[Buddha-l] Pudgalavada - Vasumitra

[Dan Lusthaus]

Stephen, Lance et al.

> >It's not nimitta or âkâra at all. The "xiang" here is the wrong
> >character --  it should be the "sa.mj~naa" xiang ! See Thien Chau p90 and
> >corresponding Chinese for details.
>
> Thien Chau p47 and T1506 p18 b 06-19 is better since the Chinese text for
> his p90 is corrupt and Chau's summary "translation" here is inaccurate
> anyway.

I'm glad you caught the problems on p90 before I had a chance to point them
out (in short, the only word in that miserable passage that Thich T.C.
doesn't change into something else is the xiang/thought term! He completely
mangles it.)

P. 47 is, in some ways, no better. The Taisho punctuation here is completely
wrong, and TTC therefore mis-parses the passage in his comments. That
passage, in fact, seems to reinforce the reading of xiang/nimitta.

I haven't commented yet on the many suggested emendations suggested by
Stephen. Some are what I would consider merely stylistic revisions, with
little if any semantic impact, and since Stephen's rendering are less
literal and more mellifluous, they are harmless revisions. Others result
from some major or minor surgery on the original text, and these I remain
hesitant to embrace. I would rather try to make sense of what the page
presents, perhaps altering punctuation (since the Taisho punctuation is
notoriously erroneous), and only when all efforts, even some that are, as
Stephen somewhat justifiably characterized them, "creative," will I start to
look for surgical remedies. Since it would require technical (and for most
buddha-lers, arcane) details to go into each of Stephen's suggestions, I
will restrict my online comments to this example alone, which, perhaps for
those not just hitting the delete button on this thread, may illustrate the
sort of challenges faced by those attempting to decipher such texts (that
is, the translations most of you read in order to acquire more knowledge of
Buddhism).

The problems with the long and short text are legion, and TCC's pioneering
effort is highly laudable -- downright courageous at times -- but not always
on the mark. The short text is somewhat better, but it is terse and jumbled
at times. The long text, which TCC sees as containing not only a root text,
but a commentary and (at least one) subcommentary, is an interesting
disaster. While not exactly stating this outright, his reconstruction of the
circumstances of its composition suggest a scenario something like the
following:

Kumaarabuddhi, from a Turfan royal family, was probably a spoiled rich kid
who, not being in the line to inherit rulership, was farmed out to the local
monastic community to pursue a monk's life (not an uncommon scenario in
Buddhist countries). He was, at best, a middling scholar. Somehow he ends up
in China at time when Dao'an and Huiyuan were active. In order to have him
earn his keep, Dao'an decided to put him to good use and have him translate
some texts, starting with the Vatsiputriya treatise (and its commentaries).
Given the state of his talents, the resulting translation was miserable, and
Dao'an, Huiyuan, and the others realized that (which is probably why he was
not assigned any more translations, and we hear little more about him).
Huiyuan, in writing about the translation work, while maintaining a
diplomatic tone extolling the merits of the work, warns, not so subtly
between the lines, that the work of translation with Kumarabuddhi was
unpleasant and the result was unsatisfactory. TCC himself loses no
opportunity to (justifiably) complain about the translation mistakes he
finds.

Some remain instructive, however, as when (TCC, p. 47, n. 199) the short
text uses the term zheng siwei (correct reflective thought) while in
Kumarabuddhi's long version the corresponding term is yin xing ("practicing
sexual misconduct"), an over-literal rendering of yoni"so-manaskaara, thus
providing a good clue to the Indic term underlying the short version's zheng
siwei (which, otherwise, could have been suggestive of a wide range of
terms).

Coming back to the passage with the xiang/nimitta that Stephen suggests we
amend to a different xiang/thought (based on things in TCC on this page
[actually on the following page], let's examine the evidence.

1. Both translations of Vasumitra, those by Paramartha and Xuanzang, have
xiang/nimitta here, not xiang/thought.
2. While it would be conceivable that some textual corruption entered one
version or the other, the odds against it happening to both texts, composed
a century apart, is slight.
3. If one speculates that some editor/redactor came along at some later date
and altered both texts for whatever reason, that would suggest that this
later editor had the same opinion as I do, viz. that nimitta (or laksana,
linga, etc.) was the correct term here.
4. Paramartha and Xuanzang were two of the best translators, so to think
that they couldn't tell the difference in Sanskrit between samjna on the one
hand and nimitta, laksana, linga, akara, etc. on the other, is unreasonable.

5. So the question remains, why do the long and short texts appear to have
xiang/thought in the comparable context? To answer that, we need to look at
the Chinese texts, which, to avoid message-size limitations, I will do in
the next message.

Dan Lusthaus