[Buddha-l] Nomenclature blues: "Western Buddhist Order" is no more

[Dayamati]

Dear denizens,

Since there has been a recent discussion of Western Buddhism here, some of you may be interested in hearing that the Friends of the Western Buddhist Order (FWBO) is no longer going to bear that name. The background to the change of name is that for some years now members of the order in India have not been entirely comfortable with being designated as being identified as Western. In India, where nearly half of the order members are from, the order has had an entirely different name, Trailokya Bauddha Mahasangha Sahayaka Gana, which has no reference to the order being Western. In response to an appeal that the order being given a single name everywhere in the world (or at least that every country have a translation into its local language of the One True Name), Sangharakshita has announced that from now on the Western Buddhist Order will be called the Triratna Buddhist Order, and the friends thereof will be known as Friends of the Triratna Buddhist Order (FTBO).

Right away, I have a question. How do you say "Friends of the Triratna Buddhist Order" in Spanish, French or Dutch? Already in Dutch the old FWBO had two names, one used in the Netherlands and the other in Belgium; the difference in names reflects two different ways of parsing the English name. Does it mean Friends of the Western Order of Buddhists, or Friends of the Order of Western Buddhist? The Nederlanders and Belgians arrived at different answers to that question. So what kind of compound is "Triratna-buddhist-order"? Deciding that will determine how the name is translated into languages that do not form compounds in the same way as English. Such grammatical questions are simply inescapable, unless of course the decision is made to take Triratna Buddhist Order as a mantra.

In the 1980s I was a member of The Zen Lotus Society. We all loved the name and never gave much thought to what it meant. It was just our collective name, sort of like the name of a hockey team. You had your Toronto Maple Leafs (even though the plural of "leaf" is "leaves"), and you had your Zen Lotus Society. But as the ZLS expanded to non-English parts of the world, such as México and Québec, the question arose how to translate the name into Spanish and French. And that required knowing what the syntactic relationship was between the words "Zen" and "Lotus" and "Society". Was it the Society of Zen and the Lotus, or the Society of the Zen-like Lotus, or the Lotus-like Zen, or the Lotus-like Society for Zen, or the Society called the Lotus that belongs to Zen, or the Society coming from the Lotus in Zen? Heads were scratched in befuddlement, grammarians were consulted, tea leaves were read, hexagrams were cast, astrologers were visited, quantum physics was investigated, but no clear answer emerged. Finally a decision was made to change the name from Zen Lotus Society to something more transparently grammatical and therefore translatable into Spanish and French. It seemed a wise and right thing to do. But you know what? I never could remember the name that replaced Zen Lotus Society, and to this day Zen LOtus Society is what I still call it.

Erik, Henk, Stefan, your assignment, if you should choose to accept it, is to translate "Friends of the Triratna Buddhist Order" into Dutch. I would bet you three olliebollen you can't make sense of the new name. (One person on hearing the name "triratna" asked "Why could someone name a Buddhist order the friends of the Tree rotting?")

yours in triratna,
Dayāmati (I abandoned the named Richard Philip Hayes, because I couldn't parse it)
rhayes at unm.edu