User:B9 hummingbird hovering/Beacon of Certainty by Mipham/Introduction

Introduction
I still have been unable to source the Sri Unicode for the Beacon. I have sent Dharmadownload an email informing them but as yet have received no response. I haven't felt like continuing with the rendering yet. I have been reading and re-reading Pettit's gloss of the first topic of the Beacon's seven, and I am ashamed to say I have not grasped it and that it kept on putting me to sleep. But then I realized that my linguistic ability is exceptional and that if it is opaque to me then it is most probably going to be inaccessible and dense to most other people who read it. Though without a show of humility I say my linguistic ability is keen it is qualified by my thorough lack of detailed knowledge of the extended discourse of this work. For me humility is nothing if it is not honest. The tradition of self-effacement of the Tibetan masters always makes me queasy as it smacks of caricature. To me they are denigrating the quality of their master(s). The Beacon is a senior text, so it is a given that it is going to be challenging. Pettit's description of how solitary and marginalizing was his writing experience of this work, even though he is fortunate to have a supportive parter, brought empathy welling to my eyes. I even sent him an email telling him so and that I felt solidarity with him in his work...and thankful. He probably never got it *hehehehehe*. We have never formally corresponded. I happened upon an email address of his in my travels and sent an email to Pettit unsolicited. But, that said, in my experience if a commentary is opaque it is because the exegete has not mastered the work. I have not read all the commentaries like Pettit and I have not had the fortunate personal instruction of the teachers with whom he has had recourse but I have slept with his rendering and extended work close to my heart and pray for the essence of the meaning to be made accessible to me so it may make its way through me when I engage Mipham's text in the Tibetan. Indeed, it is only through the work of Pettit that I could work at a rendering of the Tibetan into English as his work helps me with historicity, context and the grammar which is still somewhat of a mystery to me.

I am learning through Pettit.

But beyond that I do not yet get to the adamant shard of this first point. I will persevere and continue to bumble my way through a translation. My knowledge of Tibetan grammar is where I really need to progress. My renderings are surely wanton. Dharma is practical for me. If it becomes too unearthy then it is pointless. I appreciate academia and precision and eloquence in communication but if there is no clarity and accessibility then it fails. Well, that is my opinion.

For me this ivory-filigree of rhetoric needs to be of real spiritual value to the engaged practitioner. Collapse the 'Greater Tradition' of the orthopraxy with the 'Little Tradition' of all the manifold practitioners who may engage this with their own overlay of experience colouring their reading of my interpretation of both Pettit and Mipham. It needs to be stated that all exegesis is interpretation. Greater Tradition may ark at that but it is a modernist discourse of truth.