buddhist hybrid english

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THE JOURNAL

OF THE INTERNATIONAL ASSOCIATION OF

BUDDHIST STUDIES

E D I T O R - I N - C H I E F

A . K. NarainUniversity of Wisconsin, Madison, USA

E D I T O R SL. M.Joshi

Punjabi UniversityPatiala, India

Alexander W. MacdonaldUniversite de Paris X

Nanterre, FranceBardwell SmithCarleton College

Northjield, Minnesota, USA

Ernst SteinkellnerUniversity of Vienna

Wien, AustriaJikido Takasaki

University of TokyoTokyo, Japan

Robert ThurmanA mherst College

Amherst, Massachusetts, USA

Volume 4 1981 Number 2


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C O N T E N T S

I. ARTICLESNew Buddhist Sanskrit Texts from Central Asia: An Un

known fragment of the Mahayana Mahdparinirvdna-sutra by G. M. Bongard Levin 7Buddhist Hybrid English: Some Notes on Philology andHermeneutics for Buddhologists by Paul J. Griffiths 17Nonorigination and Nirvana in the Early TathdgatagarbhaLiterature by William Grosnick 33Multiple Dimensions of Impermanence in Dogen's "Gen-jokoan" by Steven Heine 44The Autobiography of a 20th-century Rnying-ma-pa lamaby Alexander W. Macdonald 63Metapsychology of the Abhidharma by Shanta Ratnayaka 76

II . SHORT PAPER

1. The Buddhist "Prodigal Son": A Story of Misperceptionsby Whalen L ai 91

III. BOOK REVIEWS1. Lustful M aidens and Ascetic Kings (Buddhist and H ind u

Stories of Life) by C. Amore and Larry D. Shinn 99


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2. The Syncre t ic Rel ig ion of Lin Chao-en by Judith A. Berling 1013. T h e M em oirs of a M od ern G nost ic (Par ts I and I I ) by

Edward Conze 1024 . B u d d h i s t S t u d i e s by J. W. dejong 1065 . So urce s for a History of the bSam yas Debate by G. W. Houston 1076 . B u ddh i s t A rc h i t ec tu re o f W es te rn Ind ia (c . 250 B C - A D

300) by S. Nagaraju 1097 . T h e T ho us an d B u dd ha s : A nc ien t B ud dh i s t Pa in tings f rom

t h e C a v e - T e m p l e s of T u n - h u a n g o n t h e W e s t e rn F r o n t ie r of China by A urel Stein 112

I V . P R E S I D E N T I A L A D D R E SS1. Tasks Ahead: Pres ident ia l Address Given on the Occas ion

of the Th i rd C onfe rence o f The In te rna t iona l A ssoc ia t ion o f B uddh i s t S tud ies , Winn ipeg , C anada , A ugus t1980 by Herbert V. Guenther

C o n t r i b u t o r s 124


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Buddhist Hybrid English:Some Notes on Philology andHermeneutics for Buddhologists

by Paul J. Griffiths

Buddhist thought has a strange, and in many respects deplorable,effect up on lang uag e; in India it prod uced that barbaric language weusually call by the equally barb aric nam e of Buddh ist H ybrid Sanskrit,a language in which large numbers of long, repetitive, obscure, andsubtle works were composed over a period of more than a thousandyears. It forced the Tibetans to invent not only an alphabet but alsowhat was in effect a new lang uag e, the most mechanical form of trans-lationese which the world h as yet seen. It man aged to disturb even th eseve re ba lance a nd precise rhy thm s of classical Chinese. And it is nowin process of w reaking its havoc upo n the English lang uage, creating adialect comprehensible only to the initiate, written by and for Buddhologists, a dialect which has provided the title for this paper:Buddhist Hybrid English.

It is the intention of this pape r to make some suggestions aboutthe causes of this unfortunate development, and to point the way toits remedy. More specifically, one main problem area will be dealtwith: that of how to interp ret Bud dhist Sanskrit texts in such a way asto avoid unnecessary bastardization of the English language, whilestill pe rfo rm ing the scholarly task of making available the m eaning ofsuch texts to the scholarly community. We shall be concerned hereonly with Buddhist texts that survive in Sanskrit, and how they havebeen and should be handled by the English-speaking Buddhologicalcommunity. Much of what is said here will have wider applications,but such applications will not be made explicit.1 We are here dealingwith what is essentially an hermeneutical issue, and we shall try toanswer three questions: first, what should be the aims of the Buddhological community in handling the corpus of Sanskrit texts avail-17


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able to i t? A subsidiary issue here wil l be whether or not the t rainingmethods used for young Buddhologis t s a re in fac t appropria te to theachievement of these aims. Second, i t wil l be asked how these aimsmay best be achieved. In order to answer this i t wil l be necessary tolook briefly at the literary nature of the avai lable Sanskri t texts , and toestabl ish some hermeneutical principles. We shal l need to ask whetherphi lological expert ise as classical ly understood has any relevance tothe hermeneut ica l en terpr i se , and to examine the poss ib le a ims andpu rp os es of t rans la t ion . T hi rd , we shal l askand mak e some a t tem pta t answeringthe ques t ion about the proper re la t ionsh ip of ph i lo l ogy to he rm ene ut ic s in the Budd hologica l sp here . I t is her e , above al l,that Buddhologists have a great deal to learn from other discipl ines inwhich these problems have been faced and d iscussed for genera t ions .T h e r e is abso lu te ly no reason why Buddho logy should become anhermet ic t rad i t ion , sea led off f rom the un in i t ia te and passed downfrom master to pupil by myst ical abhiseka; that way lies extinction, ora t l eas t a se l f -ban ishment f rom the wider academic communi ty .

First , therefore, we need to discuss the legi t imate aims of theBuddho log ica l communi ty i n hand l ing the co rpus o f Buddh i s t San skri t texts at i ts disposal . This area of Buddhological endeavour isclearly a part of the history of rel igious ideas in i ts widest sense. Thatis to say, the Buddhologist handling Buddhist Sanskri t texts isorsh ou ld be con cern ed ini tial ly to un de rs ta nd wh at h i s tex ts a re abo ut .This sounds obvious , and should hard ly need say ing , bu t as we sha l lsee t he Buddho log ica l communi ty p roduces a l a rge number o f t r ans lat ions (part icularly of Tibetan texts , but also to a somewhat lesserdegree of Sanskr i t t ex ts) which be t ray no such unders tanding . Whatthe n cons t i t u t e s unde rs t and ing? T h i s is a mu l ti -face t ed phe nom eno n ,involving the interact ion of the Buddhologist with his text on an u m b e r of diffe ren t levels; i t goes far beyon d phi lology, tho ug h ace rta in de g re e of phi lological exp ert ise is a necessary prec ond it ion forun de rs ta nd in g to occur . Ph ilologica l exper t i se should provide theabi l i ty to know what the technical terms of Buddhist Sanskri t phi losop hy m ea n (an en ter pr ise w hich is s ti ll in its infancy) and to ha nd lethe complex syntax of Sanskr i t ph i losophica l sen tence . This i s noeasy mat te r , and I doubt whether anyth ing less than f ive yearsintensive study of the Sanskri t language could provide the necessaryexpert ise . We should note here that phi lology, as classical ly unders tood in Eu ro pe a nd A me rica , is o f very ma rg ina l re levance for th estu dy of B ud dh ist San skri t . Sansk ri t has bee n and often stil l is18


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taught in Western univers i t ies pr imar i ly in connect ion with Indo-E u ro p ea n s tudies , s tudies which have s ignificance pr imar i ly for theu n d e r s t a n d i n g o f t h e V e d a . 2 The Sanskr i t ic Buddhologis t does notneed to know the e tymology and der ivat ion of h is technica l te rms andthe i r r e la t ionsh ip to con jec tura l Ind o-E urop ean roo ts ; m ore r e levan twould be a thorough grounding in the Prakr i ts , the l inguis t ic develo pm en ts o f Middle Ind ie . T h e Sanskr it ic Buddholog is t 's p r imaryconcern is to unders tand the technica l te rminology of his texts as i twas under s tood by the i r au thor s , th roughout a thousand yea r s o fIndian his tory, and the only ef fec t ive way of ga ining such under s tanding is by wide reading of texts and commentar ies . Only thus canthe ful l semant ic range of a g iven technica l te rm be apprecia ted.Clear ly , th e pre - requis i te h er e is the abil ity to read Bu dd his t Sanskr i twith ease and f luency, to be able to pick up a text and read i t with thesame speed and level of comprehens ion tha t we would br ing to amodern s tudy in Engl i sh , F rench or German. The undoubted f ac tth a t suc h skil l is ra re am on g W estern Bu ddh ologis ts me ans tha t veryfew ha ve the t ime to beco me acq uain ted with a full ran ge of B udd his tSanskr i t l i t e r a tu re , and so our under s tand ing of the ma te r ia l r emainsvery l imited. We shal l re turn to th is point .

The second s tep on the path to unders tanding a given text i s theabil i ty to contextualize, to place the text under discussion in i tshis tor ica l context , both in the broad sense of t rac ing cont inui t ies anddiscont inui t ies wi th the ear l ie r t radi t ion, and in the nar rower sense ofseeing how a given text f i ts into the larger corpus of i ts author . Con-textual iza t ion should a lso , wherever poss ible , inc lude a plac ing of thetext in i ts socio-cultural context in an attempt to show how particularforms of thought arose in in terac t ion with par t icular forms of socie ty .I t i s t rue tha t the pauci ty of our knowledge about both the re la t iveand absolute chronology of the composi t ion of Buddhis t Sanskr i ttexts in relat ion to the chronology of Indian his tory at large makes thistask diff icult ; bu t even i ts desirabil i ty is hard ly rec ogn ized by m ostprac t ic ing Buddhologis ts , who tend to discuss the i r texts exclus ivelyon the level of abs t rac t phi losophy, as though each and every one wasrea l ly composed in the tusita heaven, in blissful isolation from thewor ld o f men .

T he t h i r d a nd m os t im por t a n t s te p on t he pa th t o unde r s tanding a given text i s tha t of appropr ia t ing i ts meaning, of makingexpl ic i t to oneself one ' s unders tanding of the in tent ions of the text ' sau th o r . I t is a t th is point tha t c rea t ive th ink ing begins to op era te , an d


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i t is only when this point has been reached that any at tempt at interpretat ion is l ikely to have success. There is unfortunately no spacehere to draw out the ful l implicat ions of this third s tage on the path ofun de rs ta nd in g; to do so wou ld involve an excurs ion in to the k ind ofhe rm en eu t ica l phi losop hy which is fa r f rom p op ular in the Anglo-Saxon world. All that can be said is that a necessary condit ion for theat ta in m en t of this th ird s tag e is th e abi li ty on th e part of the Bu dd ho l-ogist to restate what he takes to be the meaning(s) of his text in termso th er th an tho se em ploy ed by i ts au tho r . I f the Budd hologis t ca nno td o this , an d restr icts hims elf to discussions of his text in the idiom an dthought-wor ld of the context which produced i t , then he has fa i led inw ha t we shal l see to be a pr im e du ty of any scholar in any f ieldthatof making his resul ts avai lable to the wider scholarly community. I tshould also be noted that this process of restat ing the meaning(s) of agiven text in terms other than those employed by the text i tself may,bu t nee d n ot , involve s t ra ight forw ard t rans la t ion of the text f rom onelanguage to another . I t wi l l be sugges ted in the course of th is papertha t t rans la t ion is very frequent ly not the bes t way of per form ing thehe rm en eu t ica l task , a fact ra re ly rea l ized by prac t ic ing Bud dholog is ts ,most of whom s tand t ransf ixed in awe of the i r texts and are concerned la rge ly to t ransmi t them by means of t rans la t ion regardless ofw he the r o r no t they have been under s tood .

So far , then, i t has been suggested that the ini t ial aim of theB uddho log i s t hand l ing B uddh i s t Sanskr i t t ex t s and w ork ing w i th inthe academ ic com m u ni ty shou ld be to un der s t and h is sources . Th esecond legi t imate aim, as we have already begun to see, is that ofmaking his understanding avai lable, ini t ial ly to his co-special is ts ,secondari ly to the wider scholarly community, and f inal ly to thein teres ted publ ic . I t must be s t ressed again and again tha t the Buddhologis t , as an academic , has a rea l duty to communica te , and thetend enc y in co n tem po ra ry W es te rn B uddho logy to r e t r ea t beh ind animpenet rable sh ie ld of technica l vocabulary comprehens ib le only toco-special is ts , and to make no effort to reach out to col leagues inrel ate d f ields, is to be very strongly de pl or ed . Very few of the pa pe rspu b l i she d in the dozen o r so Eng l i sh -l anguage journ a l s w hich han d lespecial ized work in this f ield can be comprehensible to anyone outsideth e closed circle of specialis ts , an d this is largely because few Bu dd ho logis ts have any exper t i se in anything but Buddhology. Dr . R ichardGombrich , in h is inaugura l lec ture as Professor of Sanskr i t in theUnivers i ty of Oxford , bemoaned the s ta te of Br i t i sh Sanskr i t s tudiesin these w ords :20


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We have three problems: we are not very good at English; weare not very good at Sanskrit; and we are not very good atanything else.We s hou ld take these w ords to hea rt; they are, if anything, still m oretrue of the state of Buddhist Sanskrit studies in England and America. T h e re are , as on e would expect, some exceptions, some Bud dhol-ogists who have both the skills and the desire to communicate withscholars in other fields and to undertake the hermeneutical task, butthey are few, and mostly in the realm of philosophy, where at lastsom e atte m pt is being m ade to enter seriously into the realm of cross-cultural philosophy.4 But the vast majority of published work speaksonly to other Buddhologists, and not always very clearly to them. Ifthe third step on the path to understanding were taken more seriously, if it was felt as a duty to develop the ability to restate themeaning(s) of one's text, and if this approach were inculcated in ouruniversity departments devoted to Buddhist Studies, then we mightbeg in to see some very positive results in the are a of inter-disciplinaryand inter-cultural thinking.

This should not be misunderstood. I am not trying to say thatthere is no room for specialized research work, or that journalsshould not publish abstruse and complex pieces likely to be understood only by oth er Budd hologists. Rather, I am suggesting that everyBuddhologist should see it as his duty not merely to communicatewith fellow specialists, but also with the wider scholarly world andwith the interested public. If a Buddhologist's specialized researchwork makes him unable to do this, then there is something wrongwith the educational system which produced him and with the academic structures which support him.

So far, then, it has been suggested that a Buddhologist's academic work is in principle no different from that of any other specialist in the field of the history of religious ideas, and that the aimstow ards w hich h e works are jus t a pa rt of the wider field of the searchfor truth. Something needs to be said, however, about what the aimsof th e Bu ddho logist are not, if only because there seems to be a greatdeal of confusion, especially in A merican academic circles, abou t this.T h e most im portan t point to bear in mind h ere is that the B uddhologist qua Buddhologist cannot be a religious enthusiast, proselytiser, oreven , one migh t go so far as to say, Buddh ist. Th e set of attitudes thata Buddhist usually has towards the texts of his tradition are quitedifferent from, and to a large extent incompatible with, those that aBuddhologist should have towards the text he is studying. The un-


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critically religious Buddhistand most Buddhists are uncriticallyreligiousregards his texts with awe as instruments of salvation andcontainers of truth. He is not concerned to learn things about Buddhism, is only marginally concerned with philological matters, andgenerally has no interest whatever in what we have called contextual-ization. For the Buddhologist, the opposite isor should bethecase. T o take two exam ples: the average Sinhalese Buddh ist (and thisapplies also to the intellectuals of that tradition) is quite happy tobelieve that th e suttas of the Pali suttapitaka were spoken by Sakyamunijust as they now stand in the texts preserved for us. He is notinterested in, say, the application of form-critical method to the Palicanon in an attempt to reclaim the Buddhavacanam. Similarly, theTibetan scholastic, trained in the philosophical method of his school,has n o tro uble at all with the idea that the same Sakyamuni spoke thesutras of the prajndpdramitd, and would regard as at best unnecessaryand at worst sacrilegious the attempt to contextualize the prajndpdramitd literature in the way that has been suggested in this paper. Theconflict between uncritical faith and rigorous historico-philologicalenquiry, a conflict which radically divided and almost destroyed theintellectuals of Protestant Christendom during the last century, is infact ju st as strong an d jus t as pernicious in the B uddhist sp here, eventh ou gh it has yet to come out into the op en . We shall have occasion toreturn to this issue, especially when we consider the motivation fortranslating Buddhist texts. At this point it needs to be stressed onceagain: the Buddhologist as Buddhologist cannot be a proselytizer,neither can he regard his texts with awe as receptacles of revealedtru th . T h e only kind of tru th they can have for him as scholar is thatwhich is subject to discussion a nd verification in the open aren a of theacademy.

This is not, of course, to say that no Buddhologist can also be aBuddhist, but only that any who claim to wear both hatsand manydomust be very careful to separate in their minds and their teachings the different functions of Buddhist and Buddhologist. To confuse the two is simply bad scholarly method. This problem is especially severe when Buddhism is taught in Western universities byBu dd hist scholastics, either of the Tibetan o r Therav adin persuasion.T h e difference in presuppo sitions and appro aches between their wayof studying Buddhism and the way in which aspiring Buddhologistsshould be studying it is often not made sufficiently clear to students,with the result of confused method and questionable results.22


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Having br ie f ly ske tched the a ims of the Buddhologis t handl ingBuddhis t Sanskr i t t ex t s , we mus t now cons ider whether or no t t r a ining methods in Bri t i sh and American univers i t ies are in fact appropr ia te to these a ims. What can we expect of the new generat ion ofBuddhologis ts in the f ie ld of Sanskr i t s tudies? The f i rs t point to notei s tha t there a re no t very many of them. There a re a number ofreasons for this: one is that Sanskri t tui t ion is not widely available inthe univers i t ies of e i ther England or America , and even where i t i s tobe foun d the s tress is e i ther on Ind o-E uro pe an phi lo logy , o r upo n thestudy of the c lass ical language and the mainst ream l i tera ture ofI n d i a . 5 Eve n in those few univers i ties whe re B ud dh ism is t reate d as af ie ld of s tudy in it s ow n r ight , B ud dh is t Sanskr i t tend s to get ta ug htpr imari ly as an adjunct to special izat ion in e i ther Tibetan or Sino-Japanese f ie lds . The at t ract ion of having access to a complete corpusof B ud dh is t l i t e ra ture ra the r than a f ragm entary o ne , com bined wi thhaving l iving representat ives of a given t radi t ion avai lable , togetherwi th the i r o ra l t r ad i t ions , has meant tha t more and more asp i r ingBuddho l og i s t s a r e cen t e r i ng t he i r a t t en t i on e i t he r upon T i be t ans tudies or upon Sino-Japanese s tud ies to the de t r iment of Sanskr i t .6One result is that i t is now typically possible to get a Ph.D. in BuddhistStudies f rom an American univers i ty wi th only one, or a t most two,years of Sanskr i t , the kind of t ra ining which can give no more than afaint hint of the complexit ies, at tractions, and sheer difficult ies ofreading Sanskr i t phi losophical texts wi th any kind of f luency. Thes tudy of San skr i t am on g the r i s ing gen era t ion of Buddholog is t s in theW es t is thu s assum ing a subs id ia ry pos i tion , an d Eu gen e B ur no uf sprophecy of 1844, that the s tudy of Buddhis t Sanskr i t would a lwayshave pr ior i ty for those in te res ted in unders tanding Buddhism, 7 isnow in process of be ing d i sproved .

This is a sad state of affairs. If real expert ise in the handling ofBuddhis t Sanskr i t texts should vanish f rom the univers i t ies of Englan d a n d A m eric a an d it is bec om ing increasingly di ff icult to f indou ts ide Ind ia and Jap an the loss wou ld be i r reparab le . I t would be asthough we had access to the sacred books of Chris t iani ty only throught he Vu l ga t e .

So far , then, we have seen that one of the a ims of the Buddhologis t which was out l ined in the f i rs t par t of this paperthat of unders tanding h i s t ex t sis in some danger because the t ime and teachingnecessary to gain a f luent reading knowledge of Buddhis t Sanskr i t i snot readi ly avai lable in the univers i t ies of England and America , andeven when i t is , the young Buddhologist is not very l ikely to want i t .23


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But it is in the third stage of the process of understanding, that ofappropriating and restating the meaning(s) of one's text, that the realproblems arise. The education of the aspiring Buddhologist as anhermeneutical philosopher is likely to have been sketchy, and so hisskills as a communicator are likely to be equally minimal. We mustask: what are the methods best adapted to achieving the aim ofrestating the meaning(s) of one's text?T h er e can be no doub t that since the beginning of Buddhologyas an academic discipline, one method above all others in communicating the m eaning of Budd hist texts to the world has been adop ted:this is the method of translation. Since Burnouf translated the Sad-dharrmpundarikasutra* the sine qua n on of success as a Buddhologisthas been the production of substantial translations of previouslyun tran slat ed texts. Th is is still very m uch the case today; the standa rdAmerican Buddhist Studies Ph.D. consists of a translation (and sometimes also a critical edition) of a given text, combined with a fifty pageintroduction and perhaps the same amount of explanatory notes. 9Part of the thesis of this paper is that the obsession with translation inthe Buddhological community, the pick-your-text-and-translate-it appr oa ch , is no lo nger, if indeed it ever was, the best way of un der takin gth e h erm ene utical task which we have seen to be of such fundam entalim por tance . A m ong o ther problems, the stress on translation has ledto the development of that regrettable phenomenon which providedthe title for this paper: Buddhist Hybrid English, a bastardized formof the English language, so hag-ridden by Sanskrit syntax that almostevery sentence is constructed in the passive, every technical term istranslated by a series of hyphenated polysyllables, and the ideal ofwriting clear, precise, and elegant English hardly even comes to theconscious awareness of the translator.I do not wish to underestimate the difficulties of translatingB ud dh ist Sanskrit texts into clear, precise, and elegant E nglish; I amonly too aware of them. But I do wish to argue that if the task oftranslating in this way proves too difficult, then another way ofcommunicating the meaning of the text should be adopted. To fleshout this statement in more detail we need to look at the nature of thesou rce m aterial with w hich the Sanskritic B uddhologist w orks, not, asis usually done, from the viewpoint of content, but from the viewpointof form, of literary and aesthetic merit.

Clearly it is impossible to make any attempt at a survey of theliterary forms and aesthetic merits of the entire field of Buddhist24


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Sanskrit literature. 1 wish simply to take a few examples of texts whichare , for varying reasons, unsuited to communication and interpretation by translation. Examples will be taken from both sutra and sdstra,though not from tantra.10 To begin with the sutra: there survives inSanskrit a substantial body of work, ranging from the concise andelegant vajracchedika, through the diffuse, repetitive and ornate Gan-davyuha, to the cryptic and disorganized Lahhdvatdra. From the religious viewpoint these are the basic and essential texts of Buddhism;for t he believing Bud dhist it is he re that the word of B ud dha is to befound, and so the religious motivation for preserving and translatingthese texts is obvious. T o d o so is an action amassing great m erit forthe doer, and makes the saving word of the Buddha available forwhole new cultures. It should always be remembered that the cult ofthe book is hardly less developed in the Mahayana than in Islam,11tho ug h t he term s in which it is expressed are rath er different. But forthe scholar, as we have already pointed out, different considerationsshould provide motivation. The Buddhologist should ask himself,when dealing with a particular Sanskrit sutra, whether or not it hasany literary merit; whether or not it is of a kind to permit a clearEnglish rend erin g, or w hether its mean ing would be better communicate d by study a nd analysis. T o take jus t one of many possibleexamples, let us look at the Gandavyuha.12 In this text we see theapotheosis of Gautam a taken to an extrem e degree and a concomitantfascination with the details of the various buddhaksetras which mutuallyinterpenetrate to make up the dharmadhdtu. The ostensible "plot" ofthe sutraSudhana's pilgrimage from teacher to teacher in an attempt to discover how to live the life of a bodhisattvais almostcompletely overlaid by the endlessly repetitive descriptions of theappearance, ornaments, and powers of the various bodhisattvas, andthe piling up of a multi-membered compound upon multi-memberedcompond, each more grandiose than the last. For example, in asection of the sutra devoted to describing bodhicitta there are no lessthan 224 separate similes used to elaborate upon it,13 none addinganyth ing substantial to our u nde rstand ing of the pheno me non. Leaving aside for the moment the question of why so many Mahayanasutras employ this kind of literary overkill, it is surely clear that atranslation of such a work could have no scholarly purpose. Whowould read it? Buddhologists have access to the original, which is atleast syntactically easy to follow, even if paralysingly boring, and thewider scholarly community is not going to spend its time wading25


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t h rough 500 pages o f ve rbose r epe t i t ion . Any Buddholog i s t whowishes to s tudy the Gandavyuha, and to understand i t in the sense ofunder s t and ing which has been d i scussed in the cour se o f th i s paper ,w ou ld b e bet te r off p rod uc ing a s tudy of the text and an analysis of it sre l ig ious meaning than a t ransla t ion. Transla t ion can a l l too of ten bea replacement for thought , a temptat ion to es tabl ish one 's credent ia lsand exhibit one's vir tuosi ty; i t f requently has l i t t le to do with thescho la r ly en te rp r i se .

I would suggest , therefore , that a large propor t ion of the survivin g sutra m ater ia l in Sanskr i t is be t ter left unt ran sla te d . Bu ddho logis tscan give far more to the scholar ly communi ty by creat ively s tudyingan d in te rp r e t in g these tex t s than by t r ans la t ing them . T rans la t ion canbe lef t to those who wish to perform i t as an act of rel igious supere roga t ion . Bu t he re aga in a d i sc la imer becomes necessa ry . Somesutras, even i f a smal l minor i ty , are models of l i terary e legance andrel ig iou s po w er , an d i t is these th at cry out for t ransla t ion. I can do nobe t te r th an to quo te Jac qu es May on th is ma t ter , a m an whose l i terarysensibil i t ies and good sense could well be imitated by many English-speaking Buddhologis ts . He said ( in reference to the Samdhinirmocana):

. . . i l est un des quelques Mahayana sutras qui , tels le Vimalakirti-nirdeka, YUpdli-pariprcchdm reunissent des qual i tes qui font engenera l c rue l l ement de fau t a ce genre des t ex tes : p ropor t ionsraisonnables , n i t rop vaste , n i t rop rest re in tes; composi t ion c la i re t r igoureuse; idees d is t inctes , ar t iculees , expr imees avec per t inence e t sans t rop de r epe t i t ions . 1 4I t is ju st bec ause mo st sutras are ei ther excessively long or obscurelyshor t , crypt ical ly incomprehensible or repet i t ively obvious, and justbec au se they lack the m arks of c lear an d precise th ink ing, that most ofthem do not benef i t f rom t ransla t ion and are bet ter in terpreted ino t h e r w a y s .

We may now turn br ief ly to the second category of Buddhis tl i tera ture t radi t ional ly d is t inguished, that of Nostra. T h e r a n g e o fl i terary types subsumed in to th is category i s very wide, and thedec i s ion as to the bes t method o f under t ak ing the hermeneu t i ca l t a skm us t be m ad e on th e mer i t s of each case . He re I wish only to take twoexamples o f the Buddhi s t Sanskr i t sdstras in or de r to g ive some idea ofthe specia l t ransla t ion problems associa ted wi th th is k ind of l i tera ture ,and in order to show that not a l l of these texts are amenable to t ransla t ion. O u r f ir st e xa m ple is the Abhidharmakoka together wi th Vasu-26


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b a n d h u ' s o w n bhdtya, which we may take as a paradigm of kdrikd textswith a t tached prose commentar ies . Such texts provide specia l probl e m s : th e m ost obvio us is tha t of w hat to do with the kdrikd por t ions ofthe text . Is i t legit imate to at tempt a translation of the verses alone,wi thout the i r p rose commenta ry( s ) ? Were the kdrikds ever meant to beread wi thout a commenta ry , and do they in f ac t make much sensew ith ou t on e? T he se issues are a t least par tia l ly l i te rary one s , havin g todo with fac ts about the nature of Buddhis t Sanskr i t Nostras a nd t hel i te rary convent ions of the t ime in which they were wr i t ten; the issuesremain dif f icul t to decide because we do not know enough about suchth in gs . Th e com m on-sen se v iew, an d tha t which appe ar s to have beentaken by the major i ty of Buddhis t in te l lec tuals , pas t and present , i stha t a kdrikd text such as the Ko'sa is of l it t le use witho ut a c om m en tary .A kdrikd text by i tse l f i s so concise and ambiguous tha t i t communicates l i t t le; i ts main function is to provide a matr ix for the extensivecommentar ia l d iscuss ions of d isputed phi losophica l i ssues which areto be found in the works o f such as Vasubandhu and S th i r amat i . 1 5T he re fo re , t ak ing in to accoun t the gu ide lines tha t we have a lr eady setou t , we m us t conc lu de tha t the en te rpr i se o f t r ans la t ing kdrikd texts bythemselves is a f rui t less one . The resul t can only be to produce anEng l ish vers ion w hich is as am big uo us an d f rus t ra t ing as the Sanskr i to r ig ina l . M at te r s a r e d i f fe r en t , tho ug h , when we move to a cons ide ra t ion of kdrikd texts in conjunct ion with the ir commentar ies . We moveat once f rom the rea lms of aphor is t ic ambigui ty to those of prol ixprec i s ion . The prob lems he re a r e no t tha t we do no t know wha t theau th or in te nd ed tha t is usual ly ve ry c learbut tha t Ind ian comm en tar ia l s ty le is qu i te except ional ly h ard to re n de r in to luc id an dcomprehens ib le Engl i sh . Any a t tempt to make a comple te Engl i shr e n d e r i n g o f a bhdsya which adopts the usual method of gloss ing eachword , then unpack ing each compound , and even tua l ly ge t t ing a -round to d i scuss ing the ph i losophica l meaning of the ve r se underco ns id er at io n, is l ikely to lose th e un init ia ted r ea d er in confusion veryquick ly .

T h e b es t m eth od of mak ing such texts available for the scholarlyco m m un i ty is the re fore no t s t r a igh t forward t r ans la t ion , bu t r a th e rs tudies which incorpora te t rans la t ion only as and when necessary.P a r t s o f t he p r o s e c om m e n ta r i e s upon kdrikd texts , notably thosew hich g o bey on d w ord an d gram m atica l g losses , a re in fact m as ter pieces of phi losophica l prose , luc id and even a t t imes enter ta ining,and i t is these above all which need to be translated. I t is also in these


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extended commentarial sectionsa commentary upon one harika maytypically extend to half a dozen pages where matters of philosophicalcontroversy are raisedthat the real philosophical meat of a givenwork is to be found. The rest is of interest only to those who havesufficient philological expertise and interest in Sanskrit syntax to readit for them selves. Th e m odel for dealing with such femA a-plus-commentary texts, therefore, should be Van Buitenen's study ofRamanuja's Gitdbhdsya.16 Here interpretive cruxes are translated; therest is summarized, analyzed, and interpreted. It might be objectedthat this kind of selective interpretation/study does violence to theintegrity of the text and is therefore to be shunned; but as long as thescholarship employed in the study is careful and the content of thetext under consideration adequately conveyed, this is no real objection. We have seen that one of the main objectives of the Buddholo-gist is to communicate the meaning of his text. The kind of selectivetranslation /study I am suggesting for fomA a-plus-commentary textswould do this much more effectively than would a full translation,and is therefore to be preferred. It takes the text seriously but notslavishly.

Our second example of a Buddhist Sanskrit kdstra which is notamenable to communication by translation will be the monumentalYogdcdrabhum&dstra. About half this text has survived in Sanskrit, andmuch of it is now available in editions of varying excellence. 17 T heYogdcdrabhumi is in effect a pedagogical handbook of the Yogacaraschool, a work of what Jacques May has called "inexorable technicality"18 consisting of little more than lists of technical terms togetherwith brief definitions. To attempt a translation of such a work wouldbe tantamount to rendering the Oxford English Dictionary into Sanskrit. Clearly, works of this kind need intensive study, and the resultsof such study need to be made available, but translation is simply notthe best way to go about it.It should, of course, be pointed o ut that some Buddhist Sanskritkdstras do in fact possess the literary characteristics which maketranslation a suitable method of undertaking the hermeneutical tasknamely, the characteristics of precision, lucidity and elegance. Wemight suggest Santideva's Bodhicarydvatdra or Kamalasila's Bhdvand-krama as fairly random examples. But the majority of the survivingBuddhist Sanskrit Nostra material is, I suggest, better left untranslatedfor much the same reasons that were distinguished earlier for thesutra material.28


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This superficial and hurried review of the literary and aestheticcharacteristics of Buddhist Sanskrit texts may allow the tentative conclusion that the Buddhologist's interpretive methods should alwaysco nf or m to the material with which he is dealing; that on e m ethod willnot do for all texts; and that translation is only occasionally the mostappropriate method.

Before we close this paper we should look at an example ofBuddhist Hybrid English. It is not a phenomenon confined to graduate stu den ts or recent Ph.D . candidates, but som ething which afflictsthe most mature scholars. Take this for instance:

. . . all dha rma s are situated in perm ane nce, ease, the self, thelovely; and likewise in impermanence, ill, not-self and the unlovely; in gre ed , hate, delusion , wron g views; for an entity m adeby false views does not exist, how can the false views themselvestake place? For situated in Suchness are all dharmas, and fromthat situation they do not depart. And why? Because the comingand going of Suchness cannot be apprehended. And so for theDharma-element, the Reality-limit, Sameness, the unthinkableelement, and immobil i ty.19

This example of Buddhist Hybrid English was chosen pretty much atrandom from the late Edward Conze's translation of the Pancavim-katisdhasrikdprajndpdramitdsutra. This translation was originally published without notes or explanatory apparatus of any kind, and onecan not he lp but wond er i f Dr. Conze ever thoug ht about his audience.No n-B ud dh olo gists , tho se who. have no Sanskrit and n o training inthe intricacies of the prajndpdramitd, cannot possibly make any sense ofit whatever. Dr. Conze's translation bears only the most tenuous relationship to the English language in terms of syntax, and is full ofunexplained technical terminology; this much should be obvious evenfrom the short extract quoted here. Its only advantage is that theSanskrit original shines through with a fair amount of clarity; it isn'tdifficult for the Sanskritist to reconstruct the original. But it is precisely the expert who doesn't need a translation. He can read theoriginal, and should prefer to do so.

The barbaric nature of Dr. Conze's translation is not, of course,altogether his fault. The nature of the material is such that anythingelse w ou ld be almost imp ossible to achieve; the Pancavimiatisdhasrikd isju st as barbaric in Sanskrit. His fault, then , lies not in a bad re nd erin gof the text, but in that he decided to translate it at all. The long2 9


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prajndpdramita sutras are just the kind of texts which do not benefitfrom translation and which are better studied and interpreted inother ways. I have no doubt that Dr. Conze came closer to an understanding of this material than has any Western Buddhologist beforeor since, but he failed signally in his hermeneutical task, that ofmaking his understanding available to others, becausein this case atleasthe chose the wrong method. The Buddhological communitywould have been better served if Dr. Conze had produced a goodcritical edition of this text (still a desideratum) rather than an unreadable translation, together with a detailed critical study of itsstructure, relationship to other prajndpdramita texts, ideas, and technical terminology, and (only as and when necessary) a translation ofand commentary upon key passages.I chose this example not because Dr. Conze's translations areworse than anyone else's; in fact they are better than most. Rather, itillustrates w ith a concre te exam ple th e kind of gibberish that is all toooften produced by the Buddhological community in the sacred nameof translation. I might add that still more striking examples ofBuddhist Hybrid English could be adduced if we were to look at theresults obtained by those who translate Tibetan texts.We must now make some attempt to draw together the threadsof this discussion. We have tried to sketch the legitimate aims of theBuddhologist in studying the corpus of Buddhist Sanskrit literature,and to show the fundamental importance of a good reading knowledge of Buddhist Sanskrit for the achieving of these aims. We havenoted in passing that an adequate training in the field of BuddhistSanskrit is becoming increasingly hard to find in English or Americanuniversities, largely because there is a growing tendency to treatSanskrit merely as an adjunct to Tibetan or Sino-Japanese studies.But we have also tried to show that philology is not enough; in orderfor the Buddhologist to achieve his aims, philological expertise mustbe properly employed in the task of interpreting the sources andmaking them available for others; that is to say, philology must beproperly related to hermeneutics. The second part of our paper wasdesigned to show that such a relationship is only rarely brought intoeffect by translation, largely because of the literary nature of thesourc e m aterial. To a ttemp t translation w here this is not an ap prop riate means of undertaking the hermeneutical task leads to that regrettable phenomenon which I have called Buddhist Hybrid English.

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N O T E SA version of this paper was f i rst read at the 4th Conference of the Inter

nat ional Associat ion of Buddhist Studies, held at the Universi ty of Wisconsin, Madison,U . S . A . , Augus t 7 -9 , 1981 .

1. Most of what is said in this paper will be applicable only to England andAmer ica , in both of which the author has exper ience . Whi le some of the problems aresimilar , th er e are suff icient d ifferences to m ake the app licat ion of what is said he re tothe B uddho log i ca l com muni t i e s o f Ind i a , E urop e , and Jap an somew ha t p rob l ema t i c .

2 . cf . Richard Gombrich, On Being Sanskritk (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978),p p . 2 0 - 2 2 .

3 . Gombrich, op. c i t . , p . 27.4. Especia lly notewo r thy h ere is Chr i s Gu dm un sen 's Wittgenstein and Buddhism

(London: Macmi l lan , 1977) and many of the papers publ i shed in Philosophy Eastfc?Westd u r i n g the las t dec ade . A good rece nt exa mp le is Rober t Th ur m an 's "Phi losophica lNonegocent r i sm in Wi t tgens te in and Candraki r t i in the i r t rea tment of the Pr iva teL a n g u a g e P r o b l e m " (Ph.E.W., Vol . 30 . 3 , Ju ly 1980), pp . 32 1- 33 7 .

5 . Sa nsk ri t of any kind is formally studied in no mor e than half-a-dozenunivers i t i es in En glan d, and Bu ddh is t Sanskr i t in it s own r ight is t aug ht n owh ere on aregular basis . While Sanskri t is more widely avai lable in American universi t ies , there isst i l l comparat ively l i t t le special ized teaching of Buddhist Sanskri t .

6. This tendency has now reached the point at which English t ranslat ions ofBuddhis t t exts a re be ing produced sole ly f rom the T ibetan or Chinese even when theSan skr i t or ig in al or par t of i tsurvives . This k ind of th ing is do ne even by those whoha ve at least so m e preten sion s to scho larship in the f ield, for exa mp le, Jeffrey Ho pk ins ,who has perpet ra ted a t rans la t ion of Nagar juna 's Ratndvali (as part of The PreciousGarland &? The Song of the Four Mindfulnesses, London: Allen & Unwin, 1975) ent irely onthe basis of the Tibetan version in apparent bl issful ignorance that a substant ial part ofthis text survives in Sanskri t , and has even been edi ted by G. Tucci as "The Ratnaval i ofN a g a r u n a " (JRAS, 1 9 3 4 , p p . 3 0 7 - 2 5 ; 1 9 3 6 , p p . 2 3 7 - 2 5 2 , 4 2 3 - 4 3 5 ) . S u c h a p r o ce du re i s s imply bad scholar ly meth od , and is becom ing ever mor e comm on a mo ng Ti -betophiles who seem to forget that Buddhist canonical texts were original ly largelycomposed i n Sanskr i t .

7. E u g e n e Burnouf, Introduction a VHistoire du Buddhitme Indien (Paris: Maison-ne uv e, 1 844, 2nd ed . 1876) , pp . 1 0 - 1 1 .

8. Burnouf, Le Lotus de la Bonne Loi (Paris: Maisonneuve, 1825).9. In surv eyin g forty Budd hist Studies Ph.D. 's aw arde d by Am erican universi

t i es f rom 19 74 -1 97 9, I found tha t 25 followed thi s s tand ard pat te rn .10 . This restr ict ion is part ly because I do not consider myself competent to dis

cuss tantr ic texts from the l i terary angle or any other , and part ly because the problemsinvoved in the hermeneutics of tantr ism are so idiosyncrat ic and complex that even asuper f ic ia l d i scuss ion would need a paper to itself. Never theless , many of the broaderp o i n t s m a d e a b o u t sutra a n d sdstra may also be applied to tantra.

11. cf . G. Schopen, "The Phrase 'sa prthivtpradesascaityabhuto bhavet in theVaj racchedika: Notes on the Cul t of the Book in the Mahayana." (Indo-lranian Journal,Vol. 17, 1975). pp. 1 4 7 - 1 8 1 .

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12 . This text i s to hand in two reasonably good edi t ions: D. T. Suzuki &H . I zum i , The Gandavyuhasutra (Tokyo: Suzuki Research Foundat ion, 1949) , andP. L. Vaidya , Gandavyuhasutra (Buddhist Sanskr i t Texts 5, Darbhanga: Mithi la Inst i t u t e , 1960) . T h e re is no com plete pu bl ished Engl ish t ran slat ion.

13 . Vaidya, ed. cit . , 397.l7ff.14 . Jacques May, "La Phi losophic Bouddhique Idea l i s t e" {Etudes Asiatiques,

Vol. 25, 1971) , p. 276.15 . The fact that kdrikd texts are sufficient ly am bigu ous to be capable of a wide

range of in t erpre ta t ions becomes c l ear i f we compare , say , the Kosa with the Abhi-dharmadipa. The lat ter i s a work wri t ten in an at tempt to re-establ ish the Vaibhasikaviewpoint in react ion against the Sautrant ika leanings of the Kosabhdsya. It does this inm any i n s t ances by r ep r oduc i ng t he kdrikds of the Kosa and in terpre t ing them in adi f f erent som et imes d iamet r ica l ly oppo sed ma nne r . Some 300 of the 597 surv iv ingSansk r i t kdrikds of the Dipa have m or e or less exact paral lels in the Kosa. T h e " m e a n i n g "of any given kdrikd i s thus not inherent in the kdrikd but de termined by the commentator .

The best edi t ions of the respect ive works are: Abhidharmakosabhdsyam of Vasu-bandu, ed. P. Pradhan wi th int roduct ion and indices by A. Haldar , Tibetan Sanskr i tW ork s Ser ies, Vol . 8 (Patna: K. P. Jayaswal R esearch Inst i tute, 1975); Abhidharmadipawith Vibhdsaprabhdvrtti, ed. P. S. Jai ni , Tib etan Sanskr i t W orks Ser ies, Vol . 4 (Pa tna:K. P. Jaya swa l Resea rch Inst i tute , 2nd e d. 1977).

16 . J . Van Bui t enen , Rdmdnuja on the Bhagavadgitd: A Condensed Rendering of theGltdbhdsya with copious notes and an introduction (Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass, 1968).

17 . Bhumis 1-5 , ed . V. Bhat t acharya , The Yogdcdrabhumi of Arya A sahga (Calcut ta: Universi ty of Calcut ta Press, 1957) ; Bhutnu 8, 9, 14, ed. A. Wayman in Journal ofIndian fc? Buddhist Studies, V ol . 8 , 1960, pp . 37 5 - 3 79 ; Bhumi 13 ed. K. Shukla, Srdvaka-bhumi of Arya Asanga, Tib eta n Sansk r i t Wo rks, Vol . 14 (Patna: K. P. Jayaswal ResearchIns t i tu t e , 1973) ; Bhumi 15, ed . U nra i W ogihara , Bodhisattvabhumi (Tokyo: SankiboBu dd his t Bo oks tore, 2nd ed. , 1976) ; also, ed. N. Du t t , Bodhisattvabhumi, Tibetan Sanskr i t W ork s Ser ies, Vol . 7 (Patna: K. P. Jayaswal Research Inst i tute, 1966. 2nd ed. ,1978).

18 . In a r ev iew of I^mber t Schmi thausen ' s Der Ninxina-Abschnitt in der Viniscaya-Samgrahanider Yogdcdrabhumih in Indo-Iranian Journal, Vol. 14, 1972, pp . 1 2 5 - 129. T h ereference to " t echnic i t e inexorable" occur s on p . 125 .

19 . E d w a r d C o n z e , The Ijxrge Sutra on the Perfection of Wisdom, Parts 2 8c 3(Madison, Wisconsin: 1964) , p. 374.

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