NAME

Parse::Marpa::Doc::Why - Why call this parser "Marpa"?

WHY CALL IT MARPA?

Marpa is the name of the greatest of the Tibetan "translators". In that time (we're talking the 11th century AD) Indian Buddhism was at its height. A generation of Tibetan translators were devoting themselves to producing Tibetan versions of Buddhism's Sanskrit scriptures. Marpa was their major figure, and today he is known simply as Marpa Lotsawa: "Marpa the Translator".

In the 11th century, translation was not a job for the indoors type. A translator needed to study with the teachers who had the texts and could explain them. That meant going to India. Marpa's home was in the Lhotrak Valley. The route from the Lhotrak to India was via the three-mile high Khala Chela Pass, two hundred difficult and lawless miles away.

From Khala Chela to the great Buddhist center of Nalanda University was four hundred miles downhill, but Tibetans would stop off for years or months in Nepal, getting used to the low altitudes. Tibetans had learned not to go straight to Nalanda the hard way. Almost no germs live in the cold, thin air of Tibet, and Tibetans arriving directly in the lowlands had no immunities. Whole expeditions had died from disease within weeks of arrival on the hot plains.

BLATANT PLUG

There's more about Marpa in my new novel, The God Proof, in which his studies, travels and adventures are a major subplot. The God Proof centers around Kurt Gödel's proof of God's existence. Yes, that Kurt Gödel, and yes, he really did work out a God Proof (it's in his Collected Works, Vol. 3, pp. 403-404). The God Proof is available at Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/God-Proof-Jeffrey-Kegler/dp/1434807355.