[Buddha-l] MPNS & Buddha-nature (Lusthaus)

[Dan Lusthaus]

> This question has long puzzled me. The only hypothesis (and a very
> tentative one at that) that I have come up with is

All hypotheses are welcomed, however tentative. Someday I may find the time
to collect the various conjectures that have occurred to me over the years.

> (I recall Matilal telling
> me once that it is next to impossible to translate Sanskrit
> philosophical literature into Bengali!)

Was he thinking of navya-nyaaya or any garden variety Sanskrit philosophical
text? The former is largely untranslatable; symbolic logic as a target
language sometimes works. I think the texts are translatable, though things
are definitely lost. Nagarjuna's exquisite, elegant, sophisticated, lucid
poetry is lost in the convoluted English renditions. In MMK grammar dances.
But his semantic sense can be largely captured. Similarly Kant in German is
very picturesque, colorful, vivid imagery. Kemp Smith's rendition of the
first critique captures the meaning, but turns it into colorless
metaphysical abstraction. But there are plenty of English speakers/readers
who know little or no German and yet understand Kant.

>(I rest my case on any Tibetan translation of their works; the
> Tibetan translations tend to lose a great deal of the subtlety of the
> close linguistic reasoning of the originals.)

I've recently been looking at some Tibetan translations from Asanga,
Vasubandhu and Bhavaviveka, and your observation is dead on target. Basic
terms which need to be differentiated in the Sanskrit get conflated and
become indistinguishable in Tibetan; Chinese is often equally ambiguous and
imprecise. I've even started to collect a list of these importune
Tibetisms -- what for, I have no idea, since they don't help with any
scholarly purpose except perhaps as cautionary tales.

>  I think the question to ask is not why certain post-
> Dignagan Buddhists were NOT translated into Chinese, but why they WERE
> translated (sort of) into Tibetan.

It may be no more than timing and faddism. That stuff was all the rage when
Tibetans started to pay attention; The Chinese already had too much
pre-pramanavada Buddhism which, in their own readings, was more than enough
to interest them anymore. They grew impatient with Indian "saastras,
preferring to return to the sutras (a euphemism for preferring their own
homespun "saastras to the Indian ones).

Dan Lusthaus