Download DO THE TIBETAN TRANSLATIONS OF INDIAN BUDDHIST TEXTS

DO THE TIBETAN TRANSLATIONS OF INDIAN BUDDHIST
TEXTS PROVIDE GUIDELINES
FOR CONTEMPORARY TRANSLATORS?
Sean Gaffney
(SOAS)
The translation of Indian Buddhist texts has posed an array of problems of
a philosophical, conceptual and cultural nature, to any translator during all
periods of history. In particular, the large number of technical terms
utilised in these Indian texts, which are crucial to their understanding,
present by far the biggest challenge to translators. Beginning with the
earliest extant translations from Buddhist texts into Chinese (Mizuno 1982:
45) by the translator Lokakshema in the second century CE, followed by
the Tibetan translations commencing in the eighth century CE and the
Western academic translations of the last one and a half centuries, there
has been a continuing quest for reliable translations of original Indian
Buddhist texts. From as far afield as Gandhåra, Sogdiana, the Central
Asian regions of Khotan, Turfan or Tun-huang, China and Tibet, successive
generations of translators have been engaged with the many problematic
issues connected with such a task. There have been a variety of approaches
to the translation process in these different regions, some translating
literally, some by means of paraphrase, but the ultimate aim of them all
has been to produce faithful and comprehensible renderings of the Indian
originals in their own respective languages.
The attempts at the translation of Indian Buddhist texts are
illustrative of some of the problems involved in the translation of religious
works generally, though these issues also arise with the translation of any
ideological, scientific or literary work. For example the translation of the
Ma'o-tse-tung-dgongs-pa (Thoughts of Chairman Mao) from Chinese into
Tibetan necessitated the creation of an entirely new range of Tibetan
SOAS Literary Review (2), July 2000
vocabulary. In order to represent such Marxist concepts as ‘proletarian’,
‘bourgeoisie’, ‘means of production’ and ‘class-struggle’, to name but a
few, the Tibetans had to coin new words. Similarly, the translators of
Indian Buddhist texts into Chinese or Tibetan were presented with the
specific problems of how to render the religio-philosophical terminology,
and the Indian literary forms, into their own languages without distorting
the meaning or intention of the original. During the early period of
translation activity in China and Tibet each translator would use their own
interpretations of these terms, leading to an inconsistency of terminology
when compared with texts prepared by other translators. Some of the
Chinese translators often translated a Buddhist technical term using a
Taoist technical term, thus importing totally inappropriate philosophical
assumptions into the text, while others merely transliterated the terms. The
method of dealing with these issues was gradually refined over a period of
centuries until an Indian Buddhist text could be translated into Chinese or
Tibetan with a high degree of accuracy in terms of its representation of the
original intention of the text and the consistency of its philosophical
terminology.
The problems associated with the translation of Indian Buddhist texts
are by no means confined to ancient history. Since the beginnings of
Western academic philological and historical studies of Buddhism,
commencing with Csoma de Koros in the mid-nineteenth century, the
philological, philosophical and cross-cultural problems inherent in the
translation of ancient Indian texts have been studied and debated. Even
today there is no universally agreed method for rendering even some of
the most basic and frequently-met technical terms found in Tibetan and
Sanskrit into English, or for that matter into any other European language.
Therefore any contemporary scholar dealing with a Tibetan translation of
an Indian work has several choices regarding their approach to the work of
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translation and the vocabulary used to translate technical terms into
English. Whatever approach is adopted, a knowledge of the text's
historical background, if available, and of its philosophical assumptions is
of course a prerequisite. When the history of a text can be traced it may
provide evidence of the distinct types of literature that have been utilised
in its composition.
The translation of Indian Buddhist texts into Tibetan
Much of what is currently known about the content and scope of Buddhist
literature, produced in India from the early centuries BCE up to the
thirteenth century CE, comes not from any of the Indian languages
themselves, but from translations made into the Tibetan language. The
historical reason for this is that very few of the Buddhist works written in
India survive in their originals, whether in Classical Sanskrit, Buddhist
Sanskrit or one of the Pråkrit languages. The Tibetans became prolific
translators of Indian Buddhist texts from the seventh century CE and
continued this process as long as it was possible for them to obtain texts
from India — through Tibetans who visited India or from Indian teachers
— up to about the early fourteenth century CE. It is for this reason that
the Tibetan translations of Indian texts are so important for a complete
understanding of the development of Indian Buddhist philosophy during
this period of lost Indian history.
The written Tibetan language was a relatively late creation, being
‘invented’ in the seventh century CE by Thon-mi-sam-bhota, a minister of
King Song-tsen-gam-po (c. 609-649), who created the Tibetan script after
having spent years in India studying various Indian scripts and grammar.
He composed the first works explaining Tibetan grammar and was also the
first recorded person to translate a text from Sanskrit into Tibetan.
Therefore, at the time of the Tibetans' initial contact with Indian literature
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the amount of indigenous written Tibetan material was really very small.
This material falls into two main categories, the earliest being the rDo-rings
(Pillar Inscriptions) of the various Tibetan kings, and the second consisting
for the most part of historical works, the earliest of which is the bSam-yaslo-rgyus (Annals of Samye Monastery) (Vostrikov 1970: 24), that are
principally concerned with the genealogy of the royal line. There are also
early written materials from the Silk-Road region, most notably the textual
materials discovered at Tun-huang which, excepting the large amount of
Buddhist material, are mainly of an administrative nature consisting of
communiqués between Lhasa and the various outposts on the edge of the
newly-created Tibetan empire. The period in question then has no works
that we would recognize as 'literature' in its broadest sense, though there
were of course oral traditions that later came to be committed to writing.
The earliest extant written Tibetan materials are of a utilitarian nature, that
is to say they make known the kings’ intentions and their lineage; or they
are orders for food, reinforcements and objects of trade from military
commanders on the borders of the new Tibetan empire.
The Tibetan world view at the time of the creation of written Tibetan
had no connection whatsoever to the primarily Indian Buddhist world view
gradually being encountered through the import of Buddhism and
Buddhist ideas and concepts from India. This lack of a common world
view would itself seem to be a serious obstacle to the making of accurate
and intelligible translations into Tibetan. However the Tibetans were able to
avoid any inconsistencies between the two world views by a wholesale
importation of the Indian Buddhist world view. The latter initially operated
only within the confines of the intellectual world of the Tibetan translations
of Indian texts, while the indigenous Tibetan world view provided the
actual viewpoint of Tibetan culture in general. Only after some centuries
was the Indian Buddhist world view fully assimilated within Tibet itself,
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and then with some important modifications that have their origin in the
indigenous Tibetan world view. For a considerable period of time there
were in effect two entirely separate views of the world in Tibet, one
literary and theoretical belonging to the higher culture, the other being the
actual everyday world view of the majority of the Tibetan population.
Prior to the translation of Indian Buddhist texts into Tibetan there is
no evidence, or at least any surviving evidence, of any text being
translated into Tibetan from any other language. This lack of any
discernable tradition of translation into Tibetan makes the achievements in
the sphere of translating Indian Buddhist works even more remarkable.
However, the process of developing a system of translation was not without
its problems. Very early on it was recognised that in translating Buddhist
texts from Sanskrit into Tibetan, different translators were using disparate
Tibetan terms to translate the same Sanskrit technical terms. This could
lead to confusion and misunderstandings, as many of the Sanskrit texts
were of an extremely technical nature and so required a method of
rendering Sanskrit technical terms with great precision and in a
standardized manner. This problem was addressed after about 150 years of
translation work when an authoritative Tibetan-Sanskrit dictionary, called
simply the Mahåvyutpatti (Great Dictionary) or Bye-brag-tu-rtogs-parbyed-pa-chen-mo in Tibetan, was compiled at the command of King Thritsug-de-tsen (c. 815-838). Following this all earlier translations were
retranslated and a new system of translation terminology and methodology
was introduced which attempted to standardize both the terminological
consistency and the semantic accuracy of the translations. Within 200
years of its creation, the Tibetan language had become the medium for
translating some of the most refined and complex concepts and ideas of
Indian Buddhism.
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This is the background to the beginnings of the process of translation
of Indian Buddhist texts into Tibetan. It should however be mentioned that
while the Mahåvyutpatti provided authoritative guidelines for translation
terminology, it must not be assumed that only forms found in that
dictionary were used in later translations. Modern lexical studies (Chandra
1982), based on the analysis of a variety of Tibetan translations of Indian
and Buddhist works, have noted that different Tibetan terms are in fact
often employed in different texts to represent the same Sanskrit terms. In
other words the Mahåvyutpatti was not treated by later generations of
Tibetan translators as being completely prescriptive in all cases, but rather
as providing the basis for a standardization of translation terminology. In
the centuries after the compilation of the Mahåvyutpatti the Tibetan
translation tradition continued to develop, adding new Tibetan calques as
new texts and vocabulary were encountered.
The scale of the translation work carried out by Tibetans is
phenomenal; thousands of Indian Buddhist texts, on philosophy, logic,
grammar, medicine and poetics, and other subjects, were rendered into a
specialized form of the Tibetan language. This form, used solely for the
translation of Indian texts, differed markedly from the way in which
Tibetan was used in all other spheres of writing. Furthermore, many of
these Indian Buddhist texts relied upon either an oral or a written
commentary, that may or may not have been available to the Tibetans, in
order to make their import clear. The conceptual and grammatical
difficulties of the Indian originals were fully understood by the Tibetans,
and as well as creating a special translation language they devised a
rigorous translation method aimed at capturing the precise meaning of the
texts. The process developed for the translation of each text consisted of a
collaborative effort between one or more Tibetan translators (lo-tså-ba) and
one or more Indian panditas (scholars) or åcåryas (teachers). The Indian
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scholars could bring out the full import of the text at any sections where
the Tibetans were in doubt as to the intended meaning. By having scholars
from both the Indian and Tibetan traditions the Tibetans attempted to
create translations that were as faithful as possible to their source texts.
The language that was evolved for this translation process has been
called an ‘artificial language’ (Inaba et al. 1985: iii) in that, in its very
literalness, grammar, vocabulary and style, it is totally alien to any of the
indigenous written Tibetan styles. The Tibetans also created tens of
thousands of loan translations or calques in order to be able to accurately
represent the rich vocabulary of the Sanskrit language; the Tibetan
language itself simply did not have the range of vocabulary necessary to
be able to supply a different word for each of the technical terms,
synonyms and nuances employed throughout the Sanskrit works.
Therefore the Tibetans simply created a whole new range of vocabulary by
compounding existing Tibetan words together to represent Sanskrit
technical terminology, and by the addition of suffixes and affixes to verbs
to represent the various Sanskrit tenses. The result is a language that could
not easily be read by a Tibetan who was not familiar with the vocabulary
and syntax of this specialized translation language.
The Jåtakanidåna — background
The Påli Jåtakanidåna (Introduction to the Birth Stories) is still extant in its
Indian original and has a history that can be traced with some precision;
This text and its Tibetan translation (for which the date and place of
translation, and the names of the translators, are known), are the outcome
of both oral and written traditions spanning many centuries. The
Jåtakanidåna is a composite work containing material from the earliest
strata of the Påli canon, dating to about the fourth century BCE, as well as
the old oral commentaries accompanying them, and finally commentarial
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material from as late as the fifth century CE. This text is one of the few
Påli canonical texts whose date of composition can be located within
narrow parameters. From the introductory verses (Fausbøll 1897: I, 1) we
also learn that the text was composed at the request of three theras
(elders) of the Buddhist monastic community, probably from the
Mahåvihåra monastery in Anuradhapura in Ceylon during the early fifth
century CE. The authorship of this text is uncertain, being ascribed by the
Sinhalese tradition to the great Indian commentator and translator
Buddhaghosa (Norman 1983:128), though this is disputed by many on
stylistic and other grounds. To say that the text had an author in the
contemporary sense of the term is misleading, for, as already mentioned,
the Jåtakanidåna is made up of layers of early canonical materials,
particularly gåthås (verses), interspersed with both early and later prose
commentary.
The early commentarial material contained in the Jåtakanidåna has a
history almost as old as the canonical literature itself, being collected
together at a very early date in Buddhist history. The oral traditions
preserving the Buddhist canonical teachings were taken to Ceylon when
Buddhism arrived there in the third century BCE. At that time, or very
soon after (Frauwallner 1956: 18), the oral commentaries on the canonical
texts were also taken to Ceylon. The canonical works were in Påli while
the commentaries appear to have been in a north Indian Pråkrit (Norman
1991: 38) very closely related to Påli. In Ceylon the canonical works were
maintained in an oral tradition in Påli but the commentaries, excepting any
canonical gåthås (verses) contained in them which were retained in Påli,
were soon translated into Old Sinhalese Pråkrit in order to make them
more easily accessible to the Sinhalese. So from a very early period the
canonical material in Ceylon was preserved orally in Påli, with the Indian
commentaries being preserved orally in Old Sinhalese Pråkrit, until these
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commentaries were committed to writing at an early though unknown
date. These Old Sinhalese commentaries came to be known collectively as
the Atthakathås (Commentaries) and were considered as authoritative
sources for elucidating the topics contained in the canonical works.
With the committing of the Påli canon to writing in Ceylon during
the first century BCE the ability to preserve and disseminate canonical
texts was greatly improved. From this time up to the fifth century CE the
Old Sinhalese commentaries were retained as they were, with other newer
commentaries being added to them over time. Thus by the fifth century
AD a mass of commentarial literature in Sinhalese Pråkrit, ancient and
medieval, had built up around the canonical sources. As the original
canonical literature was preserved in the now sacred language of Påli a
movement arose aimed at translating, or retranslating, all of the
commentarial materials into that language. This had a twofold objective,
the first being to clarify the meaning of these works, as the Sinhalese
language had changed significantly since their translation from Påli into
Old Sinhalese, so much so that the interpretation of some of them was
uncertain; the second task was to edit the texts, eliminating duplications
and spurious texts, and expounding a teaching consistent with that of the
Mahåvihåra monastery. Whichever of these Indian translators composed
the Jåtakanidåna, it is evident that they relied heavily on these Old
Sinhalese commentaries for the traditions explaining the canonical gåthås
(verses) that were included in the canonical texts.
Of the several Indian translators from this period working in
Ceylon, who were associated with this translation and editing work, the
most important figure was that of Buddhaghosa, though whether he
composed the Jåtakanidåna is a contentious issue. He is the undisputed
compiler of a great many Påli commentarial works who read many
different commentaries, paraphrasing the essential points from them into a
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new text; his method was therefore not a straightforward translation.
Unfortunately since none of the Old Sinhalese commentaries are currently
extant, it is impossible to ascertain what relationship his works have to their
original texts. What is significant is the fact that the Jåtakanidåna itself is
the product of numerous levels of canonical text, translation of old
commentary and the commentary of its compiler. While parts of it were
initially compiled in a north Indian dialect, followed by a further
translation into Old Sinhalese Pråkrit and finally a retranslation into Påli,
other parts of it were composed in Påli during the fifth century CE.
The translation of the Jåtakanidåna into Tibetan
The Jåtakanidåna was translated into Tibetan using a system of translation
that had been evolved by the Tibetans over a five-hundred-year period (the
Tibetans actually had a larger amount of texts translated into Tibetan from
Indian works than was contained in the entire corpus of Tibetan literature
at that time). The translation of the Jåtakanidåna is from Påli, one of the
north Indian Pråkrits or colloquial dialects (Lüders 1954: 5) used by the
early Buddhist schools, which is very close to Sanskrit in both its
grammar, vocabulary, and technical terminology. The Tibetan translation
was carried out on the principles laid down for the translation of Indian
texts. The Påli text abounds in gåthås (verses), extensive use of similies,
long nominal compounds, and complex sentences. Of the thousands of
Indian texts preserved in Tibetan less than twenty Påli texts (Skilling
1993: 73) are recorded as having been translated. The Tibetan colophons
of thirteen of these texts, including the Jåtakanidåna, inform us that they
were translated by the same two Buddhist monks, the Tibetan translator
Nyi-ma-rgyal-mtshan-dpal-bzang-po and the Sinhalese scholar Anandasri.
One authoritative fourteenth-century Tibetan historical work (Bu-ston 1988:
206) compiled by Bu-ston, a student of Nyi-ma rgyal-mtshan-dpal-bzang10
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po informs us that the translations were carried out in Nepal during the
mid-fourteenth century.
The most striking feature of the Tibetan translation of the
Jåtakanidâna is the extremely literal way in with which the Tibetans have
translated much of the text. Only in a few instances, usually similes or
metaphors, is any kind of paraphrasing employed. This literalist approach
to translation is in keeping with the underlying aim of the Tibetan tradition
(Ruegg 1973: 249), namely to present as accurate and faithful a
translation of the original source text as possible. Of course it may be
objected, with some justification, that literalness is not always equivalent to
accuracy; but it does have the virtue of presenting just the bare content of
the text, free from any exegetical interpolations or glosses on certain
words. Any standardized and systematic translation method, such as that
established by the Tibetans, can only lay down the basic principles for the
translator to adhere to. It is an implicit assumption of this method that the
literal translation of a text will ipso facto be a faithful representation of the
original text. The system of literal translation is a reasonably coherent way
to convey the semantic content of a text, but the style may leave much to
be desired. While the result of such translation principles may appear as
something of a contrived creation, it does however allow for a thorough
presentation of the content and meaning of a text with a minimum amount
of distortion.
Translating Indian Buddhist texts today
In many respects a modern translator of Indian Buddhist texts, such as the
Jåtakanidåna, is in a position similar to that of the early Tibetan translators,
that is to say the world view of the contemporary translator is as far from
that of ancient India as was the case for the early Tibetan translators. This
similarity is reflected in the way in which many contemporary translators
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of the Tibetan translations of Buddhist texts employ an almost artificial use
of the English language and newly-created English terminology. This has
interesting parallels to the Tibetan method of creating calques, or loan
translation words, to convey the precise meaning of the original Indian
term without importing any presuppositions or connotations from the
Tibetan language. A very similar method is currently employed in America
by what might be termed the ‘Hopkins school’ initiated by Professor J.
Hopkins of the University of Virginia. When applied universally this
method leads to a good literal translation but with the disadvantage that
the English is of a decidedly peculiar nature (Griffiths 1981: 20), and the
reader has to learn a new vocabulary of English loan translations in order
to understand the text. Very often with this type of translation it takes a
reader already versed in Sanskrit, Pråkrit and Tibetan to be able to
understand the meaning of the English translation, which is obscure to a
non-specialist reader.
Translation of course presupposes an audience, and one has to make
some decision when translating as to who precisely is one's audience. A
translation for the specialist is an entirely different matter than a
translation for the non-specialist. One widely-used method in translations
for the specialist is to leave the technical terminology in its original
Sanskrit or Påli form, with no English rendering, but on the first
occurrence of each term a footnote is added which explains it and gives the
translator's preferred choice of English equivalents. This method has the
advantage of being able to discuss or paraphrase the term without adding
material to the actual text of the translation itself. Both of the methods
mentioned do have the drawback of producing a somewhat unwieldy
finished translation. One is either faced by a mass of English loan
translations of various technical terms, or the translation becomes heavy
with explanatory footnotes with untranslated Sanskrit or Påli terms left in
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the main text. The real root of the problem regarding this Indian technical
vocabulary is not that vocabulary itself, but the inability of English to
convey these terms, without using paraphrase or multiple word
translations, in an accurate and definitive manner.
The method of translating Tibetan and Indian texts by paraphrase
has been used by a number of French scholars, but is strangely out of
favour in the English speaking world. For the non-specialist reader this
provides the most satisfactory results, the text being unencumbered by
footnotes or unexplained loan words. Some of these translators have often
incorporated materials from later commentaries into their paraphrases of
canonical texts, though for the textual purist this can be annoying.
Interestingly this paraphrase method was used by the Chinese in some of
their early translations of Buddhist texts, though it was superceded by the
more literal approach. The use of these various methods is indicative of the
translator's dilemma, which, at it most basic level, is centred on the
problem of conveying meaning from one language and cultural
background into another, without adding to or diminishing it by inapt
translation terms.
What emerges out of the attempts to render the Tibetan translations
of Indian texts into English are those very same problems encountered by
the Tibetans themselves. Namely, how could they bridge the conceptual
gap between Tibetan and Sanskrit or Påli? The problem is the same for the
contemporary Western scholar trying to find the right English term with
which to translate one of these Indian technical terms or long and complex
sentences. These terms are unique to India, Indian culture and the Indian
languages; there is very often no English term that could be safely
employed that would not distort the sense of the original or, more
seriously, import some cultural or philosophical nuances that are absent in
the original. One is reminded of the adage that 'the translator is a traitor',
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that is, the translator in the very act of interpreting one language in terms
of another is hoplessly enmeshed within the limits and usages of that
language into which they are attempting to translate. The original Indian
texts were composed in a distant time, where the compilers and audience
shared the same mental outlook. Overcoming the problems posed by these
kinds of questions of how to achieve semantic accuracy, and a reasonably
normal English style, are the universal aims of translation, where the
translator is trying to elucidate the text and express its ideas and world
view in a language that is totally alien to the original.
Works Cited
Bu-ston (1988) Bu-ston-chos-’byung-gsung-rab-rin-po-che’i-mdzod, (Buston’s History of Religion and Treasury of Precious Sayings), Qinghai:
China Tibetology Publishing House.
Chandra, L. (1982) Tibetan-Sanskrit Dictionary, 13 vols, New Delhi:
International Academy of Indian Culture; repr. Kyoto: Rinsen Book
Company, 1959-61.
Fausbøll, V. (ed.) (1877-97) The Jåtaka Together with its Commentary, 6
vols, London: Påli Text Society.
Frauwallner, E. (1956) The Earliest Vinaya and the Beginnings of
Buddhist Literature, Rome: Serie Orientale Roma.
Griffiths, P.J. (1981) 'Buddhist Hybrid English: Some Notes on Philology
and Hermaneutics for Buddhologists', Journal of the International
Association of Buddhist Studies, 4, pp. 17-32.
Inaba, S. et al (1985) The Tibetan Tripitaka Peking Edition: Catalogue and
Index, Kyoto: Rinsen Book Company.
Lüders, H. (1954) Beobachtungen über die Sprache des buddhistischen
urkanons, ed. E. Waldschhmidt, Berlin: Academie Verlag.
Mizuno, K. (1982) Buddhist Sutras: Origin, Development, Transmission,
Tokyo: Kosei Publishing.
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Norman, K.R. (1983) Påli Literature, Weisbaden: Otto Harrassowitz.
— (1991) Collected Papers, vol 1, Oxford: Påli Text Society.
Skilling, P. (1993) 'Theravådin Literature in Tibetan Translation', Journal
of the Påli Text Society, 19, Oxford, pp. 69-201.
Vostrikov, A.I. (1970) Tibetan Historical Literature, tr. H.C. Gupta,
Calcutta:Soviet Indology Series.
Ruegg, D. Seyfort (1973) 'On Translating the Buddhist Canon', Studies in
Indo-Asian Art and Culture, 3, ed. P. Ratnam, pp. 243-261.
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