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The Tibetan Canon Preserves the Buddha's Words in Translation

Over a hundred volumes of scripture, translated from Sanskrit centuries ago, still await full translation into modern languages

On the timeline · around Compiled over centuries; modern translation ongoing · Buddhism in East and Southeast AsiaMahayana and VajrayanaBuddhism in East and Southeast AsiaThe Tibetan Canon Preserves the Buddha's Words in Translation110011501200125013001350140014501500

Quick facts

Kangyur
108 volumes, the Buddha's words in translation
Tengyur
224 volumes of commentaries and treatises
Modern translation initiative
84000, with UC Santa Barbara (founded 2021)
Kangyur translated as of mid-2020s
Roughly 23 percent

What happened

Tibetan Buddhism preserved its scriptural inheritance in two great collections: the Kangyur, "the translated words" attributed directly to the Buddha, and the Tengyur, the translated commentaries and treatises of later Indian Buddhist masters explaining and elaborating on those words. Together the two collections run to well over 100,000 pages of classical Tibetan, built up over centuries as Indian Buddhist texts were rendered into Tibetan following the tradition's establishment under kings and teachers like Atisha. The modern nonprofit 84000, working with academic partners including a Buddhist Text Translation Initiative at the University of California, Santa Barbara, has undertaken a decades-long project to render this canon into English and other modern languages, reporting that only a minority of the Kangyur had been translated and published as of the mid-2020s.

Why it matters

The scale of the Tibetan canon, and how much of it remains untranslated into any modern language even today, is a reminder that huge portions of historic Buddhist scripture still exist mainly in classical Tibetan, readable only to a shrinking number of specialists, which is precisely the access problem that modern translation projects are racing to solve before that expertise disappears.

How we know

The Kangyur and Tengyur survive as physical manuscript and woodblock-printed collections held in Tibetan monasteries and libraries worldwide, and the scale and translation status of the canon are documented by 84000's own project records and its academic partnership with UC Santa Barbara's Religious Studies department.

Sources

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