Translating Buddhism

First, a long series of parallel clauses in one passage of the Suvarṇa(pra)bhāsottama, all beginning with the word sarva (all), that mark out “the rhythm conveying the all-pervasive power of the sūtra.” Gummer argues that a translation that is sympathetic to and functions to support the performative arch of the texts would attempt to maintain the rhythm of the Sanskrit syntax, so that the English. [...] Her third example is the repeated vocative phrase tvaṃ satpuruṣa alongside a string of verbs in the future tense, which describe the impact of the preaching of the sūtra on the dharmabhāṇaka, and again functions at an intersection “between form and content.” Ulti- mately, Gummer concludes that some aspects of the performative nature of the text are untranslatable in any attempt at verbatim English. [...] Demarcated by an awareness of historical milieu, he identifies the shared religious metaphor of the cycle of transmigration understood as a flood, which needs to be traversed by the religious adept, and which may be the origin of the notion of a tīrthika as a ford-maker who is so enabled and able to galva- nize others. [...] Noting, initially, its significance as a fundamental doctrine of early Buddhism, Jones begins his assessment of the term with a twofold goal in mind—to argue in favor of one of the usual English translations of the term over others and to reconsider © 2021 State University of New York Press, Albany 14 Introduction the extent to which the concept needs to be considered as a theory of causation or,. [...] Putting the conclusions of these subsections together with an analysis of the nature of the term as a syntactic compound, he concludes that “dependent arising” is the neatest expression of the full literal meaning of “(a phenomenon’s) arising dependent on (a causal basis).” Having established his basis translation point, Jones then proceeds to a more existential discussion of the nature of causati.