Encyclopedia of Buddhism Volume One A -L Robert E. Buswell

L ANGUAGES
and received considerable support from the royal
court. This close relationship with royal power led at
the beginning of the ninth century to a singular event
in the translation history of Buddhist literature. With
a view to setting general standards for translation
methods and producing renditions intelligible to
everybody, the king issued a decree laying down compulsory
rules for translators. To implement the decree,
a royal translation bureau published a list of about
ninety-five hundred Sanskrit technical terms and their
standard Tibetan equivalents, together with a treatise
explaining the translation of some four hundred Buddhist
terms. After that, fresh translations were made
and the older ones revised according to these new rules,
which continued to be observed after the fall of the
royal dynasty in the mid-ninth century until the end
of the translation period in the fifteenth century. This
led to a unique phenomenon in the Buddhist world:
The language of nearly all Tibetan translations is extremely
standardized and, usually without violating the
rules of Tibetan grammar, faithful to the Sanskrit originals
to a degree never again reached in any other language
used for translating Buddhist texts.
Like Buddhist Chinese for East Asia, Classical Tibetan
became the “church” language for much of Central
Asia. In the final period of their Buddhist tradition,
the Uigurs translated several works from Tibetan. After
the Mongols arrived in the domain of Tibetan Buddhism
in the sixteenth century, Tibetan texts were
continuously translated into Mongolian. During the
eighteenth century Chinese emperors even supported
complete Mongolian translations of the Bka’ ’gyur
(Kanjur) and Bstan ’gyur (Tanjur), the two collections
of canonical translations in Tibetan. Mongolian lamas
wrote works in Mongolian, but Mongolian never succeeded
in replacing Tibetan as the prime language for
ritual and literature. From Inner Mongolia in the east
to Buryatia and the Kalmyk steppe in the west, Mongols
continued to study Buddhism in Tibetan. As in
the case of the Mongolians, in the eighteenth century
the Chinese Qianlong emperor, whose dynasty was of
Manchu origin, sponsored the translation of canonical
texts into Manchu. Although these translations
were made from Chinese recensions, the collection was
then styled Bka’ ’gyur after the Tibetan model. However,
this enormous effort was primarily a political gesture
and, unlike the Mongolian case, did not lead to
Buddhist literary activity in Manchu.
South and Southeast Asia. Wherever Buddhism
spread in South and Southeast Asia, its canonical literature
was not transposed into the many vernaculars,
but remained Indian. Depending on the background
of the missionaries involved, it continued to be transmitted
in either Pali or Sanskrit. Although the canon
of the Theravada came to be written in many different
scripts, such as Sinhalese, Burmese, Thai, and Khmer,
its language until modern times was always Pali, and
Pali remained the medium of Buddhist ritual and
scholarship in Sri Lanka and in all the Theravada countries
of Southeast Asia. Individual texts of the canon,
however, were translated into various vernaculars
(Burmese, Khmer, Lanna Thai, Mon, Thai) from the
eleventh century onward, and in these and several
other vernaculars (Arakanese, Lao, Shan, Tai Khun,
Tai Lue), rich indigenous Buddhist literatures were
created. Sanskrit was used by other traditions of Buddhism,
most of them following MAHAYANA or even
Tantrayana doctrines, in Burma, Laos, and Cambodia
before the arrival of Theravada, and in Java and Bali.
Modern vernaculars
All this has changed dramatically during the last 150
years. In the West, scholarly studies of Buddhism began
around the middle of the nineteenth century,
when the first canonical texts were translated into
Western languages. Somewhat later, scholars in countries
throughout Asia started systematically to translate
texts from their “church” languages into the
modern vernaculars, especially when this entailed a
shift between two different language families. As a result,
one can hardly find a literary language in today’s
world, with the possible exception of Africa, that has
not been used for translating Buddhist texts, and it
would also be fair to say that English has now overtaken
Chinese as the most frequently used medium
for the spread of Buddhist ideas and literature.
See also: Buddhist Studies; Canon; Chinese, Buddhist
Influences on Vernacular Literature in; Gandharl,
Buddhist Literature in; Language, Buddhist Philosophy
of; Newari, Buddhist Literature in; Pali, Buddhist
Literature in; Sanskrit, Buddhist Literature in; Sinhala,
Buddhist Literature in
Bibliography
Bechert, Heinz, ed. The Language of the Earliest Buddhist Tradition.
Göttingen, Germany: Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht,
1980.
Grönbold, Günter. Der buddhistische Kanon: Eine Bibliographie.
Wiesbaden, Germany: Harrassowitz, 1984.
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