On curiosity and empathy
The field is vast, the work slow and difficult, and the workers few and scattered. And that’s why I was delighted to hear from Alex Wynne about the proposed translation of all remaining Pali canon and commentaries.
The centrality of translations is such that I undertook to translate the entire four Nikāyas, as well as the older books of the Khuddaka Nikāya. Those of us who teach in the field of early Buddhism are constantly reminded of how even basic knowledge of the ABCs of the field is rare. Many are those who are confident to sound off about “Buddhism” or even to start their own school, but few indeed are those who have taken the time to understand what the Buddha was saying.
For myself, and for the majority of people, the early texts are the most interesting and important, as they record whatever we have of the actual teachings of the Buddha and his early community. And that is why those texts—essentially the Sutta texts that I have translated and the Vinaya, which has also been translated afresh by Bhikkhu Brahmali for SuttaCentral—have been the focus of my work with SuttaCentral. And that remains the case; this project in Pali is only one of our ongoing efforts, alongside translation of Chinese and Sanskrit texts. Not Tibetan yet, unfortunately!
Nonetheless, the later parts of the canon, as also the commentarial literature, are also scriptures of great antiquity and importance. This literature, created over a period of perhaps 800 years, records the responses of a considerable portion of the Buddhist community to their changing situation and ideas. It preserves the opinions and teachings of many great monastics and practitioners of the past.
This literature is highly varied: from the elaborate devotional poetics of the Buddhavaṁsa, to the earthy storytelling of the Jātakas, to the realistic dialogues of the Milinda, to the laser-like technical manuals of the Abhidhamma. It spans a long period of evolution of language, context, and ideas.
There are those who relate to this later literature as inviolable scripture, the unerring authority of the tradition, supplanting in practice if not theory the word of the Buddha himself. And there are others for whom anything less than the pure word of the Buddha himself is dismissed as useless and vapid corruption. It should not need saying that neither of these approaches represent the attitude of a scholar and a seeker of truth. A scholar seeks learning because learning is joyful and heartening for its own sake; but more because learning deepens compassion and wisdom.
The plain fact is that all of us who want to learn about of practice Buddhism or meditation or mindfulness are leaning on the Commentaries in countless ways that we are not even aware of. It is from the Commentaries that we have learned much of the practical business of how to meditate, and from them that the meanings of countless Pali words are understood. They give context and flesh to the life of the Buddha, and illuminate the lives of his followers.
To translate these later texts, then, is an act of empathy and curiosity. We want to understand Buddhism better, and to do that we need to know what Buddhists have said. I for one can’t wait to see what we find out.