Yehan Numata Program Lecture: "Toward a More Perfect Future: Early Conceptions of the History of Buddhist Translation in China"
When and Where
Speakers
Description
Yehan Numata Program in Buddhist Studies 2024-25
For questions and the reading group materials, please contact Christoph Emmrich at christoph.emmrich@utoronto.ca.
Join on Zoom Passcode: 989442
- Associated reading group, February 27, “Inborn Nature (xing 性) and Instinctive Emotion (qing 情) in the Earliest Chinese Buddhist Texts”
- See 2024-25 SCHEDULE OF EVENTS FOR YEHAN NUMATA PROGRAM IN BUDDHIST STUDIES
The translation of Buddhist texts in Indian languages into Chinese was a millennium-long project that stands as perhaps the most complex, long-lasting, and copiously documented translation movement in pre-colonial world history, one that initiated and sustained centuries of literary and intellectual contact between the philosophical and religious traditions of South and East Asia. For good reason, then, the history of this Buddhist translation in China has been the subject of near continuous study by modern scholars. Less often considered, however, is the question of how this this history was thought about by Chinese Buddhists themselves. In this talk, I will take up this question and suggest that, firstly, medieval Chinese Buddhists engaged in an ongoing project of translation historiography in which they reflected on Buddhist translation work in China as having a historical character and as following certain historical patterns. And secondly, that they tended to present this history as having a particular direction: namely, that Chinese Buddhist canonical literature, produced by translation, continually improved in quality as time passed on. The Buddhist translation project, among other things, in this way helped introduce to the world of Chinese letters a forward-looking, progressive vision in which literature becomes better as time goes on, a vision that stands in interesting contrast to more usual medieval Chinese thinking about literary history which tended to portray literary development – and in particular, the kind of expansion and proliferation of texts that Buddhist translation produced – as something that buries the teachings of the sages beneath the overgrowth of later generations.
About the speaker
ERIC GREENE is Associate Professor in the department of Religious Studies at Yale University, where he has taught since 2015. He specializes in the history of medieval Chinese Buddhism, particularly the emergence of Chinese forms of Buddhism from the interaction between Indian Buddhism and indigenous Chinese culture. His recent books Chan Before Chan and The Secrets of Buddhist Meditation study the history of the transmission on Indian meditation practices to China, the development of distinctly Chinese forms of Buddhist meditation, Buddhist rituals of repentance, and the uses of meditative visionary experience as evidence of sanctity. His current research focuses on practices of translation and commentary during the first era of Chinese Buddhism, ca. 150-350 AD.