Translation Complication: Trusting The Buddha
One of the difficulties associated with our adherence to an ancient eastern religion, is the accessibility and availability of scripture in our native western languages. The difficulty with translation is not limited to the age of the texts, we also have problems where there aren’t clear one-to-one matching on the words, translation styles, and even where the translator’s tradition or agenda creeps into the message. On top of this, scholars also maintain that the first teachings weren’t committed to text until around 200 years after the Buddha’s death. 200 years is an extraordinary amount of time for sermons to be passed around orally, without modification. Can we ‘trust’ what we consider to be The Buddha’s words?
Pre-text Sermons
There was a game we used to play in primary school, where we’d all sit in a circle. One child would whisper a phrase or sentence to the person alongside them, that child would then pass the message along to the next person, and the next person, and so on. By the time the phrase returned to the first child, it would be a confusing mess of words that sound vaguely familiar, but contextually, have no relation to the original phrase. The game was known as Chinese Whispers.
To compare this with Buddhist sermon transmission would be a travesty of course, I only provide it here as an nutshell-bound, outlier example of misinformation through transmission. Even with this well understood, it’s still difficult not to draw some similarities from it.
Sermons told by The Buddha himself to his followers, were held in the memory of the disciples and devotees, passed down through multiple generations, over the course of around 200 years, before they were finally committed to text.
A vast amount of The Buddha’s sermons are open to interpretation; with the correct mindset and the correct inclinations, you’re able to discern quite different conclusions from the same sermon as your peers. With that in mind, we cannot guarantee that those inclinations and mindsets played no part in warping the memory of what The Buddha actually said, in the minds of these monks entrusted with the teachings.
Repetition, mnemonics and other techniques were employed to help assist with the recall efforts of the monks who held the sermons, and I’m certain that given the value of the sermons themselves, that the transmission and recall efforts were treated with utmost care. However, we are all human, and humans are liable to fall prey to the same mistakes, the same personality changes and the same personal difficulties. To think that every single sermon was transposed to text verbatim, as The Buddha spoke them is markedly separate from reality.
Original Texts and Translations
When the words of The Buddha were first committed to text, they were written in some archaic, now partially defunct group of Indo-Aryan languages such as the Prakrits, or Magadhan languages; most notably amongst these is Pali. Pali itself is an interesting case, because it’s an almost entirely literary language, there was never any real spoken form of it. In fact, were it not for philosophical and religious texts such as those found within Buddhism, I’d posit that Pali would have faded into obscurity long ago.
The time in which these sermons were written out was a time before typography, or printers, or any automated form of producing the texts. Therefore, it stands to reason that copies of the suttas would have survived hundreds or even thousands of rewrites over the course of the millennia that followed. Each rewrite has the potential to introduce entropy (transformations, or slight differences). Each instance of such entropy, on an individual level would not necessarily have provided much of a semantic or interpretive difference between that and it’s parent, however, over the course of such a large scale of rewrites, it’s possible (though not guaranteed) that the intended wisdom would be lost.
One thing that makes historical India unique (among the other countries in that region of the world) is the sheer volume and variation of languages over a relatively small geographical area. When taking into account the multiple rewrites I’ve mentioned above, now also consider them being translated from one language into another. This is where the translation entropy influences the texts in full force.
Translation to Foreign Languages
Most of the Indo-Aryan languages of historical India share some similarities; there’s enough difference to classify them as separate languages, but in reality, they use similar syntax and linguistic forms. Translation from one Indo-Aryan language into another, is not so much of a difficult task for someone skilled in both languages. Conversely, the problem with translation grows tenfold when translating from Pali, into any number of different, foreign languages.
Due to the inevitable spread of Buddhism, the texts were translated from any one of the Indo-Aryan languages to Korean, Chinese, Japanese, French, German, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, English and so on.
The reality of translation from one language into another (unrelated) language is that there are very few words that have a 1:1 mapping in either language. A perfect example of this is the Pali word Dukkha.
No single English word adequately captures the full depth, range, and subtlety of the crucial Pali term dukkha. Over the years, many translations of the word have been used (“stress,” “unsatisfactoriness,” “suffering,” etc.). Each has its own merits in a given context. There is value in not letting oneself get too comfortable with any one particular translation of the word, since the entire thrust of Buddhist practice is the broadening and deepening of one’s understanding of dukkha until its roots are finally exposed and eradicated once and for all. One helpful rule of thumb: as soon as you think you’ve found the single best translation for the word, think again: for no matter how you describe dukkha, it’s always deeper, subtler, and more unsatisfactory than that. ~ Access to Insight — Dukkha
So you see here there’s not just a simple case of syntactical difference in any translation, but also a semantic and interpretive difficulty. This difficulty is immensely important to retaining the wisdom and value behind the texts themselves. Something that has the potential to be lost when translating into foreign languages.
Doctrinal Translation Entropy
As we are already fully aware, there is no ‘one true Buddhism’. The following image is perfect for displaying the real mess that is the different Buddhist schools. Keep in mind that for each branch in this chart, there comes some doctrinal differences.
The process by which one would translate from Pali to any number of different languages is to read and understand the sentence/phrase/paragraph, then interpret meaning from this passage of text, before re-writing it in the new language. Essentially, we’re drawing text through a filter of sorts; our own ability to interpret what we read based upon our own understanding of doctrine. To this, we can then suggest further potential translation entropy when we consider that texts written in Pali can be interpreted by adherents of any of the above schools, Theravada, Mahayana or Vajrayana, and the resulting translation would carry with it some key differences.
Doctrinal translation entropy has the potential for the greatest amount of translation deviation. Some translators, such as the Venerable Bikkhu Bodhi, have taken great pains to iron out the doctrinal entropy that is inevitable when translating such texts, but as he even attests, it’s easier said than done. One thing that Ven. Bikkhu Bodhi provides is transparency, if nothing else.
Can we Trust the Texts?
For me, this is a difficult question to answer. I’m certain that we can all agree that the Pali Canon, and other works in The Buddha’s name are not representative the words he actually used at his sermons those millennia ago. We can’t in good conscience trust that these are the very words that The Buddha spoke.
Does all of this mean that the texts are untrustworthy? I don’t think so.
We put trust in our Buddhist teachers, knowing they’ve received teaching from an earlier generation, we trust that the teachings they’ve received have been made just as relevant for us, as the teachings were made for them. Times change, and as generations move on and display different personalities to those that came before, then other methods of teaching rise to the fore and older methods fade to the rear.
As Buddhists we’re all more than familiar with the concept of impermanence, and nowhere is this more important that in the actual transmission of teachings. Let’s face it, if we magically transported Siddharta Guatama to this time period, we’d most likely find his ideals dated, even as devoted Buddhists. This is simply because his teachings have slowly been adapted for different cultures, different audiences, and different mindsets — an adaptation that he was purported to have supported without question.
The Buddha’s teachings provided a solid foundation for modern Buddhism, those metaphorical foundations now robustly support the skyscraper that has grown from it’s base.
As I’ve said, as intellectuals we cannot conceive of the notion that the Buddha’s actual words were preserved, unchanged for 2400 years, through oral and written transmission, across hundreds of cultures and languages to where we are today. However, that does not mean that the literature we read today is untrustworthy. The Buddha’s solid base teachings influenced everything that we know and understand about these specific philosophies today, and that has immense value.
