Mahayana-sutralamkara English Translations: A Critical Review

Revue d’Etudes Tibétaines, 2016

The case studies offer a hypothesis about the modus operandi in early Tibetan translation which challenges the alleged translationship recorded in Tibetan colophons. It was common for a single Buddhist text to be translated multiple times from both Sanskrit and Chinese. TheTibetan translation team who were responsible for Sanskrit translation would refer to the accessible Chinese parallels or other pre-existing Tibetan translations during translation. The common statement of “translating from Sanskrit (rgya las bsgyur)” in Tibetan colophons should be revisited because it might mean that a Sanskrit text acted as the main source instead of the exclusive source.

ARIRIAB XXII(2019) , 2019

ARIRIAB), published annually since 1997, contains papers on a wide range of Buddhist studies, from philological research on Buddhist texts and manuscripts in various languages to studies on Buddhist art and archaeological finds. Also, by publishing and introducing newly-discovered manuscripts and artefacts, we aim to make them available to a wider public so as to foster further research.

Forum: International Journal of Interpretation and Translation , 2010

This paper is a companion piece to a previous paper published in this journal (Raine 2010), which focused on the identity of the translators in Tibetan history and the context in which they worked. In this paper, the focus is on the formation and contents of the Tibetan Buddhist canon and the translation strategies used by the Tibetans during their nine centuries of translating Indian Buddhist texts. Guidelines for translation laid down by King Tride Songtsen (r. 799-815) are examined and analyzed, followed by a discussion of how these protocols were used by later translators, scholars and editors of the Tibetan canon. As with the earlier paper, in this paper the historical study of translation is linked to present times, with the final section devoted to examining recent efforts to render the Tibetan Buddhist canon into English and other languages. Institutional imperatives to coordinate this work, and the practices and norms that have been established for translation, are discussed. As Tibetan Buddhism continues its process of transmission to countries in the West and beyond, how translators choose to render these often recondite religious texts into multiple languages will be of great interest to scholars of both translation and Buddhist studies.

2018

When Buddhism was imported into China, it met a complex culture with a rich terminology. Therefore the translation of the sacred scriptures of Buddhism would employ Chinese expressions with already ample religious and philosophical connotations. 1 In the Tibetan case, however, the receiving culture maintained a comparatively simple language, with fairly uncomplicated semantic contents. The terminology coined to receive the rich Buddhist systems of knowledge in Tibet were created without such preexisting semantics, and, as we shall see, the import of Buddhist culture into Tibet took place in a more systematic way than that of the Chinese case. 2 In illustrating this movement from one lingua franca to another, namely, from Sanskrit to Chinese, and from a lingua franca to what we may call a national, or local language, namely Tibetan, we focus mostly upon the time of the early Tang period in China, and the same period in Tibetan, because this period shows a highly developed intellectual activity in both countries connected with the transfer and translation of Buddhism, the religion adopted and adapted by similar, but not identical processes by the two countries. The introduction of Buddhism to Tibet began in the seventh century CE, while in the case of China this process started, according to tradition, already in the first century CE. When systems of knowledge migrate by translation from one language to another, from one culture to another, this may happen in more ordered and systematic ways, or by more arbitrary and individually centered initiatives. Further, the translations may be more verbatim, more in the verbo ad verbum fashion or, on the other side, free translations which try to accommodate the translated text to the receiving culture, or even just retelling the contents of the original text in a free way. Into this picture comes the frequent use of loanwords, balanced with the number of loan translations appearing as neologisms in the receiving language. So our concern is trying to understand the Chinese and the Tibetan case of translation of Buddhist texts in this perspective. In general it can be said that the Chinese history of Buddhist translating was a more person-centered endeavor, which of course had the blessing of the ruling authorities at the time. The introduction of Buddhism to Tibet was, according to our sources, a strictly controlled process, and Tibetan royal power was the controlling agent and organizing entity in the beginning of the process. Later, with the routines created, the import of everything Buddhist into Tibet followed in general the premises laid down in the initial phase, though further developed and refined. We will start by describing the Tibetan case, because of its relative simplicity, and how the Tibetan chos skad was established-chos skad being a di

2013

The aims of the current research are as follows: first, review the challenges of rendering Buddhist texts into Chinese and English through the study of the passage “the dharma of emancipation of the exhaustible and inexhaustible”, as articulated in the Vimalakīrti Nirdeśa Sūtra; and second, discuss the scholarly argument by which these Chinese and English translations could have originated from different Sanskrit or Tibetan editions. This study tabulates the three full classical Chinese translations and five English editions, among which are included in the Chinese renditions the works of Zhi Qian (the third century A.D.), Kumārajīva (the fifth century A.D.), and Xuan Zang (the seventh century A.D.); and the English versions translated by Luk, Watson, McRae, Lamotte/Boin, and Thurman between the 1970s and the 2000s. The former three English translations were mainly based on Kumārajīva’s edition and the latter two on the Tibetan copy, illustrating a three-tier translation hierarchy in which the Chinese translations represent the first-tier, being directly translated from the Sanskrit original(s); the English renditions represent the second-tier, stemming from either Kumārajīva’s or the Tibetan edition; and with the third-tier represented by Boin’s translation of Lamotte’s French copy into English. By comparing their chaptering, chapter titles, transliteration of Buddhist terminology, translation of the passage, punctuation, linguistic expressions, and missing parts in each edition, this analysis unveils the intra- and inter-differences between the Chinese and English renditions. Prior research results suggest that it is difficult to evaluate the credibility and validity of the translations because of the uncertainties related to the origin of the text. They have also addressed the fact that the translation discrepancies in Buddhist terminology in English might create a risk of misinterpretation of Buddhist Two Sanskrit Issues p. 3 teachings. Conclusively, this research first substantiates recent discussion on directly using Sanskrit terminology, instead of the English terms, in modern English Buddhist publications; and second agrees that the renditions probably came from different Sanskrit or Tibetan originals. Importantly, it equally values the academic contributions of individual Chinese and English renditions and translators; thus proposing cross-reference among various renditions as a means to inspire researchers with insight from different translations.