Includes texts in Chinese, Pali, and Sanskrit.
The process of translation is one of the important media through which Buddhism, and particularly Buddhist ideas, migrate from place to place. But translation can never be simply loyal transmission; it is rather an exercise in understnading and interpretation. Sometimes that understanding, or its communication, can go astray. In this paper I examine one set of cases in which we confront a translation difficult to understand, but one which may, in the end, help us understand something about the process of early Chinese understandings of Indian Buddhism.
Jonathan A. Silk (1960) studied East Asian Studies at the Oberlin College in Ohio and subsequently Buddhist Studies at the University of Michigan. At the latter university he obtained his PhD in 1994 with the thesis: The Origins and Early History of the Mahāratnakūţa Tradition of Mahāyāna Buddhism, With a Study of the Ratnarāśisūtra and Related Materials.
During his studies, Silk spent several years in Japan supported by various grants. After his PhD, Silk became Assistant Professor of Religious Studies at the Grinnell College in Iowa and in 1995 at the Department of Comparative Religion of the Western Michigan University. Since 2002 he occupied the same position at the Department of Asian Languages and Cultures of the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). There, Silk has been director of the South & Southeast Asian Languages Program. Silk received several awards during and after his studies, and occupied a fellowship six times, the last one at Yale University. MsSVig
The process of translation is one of the important media through which Buddhism, and particularly Buddhist ideas, migrate from place to place. But translation can never be simply loyal transmission; it is rather an exercise in understnading and interpretation. Sometimes that understanding, or its communication, can go astray. In this paper I examine one set of cases in which we confront a translation difficult to understand, but one which may, in the end, help us understand something about the process of early Chinese understandings of Indian Buddhism.
Jonathan A. Silk (1960) studied East Asian Studies at the Oberlin College in Ohio and subsequently Buddhist Studies at the University of Michigan. At the latter university he obtained his PhD in 1994 with the thesis: The Origins and Early History of the Mahāratnakūţa Tradition of Mahāyāna Buddhism, With a Study of the Ratnarāśisūtra and Related Materials.
During his studies, Silk spent several years in Japan supported by various grants. After his PhD, Silk became Assistant Professor of Religious Studies at the Grinnell College in Iowa and in 1995 at the Department of Comparative Religion of the Western Michigan University. Since 2002 he occupied the same position at the Department of Asian Languages and Cultures of the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). There, Silk has been director of the South & Southeast Asian Languages Program. Silk received several awards during and after his studies, and occupied a fellowship six times, the last one at Yale University. MsSVig