This January 8-11, 2011, there was a historic International Conference in Sarnath, India of over a hundred scholars from many countries on "Translating the Tengyur: In the Tradition of the 17 Pandits of Nalanda University." It was convened by the Venerable Geshe Ngawang Samten, Vice-Chancellor of the Central University of Tibetan Studies and Professor Robert Thurman of Columbia University, President of the American Institute of Buddhist Studies. His Holiness the Dalai Lama attended and gave his blessing to the multi-decade project. The Venerable Dzongsar Khyentse Rinpoche of the Buddhist Literary Heritage Project, many learned Lama-scholars and Indian Pandits of Sanskrit, and modern Buddhological scholars from US, India, England, France, Italy, Germany, Russia, Australia, Japan, Korea, Taiwan, and Mexico, spent the four days discussing the launch of the huge project of the American Institute of Buddhist Studies to translate the 5600+works contained in the Tengyur collection of Tibetan translations of long lost Indian Buddhist Sanskrit works into English, Chinese, Hindi, and other European and Asian languages. The recovery of these important master works of ancient literature, mind science, art, medicine, psychology, philosophy, meditational technology, botany, alchemy, sociology, political science, and so forth, is of monumental importance especially to the Indian, Chinese, and world cultures, analogous to say, the importance to the Western culture of a miraculous rediscovery in accurate, say, Ethiopic, translations of the most important Aramaic, Egyptian, Greek, and Latin works of the ancient Library of Alexandria lost to fire in the 4th century CE. The American Institute of Buddhist studies has been slowly working away at this task for almost forty years, and this conference marked a kind of launch of a new collaboration between that Institute and the Central University of Tibetan Studies in Sarnath. Sarnath is the site where the Buddha gave his first teaching, turning the Wheel of Dharma, as it is called, so the place is especially auspicious. Though the place and this literature is sacred to Buddhists the world over, it is important to note that, as H. H. the Dalai Lama forcefully declared, this is not a project of religious missionarization, since these texts are the scientific texts of the ancient Buddhistic civilizations, the core texts of the curriculum of the ancient university of Nalanda, and so they are major works of world knowledge, especially the "inner science" of psychology and philosophy, not testaments of religious faith.
