“Ignorance of the corpus of sūtras,
Is ignorance of the Lotus Sūtra.
And ignorance of the Lotus Sūtra,
Is ignorance of the Buddha’s Mind.”
慈海
Our Great Shame 慚愧
When I first began to study and practise Tendai with my late Master Ara Ryokan, there were next to no resources available in English. With the exception of the Hawaii Betsuin Prayer Book and Dr Saso’s free-translation of Zhiyi’s Smaller Calming-and-Contemplation, there were no English versions of Tendai “practice-texts”. When it came to the texts upon which Tendai thought and theory is based, we had only Chegwan’s Outline of the Four Teachings with light annotation, and Dr Swanson’s partial translation of the Profound Meaning of the Dharma Flower Sūtra. Needless to say, these were hardly sufficient for a robust foundation.
Fortunately there are now more resources available to the budding Tendai Buddhist, and things are looking better everyday. But for the most part these are produced as and when they’re needed or being researched, and therefore appear in a somewhat haphazard manner. This means that it will be a slow and life-times long process before we have anything like the resources necessary to allow all members of our community, to fully engage with the many facets of practise and study within our tradition. Furthermore, unlike the circumstances enjoyed by our predecessors in China and Japan, we live in a time and place where translation is largely done by only those few scholars willing to dedicate a significant portion of their career, to this often thankless task.
And while we are, and should be incredibly thankful to those scholars who’re willing to do this, we should also be aware that a scholar who is not also a Buddhist, is looking for different qualities in our texts than we would. This is not to say that believers don’t produce good scholarship. Quite the contrary. We are compelled to look deeply, and to rigorously confirm the meaning of our texts, in a way that scholars are not. For these are to us more than mere books, and each of their characters are Buddhas themselves, capable as they are of transforming beings. Nor am I attempting to criticise scholarship per se. Rather, I intend merely to highlight the different goals of believers and scholars, and suggest that these differences result in translations of distinctly different sorts.
What’s more, we should take a moment to consider the absurdity of the Western Buddhists’ predicament. Could we envisage anything more ridiculous than a religious community relying on those outside of it, to teach and transmit its own most treasured possessions!? Would the early Church for example, have relied upon Zaroastrians to produce the Latin Vulgate for them? Or might they have realised the inherent problems of such a venture? Would the Muslims have labelled a Hadith written by a Christian as Sahih (i.e. strong or trustworthy)? Or would they have retained that honour for those texts linked to the Sahabha (i.e. the companions of Muhammad)? Would the Orthodox Jews still maintain the divine origin and transmission of the Oral Torah (Torah Sheba’al Peh) if it had to be provided for them by way of a Hindu? Or would this have disqualified it as a pillar of faith for Maimonides?
This is something like the present and risible situation faced by Western Buddhists, for most of the resources we have at our disposal are the products of non-Buddhists. As I said, we Buddhists must praise the scholars who untiringly assist us in bringing these teachings to our communities, but we should do so with a certain degree of shame and embarrassment. If the facts do not generate within us a deep and sombre moment of reflection, we may just be beyond saving. After all, do we not call ourselves the Buddha’s children? And does this not imply that we have been entrusted by our father with our inheritance? And having been so charged, did we not promise to spread it widely in gratitude!?
In the field more broadly, the accuracy and attention to detail exhibited in the translations of those two Catholic Fathers, de La Valee Poussin and Lamotte, have yet to be matched by our own offerings. And within my own school specifically, the extensively annotated translations of Tiantai Dashi Zhiyi’s greatest works by Dr Paul Swanson, make the output of we practitioners hardly worth mentioning. The contents of such scholarly translations have become meaningful to us as vehicles of transformation, and so we owe these scholars debts which we cannot possibly repay. I know some of these scholars myself, and I have always made it a point to sincerely express my gratitude to them, and remind them of how much their works mean to us.
But I am often left wondering if there is any greater sign of our own immaturity and dereliction as Western Buddhists, than that those doing the work of the bodhisattvas is not us!? In the face of such questions we should give rise to a certain measure of shame. If we Buddhists are often asked to reflect upon the great and priceless treasure which the Buddhas have passed into our hands, must we not chide ourselves by asking with brutal honesty: “what are we doing?”
And yet, there is a common and easy way for us to push such difficult questions to one side. Instead of engaging in such reflection with sombre humility, we often hide behind one of two forms of hubris, which I will call “back-patting” and “spiritual masturbation” respectively. “Back-patting” occurs when we use our own deficiencies to stroke our own egos. As if reciting a script vetted and prepared by Māra himself, we accuse anyone highlighting our deficiencies in this arena, with some form of linguistic gate-keeping. We puff out our chests and proudly declare that to stress the paucity of our limited output, is to imply that those untrained in the canonical languages are somehow barred from the gates of Awakening. On those rare occasions when I’ve seen these sorts of hard-talks within Western Sangha, there is more often than not a bright spark who will throw this sort of nonsense about as if it were the wisdom from Mañjuśrī’s own tongue! And we have a duty to call it out as little more than justification for our own failings.
Or worse yet, we ‘pleasure ourselves’ by announcing that seeking to transmit more of the Buddha’s scriptures and treatises of the Masters is unnecessary; all frivolous discourse and intellectual proliferation, of the sort to be eschewed and renounced by all right thinking Buddhists. I call this kind of arrogance “spiritual masturbation”, because it is a frame of mind in which one considers their own supposition to be superior to the entire edifice of the received tradition, and devalues the tremendous sacrifices repeated time and again by great figures throughout the ages.
In both of these cases, the error is nothing less than the pitfall of spiritual arrogance, and therefore should be denounced and labelled as such. For the damage it causes to the Transmission of Dharma is worse that mere ignorance. Only we as the Buddha’s Children can properly extinguish the Lamp of Dharma- by devaluing it, or by discarding it.
Our forebears have gifted us with the largest canon of religious texts known to man. It is a panoply of gems imbued with the spirit of those who authored them, and are therefore capable of inspiring in us the aspiration of bodhisattvas. In the twenty-third chapter of the Lotus Sūtra, the Bodhisattva Sarvasattvapriyadarśana 一切眾生憙見菩薩 declares:
『我得現一切色身三昧，皆是得聞法華經力，我今當供養日月淨明德佛及法華經。』
“My attainment of the Sarvarūpasaṃdarśana Samādhi is wholly [the result of] the power of having heard this Dharma Flower Sūtra, [and so] I will now make offerings to Candrasūryavimalaprabhāsaśrī Buddha and the Dharma Flower Sūtra.”
《妙法蓮華經》卷6〈23藥王菩薩本事品〉
The Sūtra of the Lotus Flower of the Sublime Dharma (Fascicle 6: Chapter 23: The Chapter on the Former Lives of Medicine King Bodhisattva)
And in the twelth chapter of that same sūtra, the Śākyamuni in a former life states:
「『誰能為我說大乘者，吾當終身供給走使。』時有仙人來白王言：『我有大乘，名妙法華經。若不違我，當為宣說。』王聞仙言，歡喜踊躍，即隨仙人，供給所須: 採菓、汲水、拾薪、設食，乃至以身而為床座。身心無惓，于時奉事。經於千歲，為於法故，精勤給侍，令無所乏。」」
“To whoever is able to expound the Great Vehicle for my sake, I will until the end of my days be their servant. ” At that time there was a sage who came and said to the king: “I possess the Great Vehicle [in a text] called the Sublime Dharma Flower Sūtra. If you do not disobey me, I will transmit it [to you].” [When] the king heard what the sage had said, he leapt with joy, followed the sage and supplied him with his necessities: picking fruit, drawing water, gathering kindling, and setting out his meals- even using his body as a bed and seat [for the sage]. His body and mind never slackened, at all times he served him. Passing through a thousand years he diligently waited upon him, ensuring that he lacked nothing, because it was for the sake of the Dharma. “
《妙法蓮華經》卷4〈12提婆達多品〉The Sūtra of the Lotus Flower of the Sublime Dharma (Fascicle 4: Chapter 12: The Devadatta Chapter)
Anyone who engages in the kinds of hubris I’ve outlined above, or refuses to have serious conversations about our output, does so in complete ignorance of statements like these. Our Asian counterparts can draw upon such a wealth of information that it would make our eyes water. And whether they choose to make use of it or not, their good fortune is to possess the option to swim in the vast ocean of Dharma, whenever they please. The important thing to bear in mind however, is that this good fortune did not fall upon them from the heavens, nor did it spring up from the ground rent asunder. It was hard-won with the unwavering efforts of Indian and Central Asian Masters on the one hand, and by East Asian students on the other. It is true, that they possessed certain advantages that we do not. For example, the Chinese and Tibetan courts would each fund immense translation efforts, comprised of extensive teams. But the advantages we have could hardly have been imagined by those early bodhisattvas! Can you imagine for example, what they might have been capable of if they like us, could instantly search for textual references in electronic canons!?
Our Goal as a Translation Temple 譯場
I am no famed linguist, nor do I claim a perfect understanding of the Buddhist Canon. But in my own journey, I have managed to learn enough Japanese to communicate deeply with my teachers, and enough Classical Chinese to dive into the rich wells of meaning our predecessors have lavished us with in the texts. And I remember how difficult it was to make heads or tails of what is a complex tradition on the best of days, with next to no resources to call upon. And so I choose to take this tremendous shame and embarrassment I feel regarding our deficiencies in this area, and funnel it into the aspiration to contribute to our common resources. In this regard, I consider one of our temple’s main responsibilities to act as a Translation Temple 譯場.
I therefore intend to work towards providing a solid foundation of texts which are simultaneously of scholarly quality, and useful to believers for whom these texts are guides to liberation. At this stage, the tentative title for this series of texts is 天台典藏 or The Tendai Textual Corpus. I think it is important however, that such an undertaking begin with the good sense and humility to build from the ground up, and proceed from this basics towards the more profound and sublime.
Starting at the beginning then, the first volume will be styled as an Introductory Primer to Tiantai/Tendai, and consist in the main of a heavily annotated translation of Chegwan’s Sagyoui 天台四教儀 or The Principles of the Four Teachings of Tiantai. Two translations of this text already exist, and so some may wonder why we intend to re-cover old ground. This new translation will not merely be a more annotated version than the existing translations however. It will also provide the reader with a number of extra resources to reinforce, and support the disciple’s learning. These will include translations of Guanding’s Tiantai Bajiao Dayi 天台八教大意, Xingman’s short Xue Tiantai Famen 學天台法門, and Eshin Sozu Genshin’s Verses on the Five Periods 五時略頌 and Verses on the Four Teachings 四教略頌 to aid memorisation. These extra resources, coupled with the heavy annotation based on Mengrun’s 蒙潤 (1275–1342), Congyi’s 從義 (1042–1091) and Yuancui’s 元粹 (1042–1091) commentaries, as well as consultation with Zhixu’s Outline of the Doctrines and Practices 教觀網宗 should afford the diligent student, with enough material to make sense of a great deal of Tiantai/Tendai Thought. We will also be inserting a Kepan 科判 or textual divisions to make the text more easily navigable, as well as quotable.
Even this first volume will take a great deal of time and effort to complete. However Reverend Jikai has already made a draft translation of Chegwan’s text, and almost finished Guanding’s and Xingman’s works. He is presently running a study class on the text, in order to get feedbakc and make corrections to the draft. On finishing Guanding’s and Xingman’s works, Jikai will move on to translating Eshin Sozu Genshin’s verses, and finally to the annotating and polishing.
The hope of course, is that on this firm and solid foundation, we will be able to move on to other volumes of as yet untranslated Tiantai/Tendai texts. If any are interested in joining our study class, they can find the details on our News Page, and may contact Reverend Jikai on the Contact Us Page. Any and every support which you can offer, will also ensure that Jikai is able to devote more time to the translation of these precious texts. For more information on how you can support us in these endeavours, please see our Supporting Us Page.
Gassho,
Reverend Jikai 慈海 Dehn
