Each time through The Immeasurable Meanings Sutra (Watson translation this time), I’m confronted with the question of how to describe the Buddha’s appearance. In particular, the sign that appears on his chest.
It was during my 21-day stay-cation retreat last year that I first read The Sutra of Innumerable Meanings (Reeves translation that time) and found this:
His chest, marked with a swastika,
Is like the chest of a lion.
I have known about the use of the swastika as a Buddhist marking for some time. I wrote about the decoration atop the Hanamatsuri shrine at the Sacramento Nichiren Buddhist Church. That post has a lot of nice background information that I won’t bother to duplicate here.
The point today is the decision of translators – other than Reeves – to avoid confusing the mark with the Nazi symbol.
The BDK English Tripitaka translation by Kubo and Logan offers:
Your chest is like that of a lion, and it is marked with the sign of virtue. (Page 13)
While the Kosei publishing 1975 translation by Tamura, Schiffer and Del Campana used the “swastika mark,” the “Modern Translation for Contemporary Readers” (Kosei 2019) translated by Shinozaki, Ziporyn and Earhart follows the BDK English Tripitaka example and offers:
His chest, bearing the mark of virtue, is like a lion’s chest.
Which brings us the reason I’m rehashing all this today.
Burton Watson’s translation of The Immeasurable Meanings Sutra chooses to keep the literal character while eschewing the word swastika.
… breast displaying a fylfot pattern; lion chested; …
While I admire Watson’s effort to remain true to the literal text (see A Note About Translations at the bottom of yesterday’s post for another example), why can’t translators use the proper spelling of the word swastika, which is svastika? That eliminates the Nazi baggage and restores the idea that this image on the Buddha’s chest “is a statement of affirmation, ‘It is!’ ‘Life is good!’ ‘There is value’ ‘There is meaning!’ Svastika is a term that affirms the positive values of life.” (Also see this discussion of the Japanese meaning of the symbol Manji.)
And getting back to the topic of The Immeasurable Meanings Sutra …