[Buddha-l] A vocabulary question for Stephen and Lance(oranyoneelse)

[Dan Lusthaus]

I appreciate Stephen's comments. A few observations:

 

> Also, when Dan quoted the Sanskrit line from the AK -- nāmobhayārthaviṣayā 
> śrutamayyādikā dhiyaḥ -- he omitted to draw attention to the use of dhii as 
> a causa metri substitute for praj~naa. 

 

Correct. I did so deliberately since dhīḥ is subject to the same translation/semantic problem as prajñā -- they both tend to be translated as "wisdom" (going back to Vedic usage, e.g., ṛta-dhīḥ). I wanted to avoid adding further complications. For the same reason I also neglected to mention that Xuanzang, in this passage, consistently uses 慧 hui for prajñā instead of the more common 智 zhi (or zhihui). While zhi can also be used to render jñāna (cognition), hui tends to remain more restricted to a sense of "wisdom" in Chinese.

 

We've done a very poor job of providing non-misleading English equivalents for most of the cognitive, mental ,perceptual, and epistemological terms used in Indian texts.

 

> As for "āpta-vacana-prāmāṇya-jāta-niścayaḥ śrutamayī", Xuanzang's rendering 
> 謂修行者依聞至教所生勝慧名聞所成 is rather loose. 

 

Yes it is. His treatment of this entire portion of the Kośa-bhāṣya is loose and interpretive. On the other hand, the Skt is very terse, and Xuanzang probably thought he was filling in implicit gaps (as most of us tend to do when translating).

 

 >I would also suggest that he has 
> translated "niścayaḥ" in his own fashion, misreading the Sanskrit as 
> "niśrayaḥ", which yields his 依. 

 

I tend to be less eager than some to attribute every difference between Xuanzang and some Skt version to his "misreading" the text, though that does happen. In this case, the āpta-vacana... phrase is followed by

 

yuktinidhyānajaścintāmayī / samādhijjo bhāvanāmayīti /

 

which Xuanzang renders:

 

依思正理所生勝慧名思所成。

 

依修等持所生勝慧名修所成。

 

Note these are fairly parallel in Chinese. Both begin with 依 without a niśrayaḥ in sight. And they all end with 所成 (is accomplished). Xuanzang has distributed the same structure to sentences lacking exact parallelisms in Skt. What do you propose he "misread" for nidhyāna (insight, seeing) in the yukti phrase (or drew on for suo cheng)? Nor (since Stephen wishes to point out what I omitted), is there a clear explanation yet for what Xuanzang has in mind when he uses varying Chinese equivalents for meditative terms, in this case 等持 deng chi for samādhi (he uses other Chinese terms for samādhi elsewhere). And so on. In short, mistaking niśrayaḥ for niścayaḥ hardly explains all the differences.

 

>  I would also translate 修行者 differently as 
> "yogin" rather than "bhāvanā" as Dan suggests.  

 

Usually when Xuanzang wants to translate "yogin" he uses the unambiguous 瑜伽者; here he deliberately uses 修行 which is his equivalent for bhāvanā, and given the context (and the lack of either term in Skt), we should follow his lead when rendering it into English. "One who does bhāvanā." He seems to deliberately want to introduce bhāvanā already into śrutamayī, to remind us that even the practice of hearing is a kind of bhāvanā, at least if one is to make progress on the mārga (which is the context of this chapter of the Kosa.

 

>It should also be noted that 
> 至教 is "āpta-vacana". 

 

Zhijiao  至教 usually renders āgama, āptāgama, etc., so here he is using that for āpta-vacana, which means basically the same thing (though the Skt obviously emphasizes more explicitly the role of language in what the "experts" or "authoritative person" are expert or authoritative about).

 

 >I am not sure what Xuanzang has done with "prāmāṇya" 
> unless he has conflated this with 至 or has somehow converted it into 聞 !

Neither is likely. As just pointed out the 至 is compounded with 教, so it's not available for prāmāṇya, and the 聞 clearly means something related to śruti (-mayī) here.

 

Let's just admit that Xuanzang is giving us what he thinks the passage *means*, not a literal word-for-word rendering of the exact Sanskrit phraseology. Were we to expand our comparison, we would find this "loose" method throughout this passage (as I indicated in the previous posting concerning his "carrying down" the viṣaya from the verse into his rendering of the commentary to make three, not just two, contributants to the three types of ālambana. He also renders artha as 法義 (dharmārtha), and so on.



Dan Lusthaus
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://mailman.swcp.com/mailman/private/buddha-l/attachments/20061108/8585ddd9/attachment-0001.htm