A Reliable Witness? On the Tibetan Translation of the Śikṣāsamuccaya
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- A Reliable Witness? On the Tibetan Translation of the Śikṣāsamuccaya
- Contributions to the Study of the Śikṣāsamuccaya Derived from Chinese Sources
- Einige textkritische und exegetische Bemerkungen zu Śāntidevas Śikṣāsamuccaya (Kapitel XII und XIII)
- Verses by Śāntideva in the Śikṣāsamuccaya: A New English Translation
- Çikshāsamuccaya: A Compendium of Buddhistic Teaching (1992)
- Śikṣāsamuccaya of Śāntideva
- Śikṣāsamuccaya of Śāntideva (Vaidya)
- Śāntideva's Śikṣāsamuccaya-kārikās
Description
Over the years that Jens Braarvig and I have known each other, one of our many shared interests and topics of conversation has been the Śikṣāsamuccaya (Śikṣ). It was Jens who first sent me a photocopy of the Cambridge manuscript (Add. 1478) on which Cecil Bendall’s editio princeps is based. This second- or third-generation black-and-white photocopy has now been entirely superseded by the splendid high-definition colour scans newly accessible on the Cambridge University Library website, but decades ago, when we could scarcely have imagined all the technological advances which now underpin our research, I was very grateful to Jens for sharing it with me. In those days we both had plans to work on the text from different angles, plans which in my case have still not been fully realized, despite a few exploratory steps having been taken. These have merely served to show, however, that what looked comparatively simple has turned out to be more complicated than I suspected. Indeed the Śikṣ presents many problems which must be resolved before we can say we understand it fully. One of those issues, which Jens and I have discussed more than once, is the integrity of its Tibetan translation, that is, whether it is an independent rendering of Śāntideva’s Sanskrit text, or whether it borrows its wording from existing translations, such as those found in the later Kanjurs. Jens has maintained that in the case of the Akṣayamatinirdeśa, on which he produced his magnum opus, the translations in the Śikṣ are new ones. However, this view was challenged long ago by Jonathan Silk (1994: 649–651), who, while working on the Ratnarāśi, took a preliminary look at the quotations in the Śikṣ of that work, of the Akṣayamatinirdeśa, and of a small number of other sūtras and found in all cases that its Tibetan translators borrowed or modified the canonical renderings, and that therefore the Tibetan translation cannot be considered an independent witness. Silk made a compelling case, on the basis of what he called “a casual comparison,” but I have nevertheless continued to ponder the extent of the problem, and whether all the evidence points in the direction he indicated.
That the Tibetan version, produced at the beginning of the 9th century by Jinamitra, Dānaśīla and Ye shes sde, and subsequently revised by Tilakakalaśa and Blo ldan shes rab (1059–1109), is often more extensive than the Sanskrit was not only noted already by Bendall (1897–1902: xxvii–xxix), but interpreted in a surprisingly positive fashion. “The translation,” he observed, “seems to be fully up to the standard of intelligent literalness, characteristic of these works. So that its value to the editor of a unique MS. would be hard to overrate. Besides this it has the advantage of representing an unabridged and consequently older recension of the text” (my emphasis). In discussing the Chinese version Bendall repeats the inference that the Sanskrit represents a later abridgement of the work as we find it in the Tibetan version, and concludes by distinguishing three stages in the development of the text, of which the Sanskrit is the last (p. xxx). This is a schema which rests on questionable foundations, however plausible it might have seemed to Bendall. In the English translation which appeared in 1922 Bendall and Rouse leaned heavily on the Tibetan version in matters of interpretation, as is evident from their footnotes, but they nevertheless rendered the Sanskrit text as Bendall had edited it. In his new English translation of the Śikṣ, however, published only last year, Charles Goodman takes a different approach. That is, he makes it a deliberate policy to include much of the extra material found in the Tibetan version, setting it within curly brackets, assuming, much the same as Bendall did, that the Sanskrit text has gaps or lacunae, and that the Tibetan additions fill these gaps, make the work easier to understand, and have significant value in their own right (see his comments on p. 1x). I have asked myself whether this is a sound move. To answer that question, and to assess Bendall’s idea of an abridgement, one needs to investigate the relationship between the Sanskrit and Tibetan texts in a more systematic fashion. That is what this paper sets out to do, to attempt a more balanced resolution of the issue that Jens and I have discussed on a number of occasions, as a tribute to Jens and his well-known passion for scholarly conversation and exchange. In the process, I hope to add something to the preliminary remarks on this subject by Jonathan Silk. (Harrison, introduction, 227-28)
