Brief History Of Buddhist Studies In Europe And Maerica

Author(s): J W De Jong
Publisher: J W De Jong

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THE EASTERN BUDDHIST
which are of great importance both for the history of Indian Buddhism and that of Chinese Buddhism. A better and more precise knowledge of the language of the Chinese translations will also lead to a greater knowledge of the Indian originals. Many Indian texts are only known through a Chinese translation. Even if an Indian original exists, it is often not the text translated in China but a later text which differs from it, because in the course of its transmission in India it has been subjected to alterations and accretions. Of great importance for the knowledge of the language of the Indian original are the transcriptions of Indian names and terms. In recent years John Brough has shown that the language of northwestern India, the so-called Gāndhārī, has to be taken into account in explaining Chinese transcriptions of Indian names. Thanks to the work of Karlgren, Pulleyblank and other scholars, it is possible to reconstruct with a fair degree of certainty the pronunciation of Chinese characters in T’ang and pre-T’ang times. On the Indian side more is now known about Buddhist Hybrid Sanskrit and Gāndhārī through the work of Edgerton and Brough. Continued study of Chinese transcriptions and of Indian texts which are not written in pure Sanskrit will be required in order to obtain a better picture of the linguistic aspects of the texts which have been translated into Chinese.
In recent decennia many scholars have done excellent work in publishing detailed Tibetan-Sanskrit indices of Buddhist texts. However, there still are very few Chinese-Sanskrit indices. It is of course more difficult to compile indices of Chinese translations than it is of Tibetan translations, because the Tibetan translators generally adhered to a well-determined terminology, although sometimes one Sanskrit word is rendered by many different Tibetan words as can easily be seen by consulting Lokesh Chandra's Tibetan-Sanskrit dictionary. However, it is certainly possible to compare Indian texts with Chinese translations and to compile Chinese-Sanskrit dictionaries. These dictionaries would be of great help in the study of Buddhist texts. Once a number of these dictionaries or indices has been published, it will be possible to compile a comprehensive Sanskrit-Chinese dictionary which will allow us to see how a certain Sanskrit term has been translated by An-shih-kao, Dharmaraksa, Kumārajīva, etc. Probably there will be less uniformity in the renderings of terms by the translators of Indian texts in China than is the case in Tibet. In China especially the translators in older periods have not
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