On Fri, Jun 8, 2018 at 11:33 AM, Dan Lusthaus <prajnapti@gmail.com> wrote:

David,

Your analogy to modern translations is apt.

While you continue to document the pervasiveness of the myth, perhaps we should let the other shoe drop. While it is true that there are differences between the various Chinese translations of the Mahāyānasamgraha, a more complete account would mention that there are actually seven Chinese translations (including bhāṣya and upanibandhana), by four translators.

Mahāyānasaṃgraha (Asaṅga)
(1) (T. 1592) Translation by Buddhaśanta in 531.

(2) (T. 1593) Translation by Paramārtha in 563.

(3) (T. 1594) Translation by Xuanzang in 649.
--

(4) (T. 1595) Mahāyānasaṃgraha-bhāṣya (Vasubandhu’s comm.)
Translation by Paramārtha in 563.

(5) (T. 1596) Mahāyānasaṅgraha-bhāṣya
Translation by Dharmagupta, sometime between 605-616.

(6) (T. 1597) Mahāyānasaṅgraha-bhāṣya
Translation by Xuanzang in 648.
--

(7) (T. 1598) Mahāyānasaṃgrahopanibandhana (*Asvabhāva’s sub-comm.)
Translation by Xuanzang between 647-649.

The two versions that dominated E. Asian attention were those by Paramārtha (with -bhāṣya) and the three versions by Xuanzang. Dharmagupta’s translation, done while Xuanzang was a youngster, never rivaled Paramārtha’s version which was the hot item in that period, totally eclipsing Buddhaśanta’s earlier effort. Study groups and temples all devoted inordinate attention to Paramārtha’s She lun; everyone studied it, masters lectured on it, it was on the reading list for all Buddhist sects in China, including early Chan. It is precisely due to its defects — ideological distortions, not just translation errors — that led Xuanzang to put not only the Mahāyānasaṃgraha on his to-do list when he returned from India in 645, but to retranslate Vasubandhu’s comm. and introduce *Asvabhāva’s subcommentary, just to make sure the correct reading of the text would become available in China. When Griffiths, Keenan, et al., worked on the 10th chapter with Hakamaya, they found that the Tibetan of Asvabhāva’s subcommentary basically concurred with Xuanzang’s text — though, if you read their introduction, they are somewhat struggling with that realization, since another important Japanese scholar, Ui Hakuju, had championed Paramārtha’s texts over Xuanzang’s (another ideological myth with some live embers in Asia) — and the evidence of the texts they were reading was indicating otherwise.

There are only three Tibetan versions: one for the main text, one for Vasubandhu’s comm., and one for the Asvabhāva subcommentary. The first and third are attributed to basically the same translators, with a redactor homogenizing the third as well. So “uniformity” is not surprising.

(1) Mahāyānasaṃgraha (theg pa chen po bsdus pa)
translation ascribed to Jinamitra, Śīlendrabodhi, Ye-shes-sde

(2) Mahāyānasaṃgraha-bhāṣya (theg pa chen po bsdus pa'i 'grel pa)       
translation ascribed to Ātīśa Dīpaṃkaraśrījñāna, Nag-tsho Tshul-khrims-rgyal-ba

(3) Mahāyānasaṃgrahopanibandhana (theg pa chen po bsdus pa'i bshad sbyar)       
translation ascribed to Jinamitra, Śīlendrabodhi, Ye-shes-sde
with revisions ascribed to R. Dpal brtsegs

That they agree with Xuanzang’s text would suggest either that Xuanzang and the Tibetans were good at capturing the Sanskrit, or (!) that the Tibetan translations and/or redactions were done with one eye on Xuanzang’s rendition. The Sanskrit has not survived, so we can’t rule either possibility out.

But a bigger issue is the role of redaction, revision, on what becomes the received texts. Even apart from known variants in different editions of the Chinese and Tibetan canons, there were wholesale ‘revisions’ of many texts, some multiple times.

But more germane to the Chinese vs Tibetan translation issues:

There are two Tib. versions of the Trisvabhāvanirdeśa — one designating Vasubandhu as the original author and the other naming Nāgārjuna as the author. (I don’t think it is possible that either of them had anything to do with it). There are serious discrepancies between these two translations.

Or, to take a more influential text, there are two divergent translations of Dignāga’s Pramāṇasamuccaya, both of which, while unavoidable since the Skt was lost, were commonly panned as bad translations. With the recovery of the Skt of Jinendrabuddhi’s -ṭīkā, which retains perhaps 70% of Dignāga’s original text, we can now see more clearly what the Sanskrit underlying the two Tib translations was, and suddenly some are beginning to say the Tib translations weren’t so bad after all. I suspect that reappraisal is a result of knowing what the Tibetan is *supposed* to indicate, and then finding it there. Reading in the other direction is more fraught.

One could make a similar case for some Chinese translations as well. Some years back a reading group of grad students was reading the Yogācārabhūmi with me. Our procedure was to read a passage in Skt, translate it orally, and then look at Xuanzang’s Chinese and translate that. We often looked at the Tibetan as well, esp. for thornier passages. After some weeks, the students, most of whom were Chinese, remarked how impressed they were with Xuanzang’s translation, declaring him great and accurate. I cautioned it only looks that way because they had already worked on the Sanskrit and knew what to look for. They disagreed. So the next session, I had them read Xuanzang’s Chinese version first, and translate that. They cobbled together a plausible reading. Then I had them read the Sanskrit. They immediately recognized the mistakes they had just made. Since they were native readers of Chinese, trained in reading classical and Buddhist Chinese as well as Sanskrit (two had studied Sanskrit and Pali for years in India and Sri Lanka, and one was a monk), the mistakes they made were not ’student’ mistakes but natural misreadings that can occur in the absence of the underlying Sanskrit. (Incidentally, on the few occasions when Xuanzang and the Tib diverged, it was almost always because each was offering a legitimate interpretation of what the Sanskrit said, but their interpretations differed.)

One can find better and worse translations in Chinese and Tibetan. Some years back I complained at a conference on Buddhist translations that many of the translations of classic Buddhist texts coming out in English from Tibetan versions of Indian texts were insipid, lacking in conceptual distinctness and clarity (of course, there are many exceptions to that, but that does identify a certain genre of English representations, which I will leave unidentified). One of the conference participants, an important scholar, in defense of those translations, replied: “To be fair, that’s how they read in Tibetan, too."

As we all know, translation is never as easy as it looks — and it doesn’t even look easy.

Dan