[INDOLOGY] Another Udāna enquiry

[Valerie Roebuck]

Dear Friends

Following my previous enquiry about Rockhill’s translation of the Tibetan Udānavarga, I now have Gareth Sparham’s rather more recent version, The Tibetan Dhammapada: Sayings of the Buddha. Needless to say, it is quite free of stray spiders. However as an indologist who doesn’t read Tibetan, I find many of his translations of Buddhist terminology  idiosyncratic, to say the least. E.g. the equivalent of apramāda is translated as ‘caution’ (ch. 1 passim), samādhi apparently as ‘stabilization’ (13.8 of the Sanskrit Udāna, 13.6 of Sparham’s version, which seems to put several verses together earlier in the chapter). A particularly puzzling one is ‘definite emergence’ in Sparham’s 15.26, referring to some meditation state - possibly for bhāvanā in the Sanskrit, though there seems to be a big difference in word order here.

Do these translation choices reflect anything in the Tibetan, or is the translator simply trying to get away from earlier translations he regards as hackneyed? I would be very grateful for any insights.

Valerie J Roebuck
Manchester, UK


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