[Buddha-l] mindful/mindfulnes

[Artur Karp]

Dear Richard,

Popular Polish translations of Buddhist texts are made generally from
the English. Their authors tend to render the English "mindful" rather
intuitively, by words such as "uważny" ("attentive"), or "baczny"
("intently attentive"), or even "czujny" ("alert, vigilant").

But it's not so easy when one translates from the original Pali (or
Sanskrit). In some - not so rare - cases "sato" ("mindful") appears
together with sequences of closely synonimical adjectives, and the
problem arises when one wants to retain their original meanings,
vis-à-vis "sato", as implied in the text. Semantic differences between
them are significant, proper selection of their equivalents hangs, as
it were, on the meaning attributed to "sato".

Where would you place Pali "sati" ("mindfulness"): "attentiveness", or
"alertness"? Or, perhaps, both of them? (If I were to "mind the gap",
I'd try to be attentively alert).


Regards,

Artur k.