This is another in a series of weekly blog posts comparing and contrasting the Sanskrit and Chinese Lotus Sutra translations.
As I move through the Lotus Sutra, comparing Senchu Murano’s English translation of Kumārajīva’s Chinese Lotus Sutra with H. Kern’s English translation of an 11th century Nepalese Sanskrit document, I am coming to enjoy the places where Murano attempted to bring clarity to the sutra.
In many cases these are simple parenthetical insertions into the text. As an example, take the events of Chapter 17, The Variety of Merits, or as Kern has it, Chapter 16, Of Piety. After the Buddha declares the merits obtained by learning of the duration of the Tathāgata’s lifetime, mandārava-flowers and mahā-mandārava-flowers rain on the assembly.
Kern offers:
No sooner had the Lord given this exposition determining the duration and periods of the law, than there fell from the upper sky a great rain of Mandārava and great Mandārava flowers that covered and overwhelmed all the hundred thousand myriads of koṭis of Buddhas who were seated on their thrones at the foot of the jewel trees in hundred thousands of myriads of koṭis of worlds.
Murano’s version clarifies:
When the Buddha said that these Bodhisattva-mahāsattva had obtained the great benefits of the Dharma, [the gods] in heaven rained mandārava-flowers and mahā-mandārava-flowers on the many hundreds of thousands of billions of Buddhas sitting on the lion-like seats under the jeweled trees.
None of the other translators of Kumārajīva Chinese Lotus Sutra felt a need to clarify who was raining these flowers on the congregation. They don’t even specify that they are falling from heaven. The flowers just fell from the sky.
Later in the same paragraph Murano has “[The gods]” raining thousands of heavenly garments. No one else feels a need to say who is dropping this stuff, although all agree that “heavenly garments” are falling.
Kern has “Double pieces of fine heavenly cloth fell down by hundreds and thousands from the upper sky.”
On the other side of this discussion is an example of a little censorship for modern modesty sake. The questionable content appears in Kern’s Chapter 17, Indication of the Meritoriousness of Joyful Acceptance where we are told of the benefits to be received when one invites another to hear the Lotus Sutra.
And, Agita, if someone, a young man of good family or a young lady, says to another person: Come, friend, and hear the Dharmaparyāya of the Lotus of the True Law, and if that other person owing to that exhortation is persuaded to listen, were it but a single moment, then the former will by virtue of that root of goodness, consisting in that exhortation, obtain the advantage of a connection with Bodhisattvas who have acquired Dhārāṇi. He will become the reverse of dull, will get keen faculties, and have wisdom; in the course of a hundred thousand existences he will never have a fetid mouth, nor an offensive one; he will have no diseases of the tongue, nor of the mouth; he will have no black teeth, no unequal, no yellow, no ill ranged, no broken teeth, no teeth fallen out; his lips will not be pendulous, not turned inward, not gaping, not mutilated, not loathsome; his nose will not be flat, nor wry; his face will not be long, nor wry, nor unpleasant. On the contrary, Agita, his tongue, teeth, and lips will be delicate and well shaped; his nose long; his face perfectly round; the eyebrows well-shaped; the forehead well-formed. He will receive a very complete organ of manhood.
Murano renders the same section in Chapter 18, The Merits of a Person Who Rejoices at Hearing This Sutra, in this way:
“Ajita! Anyone who[, while he is staying outside the place of the expounding of the Dharma,] says to another person, ‘Let us go and hear the sūtra called the Lotus Flower of the Wonderful Dharma which is being expounded [in that place],’ and cause him to hear it even for a moment, in his next life by his merit , will be able to live with the Bodhisattvas who obtain dharanis. He will be clever and wise. He will not be dumb throughout thousands of millions of his future existences. His breath will not be foul. He will have no disease of the tongue or the mouth. His teeth will not be defiled, black, yellow, few, fallen out, uneven or crooked. His lips will not be pendulous, shrunk, chapped, cracked, broken, distorted, thick, large, yellow-black or loathsome. His nose will not be flat or awry. His face will not be black, long, distorted or displeasing. His lips, tongue and teeth will be well-shaped; his nose, long, high and straight. His face will be full; his eyebrows, thick and long; and his forehead, broad and even. In a word, he will have all the good features of a man.
The BDK English Tripiṭaka translation has:
They will thus have a perfect human countenance.
Burton Watson offers:
[H]e will be endowed with all the features proper to a human being.
Gene Reeves offers:
They will have all the features proper to a human being.
Risshō Kōsei-kai’s 1975 translation has:
His sign of manhood will be perfect.
While the Modern Risshō Kōsei-kai translation, ever concerned with gender equity, has:
They will possess all the most perfect physical features of a human being.
Leon Hurvitz, who used both Kumārajīva’s Chinese translation and a Sanskrit compilation of the Lotus Sutra, stays the closest to Kern:
[H]is male member perfect.
Next: The Uniform Scent of the Lotus Sutra
