About

My name is Erick Tsiknopoulos (born Eric Neiss). My Buddhist Dharma name is Sherab Zangpo. My translator name is Erick Sherab Zangpo. This site is mainly devoted to my translations from Tibetan, as my focus is currently on the study of Tibetan language and translations. However I also post poetry, writing, essays, journals, photography, and other things on here from time to time.

Studying Tibetan is my focus now and will probably continue to be for quite a while. I hope to become an excellent translator of spoken and written Tibetan. As you can see from this site, I have already translated many texts, mostly short ones, from classical Tibetan.

I have only been translating Buddhist texts since November 2007, and though I am getting better all the time, I am new to this,  and so I am bound to make some mistakes. I strive for the highest level of accuracy possible, and I try to never publish something on this site unless I am sure that it meets a fairly high standard of translation. Nonetheless, since I have undoubtedly made many mistakes, I confess them wholeheartedly, and entreat the victorious buddhas and their bodhisattva heirs of the ten directions to forgive me.

As for me, I am 27 years old, from semi-rural southwestern Pennsylvania, south of Pittsburgh, but have spent about 75 percent of my time since highschool on the west coast, mainly in northern California and Oregon, but also in Arizona, southern California, Washington, and Alaska. I’ve had a crazy life, to be honest, and there is much that could be written about it, some of which might find it’s way to this site.

I’ve been a student of Buddhism since the age of 17, and it has been my main interest since then. I studied Theravada, Chinese Mahayana, Chinese and Japanese Pure-land, and Soto Zen, before coming to the Tibetan tradition in 2003 at the age of 22, when I met my main teacher, Khentrul Lodro Thaye Rinpoche, as well as other lamas from the Nyingma tradition. I’ve also received teachings from teachers from the other three traditions of Tibetan Buddhism: Kagyu, Sakya, and Gelug. I have received teachings on lojong (mind-training), Madhyamaka (middle-way view), ngondro (the preliminary practices), bodhichitta (the mind of awakening), emptiness (the true nature of phenomena), the nature of mind, the bodhisattva levels, and several key texts of the Tibetan Buddhist tradition, primarily from the Nyingma perspective of my teacher Khentrul Rinpoche.

I spent 6 months in Japan in 2005, where I studied Japanese language, haiku, Japanese Buddhism and Japanese culture in general, and taught English. I hope to continue my Japanese studies at some point, as I feel just as strongly connected with the Japanese tradition and language as I do with the Tibetan, though not as much with their forms of Buddhism. I am basically low-level fluent in Japanese.

I am a poet and plan on publishing a book of poetry at some point. Many of my poems can be found on this site.

As a translator of Tibetan Buddhist texts, my aspirations are to translate as many Mahayana sutras as possible, which I feel a special connection with and also feel are rather under-appreciated by Western Buddhists, and also works by Nyingma masters, such as Mipham Rinpoche; as well as hidden treasure texts (terma), the special literature of the Nyingma school, often quite visionary and poetic.

Most of all, I hope that this site will bring benefit to every single person who sees it, and that it may become a cause for the complete and perfect awakening of all beings to their true nature.