Mike,
B.Sujato's V&V translation, his redefinition of vaci-sankhara (with the mistranslated V&V) become corrupt, and his manasa & dhamma are corrupt. I think you, and most people, are under the wrong idea of how much interpretive license translators have. His mistranslation of V&V, is not in the category of "we should respect everyone's difference of opinon and choice of translation." It's wrong. It breaks the Dharma, and the coherence of how all the pieces of V&V, jhana, 4nt work together.
Example: If I were to translate vācā (vocalized speech) as "placing sound waves and connecting it to the listener's eardrum", that is extremely, extraordinarily wrong and destroys the meaning of the suttas. Even though that translation is partially correct, partially describing what happens with 'speech', it's missing the most important part of 'speech', the communicable ideas with meaning. 'Speech' isn't just any sound waves connecting with the ear drum, it's sounds in the form of language with communicable meaning.
In exactly the same way, for vitakka & vicara, it's not the 'placing of the mind and keeping it connected' , it's the thoughts that are connecting to it that are the important part.
Do you guys understand? It's a 'right' and 'wrong' situation here, not a translator preference.
sentinel wrote: ↑
Sat Aug 17, 2019 4:51 am
...
Thanks for speaking up, it would be good of Mike and others would give some feedback. I'll do my best to explain and clarify. Everyone understands the analogy with vācā, correct? If you understand that, then you understand the problem with V&V because it's the same type of partial equivalence fallacy.
"placing the mind and keeping it connected" (B. Sujato's translation of V&V), is not even a correct translation for the Vism. context of kasina absorption "first jhana"!
See the section in the article:
Vism. 1st jhana gloss, earth kasina
http://lucid24.org/sted/8aam/8samadhi/v ... #flink-95
Sam Vara wrote: ↑
Fri Aug 16, 2019 2:40 am
frank k wrote: ↑
Fri Aug 16, 2019 1:14 am
The preservation of genuine Dhamma is not a legal matter, so we're not interested in conventions and laws of gov't here. The purpose of the article is to challenge people to really think about what their roles and culpability are, in being good stewards of the Dhamma. The Buddha's words remain as they were recorded, but deliberate wrong translations that change the meaning of the words corrupts the Dhamma.
Correct. The preservation of the Dhamma is not a legal matter, so it might be that your comparison with law is misplaced.
If you think that you ought to be a "good steward of the Dhamma" then my advice would be to find a translation and interpretation which you are happy with, and act on it.
I don't think there is such a thing as a "deliberate wrong translation". Why would anyone go to the considerable trouble of learning a dead language and then mistranslating it? Could you give an example of a deliberate wrong translation?
I'm not comparing to law, or to samma kammanto (right action). It's more of a good samaritan golden rule situation. If you know for a fact a cardinal is a child molester, you're not under any legal obligation to warn anyone else, but if you were the other people, wouldn't you wish you had been informed by people who knew?
Similarly, if you know for a fact a Tibetan Lama is a sexual predator, you think its right speech and right action to keep that information to yourself?
Here is one prominent example for deliberate fraudulent mistranslation.
B. Analayo mistranslation of vitakka & vicara
http://lucid24.org/sted/8aam/8samadhi/v ... ndex.html
B. Sujato also does the same for V&V, and I'm going through my notes organizing it. I've been blowing the whistle on these Dhamma crimes for years, the problem is people have a cognitive dissonance problem. Because the perpetrators are otherwise very admirable well loved authority figures, people turn a blind eye to their misdeeds, even when a detailed pali+ english audit proving fraudulence is laid out on a silver platter.
Crime and fraudulent intent
But from a common sense perspective, if Dharma is corrupted in a way to fundamentally alter its core meaning, that's a crime against the Buddha and a crime against the Dharma. We might not be able to prove fraudulent intent, but we can definitely pull up private emails, public forum discussion on record showing criminal negligence in perpetrators not justifying their translations when confronted with evidence proving their wrongness.
... the culpability of other translators ...
More importantly, the culpability of able bodied, mentally competent Buddhists witnessing crime and not doing anything about it. One of things that really stood out for me about one of the Cardinal child molesters (88 yr old one I think), there was an interview with a bishop who said, (paraphrase from memory) "I've been blowing the whistle on him for decades but no one would listen." Boy do I know that feeling.So what should you (everyone) do?Privately or on public forums, politely ask them to explain the points of controversy that don't make sense to you. http://lucid24.org/sted/8aam/8samadhi/v ... ndex.html
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