Annie Heckman is a 2023 PhD graduate of the DSR, where she studied monastic law in Tibetan Buddhism, completing a dissertation titled “Reassembling Discipline: Bu ston Rin chen grub’s Collection of Incidents Involving Nuns from the Vinaya.” Prior to her arrival at the DSR, she was an art professor at De Paul University in Chicago but changed direction to follow her growing interest in Tibetan Buddhism. Annie is now an Associate Translator at the 84000: Translating the Words of the Buddha project, whose one hundred-year mission is to translate the entire Tibetan Buddhist canon.
How did you come to study at the DSR?
That touches on some of the particularities of studying religion, where sometimes we have a personal connection to a religion, but then our interests may become more historical or language-based. When I was an art professor, I had a distant interest in Tibetan Buddhist meditators. I would see stories or texts and just be curious about what it meant to go sit in a cave for a very long time, alongside like what it meant to be an explorer dealing with potentially fatal conditions—those limit experiences of human existence.
I was going through some significant personal challenges, and a friend kept encouraging me to meditate, but I was very resistant to the idea. Then one day I saw a man dying outside of my apartment building. I looked down from my window in the high-rise and could see people trying to resuscitate him, but it wasn't working. After that experience, I did take up meditation, so it was in a practitioner setting that I became fully exposed to Buddhism and Tibetan religion. After everything I had recently gone through, it all made total sense.
When I would hear chanting in Tibetan, it really got to me that I couldn't understand it. I received tutoring, and the deeper I went, the more I wanted to make a shift and ultimately made the decision to study. I had no coursework background in the study of religion so began to rectify that. Professor Jennifer Harris in the DSR told me exactly how I could go about it; she gave me a real path. I felt a compatibility when I visited the DSR and was very encouraged.
I studied modern colloquial Tibetan first, then classical Tibetan ... if you know the modern language it's almost like you can hear the voice of the text better in the older material.
What did you focus on in your PhD?
My focus was on monastic law, specifically on Tibetan exegesis of monastic law. There are different monastic codes, and one code was passed down, more or less in full, from Sanskrit to Tibetan. It’s a full system of rules for monks and nuns, group procedures, and many, many narratives. The rules are in a recitation text, with detailed explanations and narratives to go along with them in a separate text: these are the frame stories for how a rule, in theory, came to be formed. Some of them are sad. Some are very funny. With the rules for nuns, the text with explanations and narratives for rules doesn’t match the order of rules given in the recitation text, which is a sort of monastic legal problem in terms of organization and authenticity. But in the 1350s, Butön Rinchen Drub, a great Tibetan scholar, created a digest of narratives that matched the order of the recitation text. I studied that, figuring out how to translate it and describe his editorial process.
I studied modern colloquial Tibetan first, then classical Tibetan. I think it’s beneficial to study both, because if you know the modern language it's almost like you can hear the voice of the text better in the older material.
Do you consider that your studies in religion have influenced your perspective on cultural, social, and ethical issues?
When I was first exposed to Buddhism, I pictured all these people in robes, standing peacefully with trees and deer and flowers, and everything is quiet. Actually, of course, in narratives of the Buddha’s life, there are extreme events happening politically and interpersonally. Just look at the texts and there's a lot of high drama. It’s so important not to look back and paint a smooth trajectory for Buddhism with what is more of a modern aesthetic position of rounding off life’s rough edges. This is why having method and theory courses is so helpful. When we study religion, we’re largely studying secularism and trying to understand the secular bias that is often brought to bear, even by people who may themselves be very religious.
Let's say someone is criticizing a particular religion. I've been in conversations where someone will say, well, this religion is really inherently bad—like the problems are from the religion. My response is usually to say that I studied religion so I can't really agree with you on this—and I don't mean to say I studied it, so I know it better, but just that from studying something you cultivate an interest in how it works instead of an evaluative position. I came out of the academic study of Tibetan Buddhism really seeing it as one of many approaches to understanding the world. It's not immune to institutional critique. If you're trying to understand documents or grasp what people are saying about their participation in a religion, it's so much richer to listen for nuance rather than to decide up front ‘this one's bad,’ or ‘this one is patriarchal.’
It’s a one-hundred-year project, and we’re about at the 15th year now. So if my good fortune continues, my life’s work is cut out for me!
How have you applied the knowledge and skills from your studies to your current role at the 84000 Translating the Words of Buddha project?
I was asked to help teach Tibetan courses at U of T when I was working on my dissertation and I had contact with Professor Rory Linday, who asked me if I was interested in translation. I started to communicate with the team at 84,000: Translating the Words of the Buddha. It just so happened that I was working on this particularly tricky set of texts related to nuns. Accurate translation of the monastic code is important to the project, and I was ultimately hired as an Associate Translator.
It’s a one-hundred-year project, and we’re about at the 15th year now. So if my good fortune continues, my life’s work is cut out for me!
Who is this translation for?
There's a standard practice of aiming for an audience who is informed and curious, but not necessarily specialist. We don’t want to water anything down, but we also don't want to leave so many terms in Sanskrit that only a specialist could follow the meaning. At the same time, there is a lot of effort applied to making our translations useful for scholars.
It's a wonderful challenge for a translator. Are legibility and accuracy at opposite ends of a spectrum? Can we be accurate and clear at the same time?
What advice would you offer students considering the study of religion?
The filmmaker David Lynch says you have to go deep to catch the big fish. I relate that to the dissertation. There seems to be a point where you decide: this thing is going to take so much time, but it’s actually what I care about the most, where I can make a contribution. There are a lot of demands on a student’s attention, but I think that what gets you through is saying no when you have to. Once you’ve made your choice about what you want to know, spend a few hours with it every day until you understand it. And it does happen, and there are times when you finally realize, I'm sitting here with this information, and I may be the only one who’s looking at it in this particular way.
It's a wonderful challenge for a translator. Are legibility and accuracy at opposite ends of a spectrum? Can we be accurate and clear at the same time?
If you could create your ideal course in religion, what would it be?
It would be a course on translation! For students who are working with the source language, to address what happens when you take anything from one form and put it into another.
There’s also cherry-picking to consider. You can look through texts and find exactly what you need, by selecting a particular part—an intellectually dangerous business. In today’s world, the person who can speak to the accuracy of those selections—to say, “that's actually incorrect”—may be someone who's spending so much time busy with the texts themselves that they may not be writing several articles a year. The more we understand about how long it takes to process texts, the more we need to consider how to responsibly draw information from them. My course would include the process of analyzing secondary literature where there's translation trouble, looking at older translations, and seeing what the issues are. In general, if something really doesn’t make sense, or if it’s based on stringing together quoted breadcrumbs without full context, it’s worth a second look.