DSR alumna Annie Heckman returned in October 2025 for the department's 50th anniversary year DSR Lecture Series to present her talk on “Nuns, Monks, Soldiers, and Kings: Buddhist Monastics and the Rule of Law in the Mūlarsavāstivāda Vinaya,” exploring how Buddhist monks and nuns interact with and navigate the boundaries of royal authority in monastic legal narratives. Heckman is an Associate Translator for 84000: Words of the Buddha and currently teaches at Washington and Lee University. Before her lecture, Heckman sat down with DSR MA student Felicia Sang for an interview about her scholarly work on Buddhist monastic law and translation. The interview has been shortened and edited for clarity.
Vinayas, monastic legal codes, have been and remain essential parts of Buddhist practice and debate today. Why is scholarly examination of vinayas important in conversation with Buddhist traditions and outside the academy?
When we look at monastic law, there’s this normative universe where the Buddha is the one setting the rules, so vinayas are helpful to look at how communities can solve problems, and what happens when someone does the wrong thing. We also live in a time where the best practices for governance are up for grabs, so looking at different models of group governance is always helpful.
Translation of Tibetan primary sources plays a significant role in your methodology and analysis. What are the strengths and limitations that you encounter when translating or working with translations of religious texts like the Mūlasarvāstivāda Vinaya? What do you think others should pay attention to when working with translated material, or translating materials themselves?
Early on in my language learning, I was very critical of translators, but now I know what a world of compromises it is, from choosing the perfect term to needing slightly different syntax in English than in Tibetan or Sanskrit.
For someone working with translated materials, be generous towards any translation effort and, simultaneously, trust no one. If it doesn’t make sense, there’s a chance that there’s something going on in the way it was translated. For those translating, it's good to have a clear idea of what the goal for the final product is, and to understand that broader preferences in grammar and stylistic choices of our translation into the target language can change over time.
I try to tread gently and stay as close to the source as possible. For me, this can mean producing clumsy translations and then spending a lot of time coming up with the right ways to smooth them out. For example, there’s this story where a nun kicks someone in the ribs—she’s not an example of a good nun in these stories—and in the Tibetan it’s a noun-verb combination, like throwing a punch. You can decide when you see the noun and verb together that, whatever, she kicked him. However, to mirror and honor the syntax of the Tibetan, I needed a noun-verb combination in English. I thought about it for a week and realized, you can heave a kick! Although it will take more time, mirroring and honoring the syntax will often result in more satisfying and thoughtful translations.
With generative translators performing impressively even for Tibetan, how do you see AI shaping the future of Buddhist translation? Do you think it poses a challenge to human-driven projects like 84000, or can it be used in more supportive and collaborative ways?
I’m not using these tools for my work, but there was a time when I was testing what they could and couldn’t do. For the genres I’m working on, more often than not, it created extra steps for me.
I draft things relatively quickly when I’m translating, and I have less cleaning to do than if I use an AI tool. The tools were taking a lot more liberties and translating things more loosely than I was comfortable with. There’s also a lot to be learned by slowly going through the texts.
I don’t think there’s harm in someone who already has a certain proficiency using AI to cut down time on certain searches or seeing if something is missing in a translation, but if someone isn’t yet proficient and they use AI to cut corners, it could be detrimental. The tools might convince them of something that actually makes no sense, and unless they already have some dexterity with those materials, they might not be able to decipher it.
Tell us a bit about your current book project!
My current project is a translation of Butön Rinchen Drup’s Collection of Incidents Involving Nuns in the Vinaya (ʼDul ba dge slong maʼi gleng ʼbum), a compilation of narratives that Butön excised from the canon in the 1350s, condensing them significantly. You’ll read about nuns misbehaving, but also stories about the stars, the foremost nuns. This would be especially useful for someone interested in stories about Buddhist nuns, who doesn’t have time to read through the hundreds of pages these stories fill in the canon.
The other function is for people interested in monastic law in the Mūlarsavāstivāda Vinaya, as Butön deals with a textual problem and reorders all the narratives to match how the rules are ordered in the recitation text. If someone is interested in the nuns’ commitments and rules, and they want to be able to very quickly understand what they mean and learn something about the basis for them, then Butön’s text covers that ground, and my study helps explain how he structured it.
The DSR is an especially diverse community, theoretically, methodologically, and with research conducted in areas and religions all around the world. In what ways has this kind of environment influenced your research and professional trajectory?
The faculty were very generous, offering different kinds of exposure. For example, Pamela Klassen was studying something completely different from what I was working on, but she was teaching the Museums and Material Religion course when I was here, and after getting involved in her research through the course, I got to travel to Northern Ontario and go behind the scenes at the Royal Ontario Museum.
What's so exciting here is the degree to which, especially as a graduate student, you get to find out how professors are doing their research and how they figure out the things they figure out. It’s a very exciting atmosphere to be part of. I think a lot about the kindness here, too; the culture of the department is that if you have an issue, someone will stay and help you. That makes this department really special.
If you could give one piece of advice to graduate students in the DSR program, what would you tell them?
Even when what you’re working on might seem really obscure, if you focus and do all the work, then you’ll be able to explain its relevance. Eventually, it will be clear to people that you know what you’re talking about. So, my advice is to keep going!
