—without whose hard work and dedication I would not be here. I am immensely grateful for your support and your encouragement, the many hours you all have spent reading, editing, and engaging in my work. It has been a privilege to work with you all. I wish to thank Wendy Doniger for her constant support and encouragement over the years. Whenever I felt frustrated and overwhelmed, her emails would be a beacon of hope and positivity. It is due in no small part to her wisdom, guidance, her kindness, and her superb editing skills, that finishing this project even felt possible. I am continually inspired by her as a teacher, a scholar, and a person. I wish to thank Christian Wedemeyer for all the years of intellectual support and encouragement. I am immensely grateful for all our conversations—the countless office hours spent talking through papers, translations and qualifying exam preparation—which brought me where I am now. I wish to thank Matthew Kapstein, whose profundity of knowledge in Tibetan and Indic studies is humbling and inspiring. I wish to thank the faculty of the Department of South Asian Languages and Civilizations for all your intellectual support over the years. I wish to thank my Sanskrit teachers: Blake Wentworth, Yigal Bronner, Gary Tubb, Wendy Doniger, Dan Arnold, and Steven Collins. I wish to thank my Tibetan teachers and mentors: Tsetan Chonjore, Khenpo Ngawang Jorden, Yaroslav “Slava” Komarovski, Christian Wedemeyer, Matthew Kapstein, and Karma Ngodup. I wish to viii give a special thanks to Khenpo Jorden, whose classes first inspired my fascination with Sanskrit-to-Tibetan interlingual translation, and whose generosity of spirit inspired my first attempts at Teaching Tibetan language. I wish also to give a special thanks to Steven Collins for his mentorship over the years. His dedication to pedagogy has long served as an inspiration for me; but additionally it was through conversations with him many years ago that I truly grokked the importance of prioritizing self-care in a professional life. I wish to thank all the many institutions and people who have supported me over the years. I wish to thank Mr. and Mrs. Franke for their financial support in the 2015-2016 year, and the staff of the Franke Institute for whose logistical and intellectual support enabled me to start and finish my three remaining chapters. I wish to thank also the 2015-2016 Faculty and Doctoral Fellows of the Franke Institute for their many conversations, in particular Whitney Cox. The interdisciplinary nature of the biweekly talks greatly enriched my work and my project was definitively shaped by my experiences there. I wish to thank the Committee on Southern Asian Studies (COSAS) for their financial support, which enabled me to visit India and Nepal time and time again for my studies and research. I wish to thank the staff and faculty at the Central University of Tibetan Studies (CUTS) in Sarnath. I wish to thank Lobsang Norbu Shastri for his support—intellectual and logistical—over the years, enabling me to do my work in India. I wish to thank Penpa Dorjee, whose guidance enabled me to struggle through Tibetan poetics manuals while at CUTS. I wish to thank the staff of the Library of Tibetan Works and Archives (LTWA), most notably Sonam Topgyal and Palmo Tsering, whose archival support opened up to me resources I hadn’t known possible for this project, including modern Tibetan