Nicky Harman on “Buddhism” a
wonderful exhibition in London’s British Library displaying Buddhist art and literature from all over East
Asia.
 |
All pictures are my own from the exhibition,
unless
otherwise captioned
|
As a translator, I have what you could call a professional interest in
Buddhist texts translated into Chinese. This may sound odd, because I can’t
understand their meaning, let alone critique them as translations. But I am
always moved when I see the crystal-clear calligraphy of the sutras, first
written down in Chinese fifteen hundred years ago or more, and yet completely
familiar today. So I visited the exhibition hoping to find out more about some
of my favourite translators.
Translation played a huge role in the spread of Buddhism; the sutras would never have become an integral part of
Chinese, Japanese and Korean culture without the efforts of those early
translators. And their translations also preserved texts that have since
disappeared in the original languages, Sanskrit and Pali.
Let me recommend here
the hugely important English-language reference book,
The Anthology of Chinese Discourse on Translation, by the late Martha Cheung.
The numbers in square brackets below are
the page references for Cheung’s book, a good part of which is available free
to view on Google Books.
What particularly interested me, reading Cheung’s anthology,
was that so many of the preoccupations of the early monk-translators will sound very familiar to any translator
nowadays: how to translate new religious concepts for which the language of the
time had no words, how to deal with stylistic features that did not translate
easily into Chinese (the Sanskrit writers apparently loved lengthy, flowery
digressions, and much repetition); more prosaically, whether to translate or to
transliterate lengthy Sanskrit names into Chinese. In Cheung’s anthology, and
thanks to some excellent translations into English, these Buddhist scholars
come to life in their own words.
Buddhism was introduced into China around the turn of the Christian era
(CE). And so the first great project of religious translation began. Martha
Cheung describes the translators as “powered by a pioneering spirit”, [9] and
says: “…Translators, as well as monk-scholars who wrote about translation, were
moving in terra incognita. The kind
of translation carried out by the monks in those days was unprecedented, for no
one had any clearly defined idea as to how exactly the job was to be done.” [52]
The best-known of the
early translators, Zhi Qian (flourished 233-253 CE), was a member of the
Yuezhi, a non-Han tribe; he was educated in Chinese, as well as a number of
other languages, and began to translate the sutras using a strategy that we
might describe as “domestication” (making the text conform to the target
readers’ expectations). He omitted frequent repetition and minimized the use of
transliteration. [58] Faced with the problem of finding Chinese words for new
Buddhist concepts, he and his successors adopted Taoist (Daoist) terms. For example:
the word Tao/Dao 道was used for “Wisdom” in the Perfection of
Wisdom Sutra [72]. Another example of what we would call “domestication”. Zhi Qian was notable for translating with the
refinement of style that Chinese scholars expected and found easy to read. He
also wrote a preface to his translation, in which he introduced the three key
concepts that are still talked about in the world of Chinese translation today:
信达雅, faithful,
comprehensible, elegant [63]. (I have actually had a translation contract for a
contemporary novel which required me to abide by these principles!)
Two hundred years later, we have another eminent
Chinese translators, Dao An 道安
(312–385 CE), a monk from Hebei province. Dao An actually did not know Sanskrit
so he could not refer back to the original texts, but he worked by comparing the
large quantity of Chinese translations already in existence. By this time,
Buddhism was well established in China, and from 379 to 385CE, Dao An was president
of Translation Assembly, an official government department.
Dao An was also eloquent on translation theory. He talks, for instance, of the
five instances of losing the source and the three difficulties [79],
differentiates between translation at word and sentence level, and emphasizes
the need to transmit the substance of the text as a whole. All preoccupations
which are completely recognizable to modern translators working in any language.
Dao An’s near contemporary, Kumarajiva 鸠摩罗什 (344–409 AD) had an
Indian father and a mother who was from Kucha, a Buddhist
kingdom on the Silk Road in what
is now Xinjiang. Immersed in Buddhism from an early age (his mother became a
nun when he was seven), he was an eminent scholar with a thorough grasp both of
both source and target languages, unlike Dao An. This
does not seem to have improved his view of translation, which he describes as “… like giving someone rice that you have
chewed; they will find it not just tasteless but downright disgusting” [94]. An
early articulation of the idea that much is “lost in translation” or that the
translator is a traitor (“traduttore/traditore”, as the Italian phrase has it).
All the same, Kumarajiva’s translations were so beautiful and so
appropriate to the purpose of religious chanting that they are still popular
today. A copy of his Diamond Sutra in Chinese is one of the treasures of the
British Library’s collection. In the illustration above,
Kumarajiva is shown carrying a large wooden frame packed with sutra scrolls on
his back, while the Buddha teaches him.  |
| A still from the cartoon film Monkey King Conquers the Demon (金猴降妖) 1985 |
Another two hundred years later, Buddhism
was in its heyday in China under the Tang dynasty. Its most respected
scholar-monk was Xuan Zang (玄奘, also known as Tripitaka,
600–664CE), a Henanese who revitalized Buddhist studies. By this time, there
was an enormous body of sacred texts available in Chinese and Xuan Zang, having
realized that they were full of discrepancies and contradictions, decided to go
back to the source of the scriptures. He spent seventeen years travelling in
India, debating with eminent Buddhist scholars there, transporting hundreds of sutras
to China and translating them. The British Library has
a copy of one of his translations, the Heart Sutra, completed in 649CE. Most readers will recognize Xuan Zang/Tripitaka
as the companion of Monkey, immortalized by the sixteenth-century writer Wu
Cheng’en, in “Journey to the West” 《西游记》. He must be the first
monk to become a much-loved cartoon figure.
Back to the British Library exhibition which, sad to say, will be over by the time you read
this post. I was unprepared for the sheer beauty of the
exhibition displays, the brilliant colours of the paintings, and the soothing
effect of the background sounds – bird song, sacred chanting
and the tinkling of flowing water.
Quite enchanting. However, I confess to feeling disappointed that there was
scarcely a mention of the translators’ names or their contributions to the
spread of Buddhism through East Asia. I have devoted this post to them (and to
Martha Cheung) because they had so many interesting things to say about the
process and ethics of translation. For anyone who is interested, the excellent
British Library website has digitized
material and some fascinating articles, for instance this one: https://www.bl.uk/sacred-texts/articles/translation-and-transmission-of-buddhism