Re: [INDOLOGY] Another Udāna enquiry

[Matthew Kapstein]

Dear Valerie,


"Definite emergence" is the translator's rendering of nges par 'byung, the standard Tibetan for niHsaraNa and  niryANa and some similar expressions. As I do not have the Skt text of the UdAnavarga handy right now, I cannot verify exactly what it translates here.


Broadly, translators of Buddhist Tibetan have divided between those who prefer to translate according to the Indic terms in the background, and those who prefer to represent more literally the Tibetan. The latter practice can be in some cases misleading, as it is here. The most authoritative Tibetan-Tibetan dictionary (the Tshigs mdzod chen mo, p. 658), for instance, defines nges par 'byung in this way:

"it is the attitude that is desirous of freedom from the imprisonment of saMsAra and of arriving at the happiness of nirvANa..." I do not think that this is very well conveyed by "definite emergence."


best regards,

Matthew


Matthew Kapstein
Directeur d'études,
Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes

Numata Visiting Professor of Buddhist Studies,
The University of Chicago
________________________________
From: INDOLOGY <indology-bounces at list.indology.info> on behalf of Valerie Roebuck via INDOLOGY <indology at list.indology.info>
Sent: Monday, May 13, 2019 9:20:35 AM
To: Indology List List
Subject: [INDOLOGY] Another Udāna enquiry

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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