Rinpoche encourages everyone to learn as much Tibetan as they can. Even a little is worth learning: the thirty letters, a prayer read in its own words, the Tibetan names of the practices. Each person who learns it helps carry the language forward. Rinpoche has stated that if there is enough interest he would be willing to hold dedicated Tibetan language classes for students. The minimum is five students, so please speak to your fellow sangha members and then send an email to contact@herukainstitute.org if interested.
Beginning in the late eighth century, Indian masters and Tibetan translators worked side by side, over several hundred years, to bring the Buddhist teachings into Tibetan, largely from Sanskrit. Royal decrees told them to translate into clear Tibetan without violating the meaning, and a great Sanskrit and Tibetan glossary, the Mahavyutpatti, standardized their terms. In the process they created a new literary language, designed to convey the texts as accurately as possible.
Their work fills the two great collections of the Tibetan canon: the Kangyur, the words of the Buddha, in more than a hundred volumes, and the Tengyur, the treatises of the Indian masters, in more than two hundred. Many of these texts no longer survive in Sanskrit, and are known today only from their Tibetan translations. Even now, only about half of the Kangyur has been published in English, and the translation of the Tengyur has only begun.
Tibetan is also the language of practice. Many lamas encourage their students to chant their practice texts in Tibetan, and the oral transmission of a text, its lung, is given by a lama reading it aloud. The language and its script are used far beyond Tibet: in Bhutan, Ladakh, Sikkim and Nepal, and in the Buddhist monasteries of Mongolia.
The Tibetan alphabet has thirty consonants, set out in rows of four, with two letters in the last row. The first row, ka, kha, ga and nga, is sounded at the back of the throat.
Every letter carries the sound a. Four vowel signs, three written above the letter and one below, change it to i, u, e or o:
A small dot, the tsheg, marks the end of each syllable, and letters can be stacked one above another.
In Vajrayana practice, a deity is often visualized first as a single letter, its seed syllable (Sanskrit bīja, Tibetan sa bon). The syllable arises from emptiness, stands for the deity’s whole mantra, and the deity arises from it.
Three syllables are found throughout Vajrayana practice. OM, AH and HUM are the seed syllables of the body, speech and mind of all the buddhas, and they mark the head, throat and heart of the deities: a white OM, a red AH and a blue HUM.
Each deity has its own seed syllable. Among the best known:
The shortest of the Perfection of Wisdom sutras gives its whole teaching as a single letter: ཨ, A, the last of the thirty, which stands for the unborn nature of all things.
Seed syllables are written, and visualized, as letters. Tara’s syllable TAM, for example, can be visualized as the Tibetan letter ཏཱཾ. If the Tibetan letter is not yet familiar, it can be visualized in English letters instead, as TAM.
Many teachers allow a deity to be visualized in front of you without an empowerment. Visualizing yourself as the deity is practiced after receiving one, with a teacher’s guidance.
Tibetan tradition credits the script to Thonmi Sambhota, one of the young men King Songtsen Gampo sent to India in the seventh century. On his return, the story goes, he created the Tibetan letters from the Indian scripts he had studied. Scholars trace its letters to the Gupta script of northern India, and a 2011 study dates the finished alphabet to the 630s or 640s.
Written Tibetan has changed little since the ninth century. Its spelling still reflects how the language sounded in about the seventh century, so a reader today can open texts written over more than a thousand years.
Its writing is an art in its own right. Uchen, the headed script, is used for printed books; ume, the headless script, for handwriting and calligraphy, in many formal and flowing styles. Calligraphy is still taught today.
Rinpoche learned Tibetan calligraphy as a boy, from Lamo Yongzin Rinpoche among other teachers, long before he became a monk. In Seattle he taught Tibetan grammar and language at Sakya Monastery, and many of his sixteen books are written in Tibetan.
Begin with the thirty letters, and learn as much as you can.