Since joining UC Berkeley in 2009, Professor Jacob Dalton has helped shape the university’s Tibetan Studies program, bridging language, religious history, and Buddhist traditions. In this interview, he reflects on the program’s evolution, the challenges of learning Tibetan, and the broader significance of preserving Tibetan culture amid ongoing political and linguistic shifts.
The Tibetan language program at Berkeley was started in 2006. How long have you been teaching Tibetan? If you can, could you tell me a little about the history of this program? How has it evolved over the past two decades?
In an effort to build out the Buddhist Studies program, both Karma Ngodup and I were hired — Karma in 2006 and I joined the faculty in the middle of the 2008-09 academic year, when a foundation had endowed a new chair, which brought me to the university. Berkeley has a long history as one of the top places in the country for studying Buddhism, particularly through the 1970s to the 1990s. In the early 2000s, as we were reshaping the program, we broadened the teaching and research scope. While earlier efforts focused more on Sanskrit and Chinese, for a comprehensive Buddhist studies program, Tibetan studies were also essential. Currently, we are in the process of hiring a graduate student who grew up in Tibet as a lecturer. We hope he will teach the Tibetan language alongside me, while I focus on content courses related to Buddhism and Tibetan history. Additionally, the History Department has hired Professor Stacey van Vleet, an expert in Tibetan medicine, which means we now have two professors of Tibetan studies on campus.
You also teach religious history, including Tibetan Buddhism. Do your studies on the Tibetan language and Tibetan Buddhism overlap or influence the other in any way?
Tibet is a heavily Buddhist region, so studying Tibetan culture inevitably involves studying aspects of Buddhism. I completed a PhD in Buddhist studies, with a primary focus on Tibetan Buddhist ritual history. The Tibetan language is typically divided into classical Tibetan and modern, colloquial, or spoken Tibetan. The texts of Tibetan Buddhism are mostly written in classical Tibetan, which functions similarly to Latin in the Christian context, serving as the scriptural language for Buddhists in Tibet, across the Himalayan regions, and in parts of Mongolia and China. Given this historically wide usage of the language, Tibetan is now taught at most top-tier research universities, including Harvard, Columbia, UVA, Chicago, Stanford, Toronto, and more.
At our university, we offer both classical and modern/spoken Tibetan. Our language program is small, with a limited number of students, which allows us to remain flexible and responsive to their interests. Generally speaking, our first year focuses more on spoken, second year on classical. After two years of introductory and intermediate courses, students can move on to my seminars, where we read texts in classical Tibetan.
The use of the Tibetan language and even parts of the Tibetan culture are currently under ban in the Sichuan Province of China. Does this influence your approach to teaching the language, and if so, how?
When China invaded Tibet, it eventually defined the Tibetan Autonomous Region by drawing a boundary around the central part of the culturally Tibetan areas. However, there were large regions to the east and northeast that were also culturally Tibetan. In order to reduce the size of Tibet, these outlying areas were carved up and incorporated into the provinces of Yunnan, Sichuan, Gansu, and Qinghai. Under Chinese law, these areas are no longer considered Tibet, which means they are not subject to the same severe restrictions. Interestingly, scholars working on Tibetan culture have recently focused more on these eastern and northeastern regions, where Tibetan culture and scholarship are sometimes more vibrant, ironically because these areas are not officially designated as Tibet. Nonetheless, these outlying provinces are still heavily policed.
The Cultural Revolution of the 1960s and 70s was devastating for Tibetan culture, but there was some reopening in the 1980s and 90s. Unfortunately, over the past 15-20 years, the situation has worsened again. The Chinese government has recently implemented policies under the guise of promoting human rights and even preserving Tibetan culture, measures such as those aimed at assimilating Tibetan children. From kindergarten onward, Tibetan children are required to attend boarding schools, where they are compelled to speak Chinese. Reports indicate that many Tibetan children are losing the ability to speak their native language. As older generations pass away, indigenous Tibetan knowledge and practices may die with them. The Tibetan language has thus become a major front in China’s war on Tibetan culture. UC Berkeley’s support of its Tibetan language program is crucial as a show of support for Tibetans and to enable students from around the world to learn about this rich and ancient culture.
I try to raise awareness among my students about these ongoing challenges. Certainly, every scholar of Tibet has to reckon with them. Following the period of the 1950s and 60s, when many Tibetans fled to Nepal and India after the Chinese invasion, the Dalai Lama established a government in exile in northern India. In the years that followed, scholars wishing to study Tibetan culture or Buddhism had to do so along the borders of northern Nepal or travel to India to engage with the Tibetan exile community. In the 1990s, things began to open up, and a generation of scholars was able to conduct research within Tibet proper. This led to a growing question among scholars: where is the "real" Tibet? The exile communities have tried to preserve a version of Tibetan culture as it was before the Chinese invasion, but this has become a somewhat artificial version, influenced by India and the West. With Tibetan culture being eroded from all sides, the question persists: where is Tibet now? The distinction between Tibetans in exile and those in Tibet is only becoming more pronounced, and the future of Tibetan culture remains uncertain.
Turning now to your students' perspective, according to your students, what significance does learning Tibetan hold for them? What motivated them to learn Tibetan, and how have they applied what they learned in these classes?
Students take Tibetan classes for different reasons. Some of them are coming to study it because they're interested in Buddhism and want to travel there or study with different lamas. Those can be American or foreign students; there's a strong interest among some Chinese in Tibetan forms of Buddhism. Then there are what are sometimes called heritage learners - Tibetan undergraduates who want to learn more about their own culture. Sometimes their Tibetan is rusty - because they grew up in El Cerrito or elsewhere - so they come to our classes just to strengthen their own cultural background, which I think is great and an important part of what Berkeley has to offer. There's a large population of Tibetans in El Cerrito, and a number of undergrads grew up there, so it's quite nice that we have that to offer.
What are some of the difficulties that your students, especially those whose native language is English, experience when learning Tibetan?
Because the geography is so mountainous, Tibetan is a rather fragmented language; you end up with disparate dialects, sometimes from one valley to the next. When written down they appear more similar, but the accents, pronunciation, and vocabulary are very specific to the region. Because of this, one of the challenges students have is choosing a particular dialect. The other big problem is that the language learning materials for Tibetan are behind a lot of other languages and that's partly because it's a less commonly taught language. Textbooks and other language learning resources and programs are all lacking compared to Korean or Chinese, for example. A third problem is that historically, Tibetans have looked to India as the source of all that is good because Buddhism comes from India. They have worshiped Indian culture for over a thousand years now, and have even adopted an Indic alphabet and Sanskrit grammar, adapting both to their own language. But Tibetan is a completely different language group. It's not a Sanskritic language, and so forcing this grammatical grid over the Tibetan language can have a somewhat artificial and strange effect. Nonetheless, most textbooks employ this grid, so you essentially learn Tibetan language and Tibetan grammar in terms that are completely alien to the language itself. Just recently some historical linguists have started publishing some textbooks that are more growing out of the native Tibetan grammar, which is quite helpful.
Take a class in Tibetan to learn more!