In fact, Sir Bailey's academic achievements should be introduced in a special article. Here is just a brief mention. Even if the legend that he can read more than 50 languages cannot be proved, the document can be obtained. At least he can read English, French, German, Russian, Italian, Spanish, Latin, ancient Greek, Tamil, Arabic and Japanese, and because of his teaching, he can be said to be "very proficient" in Sanskrit and Balinese.
Unlike such a teacher who specializes in Iranian language, he can also be called a generalist. During his long academic career, Professor Norman mainly studied the grammatical, phonetic and linguistic features of Ashoka's stone carvings in BC. At the same time, Professor Norman is also one of the greatest Pali experts in the world. During his life, he compiled or translated eight Li scriptures, such as Sister, Sister, Classic Collection, French Sentence Classic, Borotti Mu Cha and so on. 1983, he also published a typical book "Pali Literature" (Pā li Literature, Otto Harrassowitz, Wiesbaden, 1983).
A large number of single research articles in his academic career were later included in the collected works published by Pali Literature Society, reaching as many as eight volumes. It is precisely because of his great contribution to Buddhist philology, especially to the collation of Pali documents, that he became the president of Pali Economic and Social Bureau with a history of 100 years from 198 1- 1994. Moreover, as the highest honor of English literature and science, he is also a member of the British Academy of Sciences with a long history. By the way, Professor Kenichi Shinji, a Japanese scholar who has made unprecedented achievements in the field of Buddhist literature in China and director of the Institute of Advanced Studies in Buddhism at Soka University, also studied at Cambridge University in the 1980s, when Norman was the instructor. Moreover, according to Xin Yan's own memory, Professor Norman's research style had a great influence on his life.
1In March, 1994, SOAS University in London invited Professor Norman to give a series of lectures in the name of "Visiting Professor of Buddhist Missionaries Association". This lecture is divided into ten lectures, mainly from the perspective of a Buddhist philologist to talk about some important issues in Buddhist research. These speeches were later compiled into a book (philosophical method Buddhism, Soas, London; Reprinted by Pali Literature Society), this translation is based on this episode.
The programmatic significance of Norman's series of speeches is that as a top scholar of Buddhist philology, he tried to explain the extremely profound problems in this field to "ordinary readers" in a simple way. However, I want to remind you in advance that even so, we still need a lot of patience and knowledge reserves, especially the language knowledge of ancient India, in order to "fully understand" many contents in this little book.
In these ten lectures, Professor Norman talked about how to look at some important issues about the origin of Buddhism from the perspective of linguistics, focusing on the oral tradition of Buddhist documents before the appearance of written words, and pointed out that this tradition had a great influence on the formation of Buddhist documents in later generations. In his speech, Norman also talked about the relationship between Buddhism and dialects in various parts of India, as well as the academic research on which dialects the Buddha has spoken in history. Later, Buddhist documents were recorded, which not only fixed Buddhist scriptures in Sri Lanka, but Norman also tried to show them, and also provided a convenient door for new Mahayana classics. In BC, Buddhism gradually returned to Sanskrit from the initial attitude of rejecting Sanskrit. However, in the process of Sanskrit, as far as practical operation is concerned, there have been distortions of various documents. It is through a variety of detailed case studies that Norman showed us the reasons and process of these file errors.
Ashoka is the key to the transformation of early Buddhism from a local religion to a pan-Indian subcontinent religion and finally to internationalization. Professor Norman also analyzed all kinds of legends about Ashoka in the past from the perspective of Buddhist linguistics, and referred to Ashoka (Ashoka Cliff Stone Carvings and Stone Pillars Stone Carvings) recorded in real documents to see which is more true. At the end of the lecture series, Norman also used a lot of detailed materials to explain that Buddhist documents were eventually compiled into Tibetan scriptures, and that the tradition of Pali annotation books in the whole scriptures had various influences on the future of Buddhism.
From the above introduction, we can see that although this book is an introductory and popular reading, and Norman himself has been expounding the study of Buddhist philology in a clearer and more concise way, the information in this book is equally huge. Therefore, it can be said that it is a microcosm or specimen of Professor Norman's lifelong research, and it is a real "little book for everyone". I believe that by reading this book, we will find that some simple questions that we take for granted actually have completely different and deeper meanings in the eyes of Buddhist linguists. For example, some basic concepts, such as "four noble truths", "Buddha", "Bodhisattva" and "critical eye", have been misunderstood by our Buddhist circles and even Buddhist academic circles. Many times, "vulgar etymology" is not only the patent of laymen and folk disciplines, but also has a good market in academia.
As for the translation of this book, let me first talk about philology and its Chinese translation in the title. In this series, Shi Feng and I both translated this book into "philology" and "philology". But there are many translation methods of this word in the Chinese world, such as "philology", "historical linguistics" and "philology". March 20 17 14 professor Chen Huaiyu of Arizona state university suggested that I translate it into "philology" or "linguistic philology" in private communication to distinguish it from "philology" as textual research. Actually, I have my own ideas on this issue. As early as 20 13, 15-20 April, Taiwan Province Foguang University held a seminar on "The Past, Present and Future of Buddhism in China", and I published an article entitled "The Present Situation and Future of Buddhist Philology in China". In which I mentioned:
At present, influenced by western Buddhist philology, many people equate Buddhist philology with Buddhist teaching research. I'm here to make a little explanation. About the Chinese translation of this word, some directly correspond to "philology", which makes sense. Because in English, it means "the study of language and literature". In other cases, the word will be translated into "linguistics" and "philology", because the word also has the meaning of "studying classical language, literature and history, but the most common meaning at present is the science of language", and more often, a qualifier of "comparison" will be added to make its meaning relatively clear, that is, it has the meaning of "comparative linguistics".
I will mention in the later Introduction to Western Buddhism that the study of Buddhist philology in the whole west is actually the study of Buddhist classic languages, with the collation, translation and comparative study of Buddhist scriptures as the carrier and Sanskrit, Pakistani and Tibetan as the core.
Just because the research foundation of western Buddhism teaching is some philological work, I will only refer to the research results of this kind of comparative linguistics in the introduction of the summary of western philology research. But philology is not exactly the same as what I call Buddhist philology. As mentioned above, philology has a strong linguistic tendency, especially in the history and development of linguistics. Most of the western Buddhist linguists we see now are proficient in Sanskrit, Baha, Tibetan and other Buddhist classic languages, mainly engaged in the translation and revision of these classic Buddhist documents, and conducted an all-round discussion on the grammatical structure, phonetic features and exegesis of these classic languages, which has actually entered the field of linguistics to a great extent.
Although we can see that in the process of translating and revising Buddhist scriptures, these western Buddhist philologists (that is, philologists) will also discuss different versions of Buddhist scriptures, but they will not take the characteristics and classification of these versions as their research objects, just as China Buddhist philologists do, but as auxiliary tools. This can be taken as an example. In Europe, the Pali Faju Jing was first translated into Europe. After the discovery of Sanskrit and Gandhara Faju Jing in Xinjiang, China, it aroused the research enthusiasm of Buddhist philologists.
What they do most is a comparative study of parallel paragraphs in these different texts, such as a comparative study of French sentences in different languages, which is very similar to the comparison of different versions in China's traditional philology; Or cross-reference related items in different texts, for example, citing ancient notes or ancient books for analysis when studying Faju Jing, which is very similar to other schools in Chinese traditional philology. However, it is obvious that Buddhist philologists mainly do translation and revision between different languages, but in traditional Buddhist philology in China, it basically does not belong to their field of work.
Similarly, sometimes, these philologists will compile some catalogues, but most of them are only for the convenience of translation and revision, and they will not regard these catalogues as a science. In addition to compiling the catalogue, China Buddhist philologists will also study a series of issues such as the historical evolution and future development of ancient Buddhist scriptures in China, which is also an area that western Buddhist philologists generally do not set foot in.
Comparatively speaking, the unique research scope of Buddhist philology in China at least includes the following aspects:
As far as the Buddhist scriptures are concerned, they include the study of the Tripitaka and the study of the unique books outside Tibet. Buddhist bibliography, including the study of the history of Buddhist bibliography, the collation and publication of Buddhist classics and versions, etc. Buddhist collation, including the special situation and treatment of Buddhist collation; The study of Buddhist scripture identification includes the identification of its authenticity, age, place and religious background. The study of Buddhist scripture compilation includes compiling lost Buddhist documents from classic books, collections and other classics at home and abroad.
Therefore, we can see that the "China Buddhist philology" within the framework of the traditional "Chinese philology" is a philological study based on the traditional research methods of China, focusing on the single language "Chinese". However, as I have always stressed, in the face of such a complicated situation of Buddhist literature, the study of monolingual literature will inevitably be greatly restricted, which involves a series of branches from the source Indian to Chinese and Tibetan.
Therefore, although I have made it clear that there is a big gap between western philology and that of our Chinese world, the former prefers linguistics, especially the discipline system of "comparative" linguistics. But here I decided to choose the translation of Chinese Literature for the following reasons. First of all, translating this word into "philology" is indeed an example and one of the common practices in academic circles; Secondly, this research orientation of western linguistics can be completely incorporated into a whole and larger research framework of Buddhist philology, and it is really necessary to integrate this research method of East and West. Recently, some outstanding Buddhist philologists in China, such as Xin Yanzhizhi and Stefano Zachetti, have actually merged the two traditions of Buddhist philology research in the East and the West.
Especially in Zuo Guanming's research, in addition to the traditional genealogy of European comparative linguistics, he also reached the point where he knew the version of China Tripitaka and the collation of Buddhism very well. Thirdly, from the perspective of being more acceptable to the audience, Buddhist philology looks at least a little kinder than Buddhist philology or comparative linguistics, and it will not be so different and make people stay away from it. Well, to tell the truth, I'm afraid that not many people are willing to read this dry pure academic book, let alone take such a scary name.
What these outstanding Buddhist philologists in China have done, or what we dream of pursuing, is to strengthen the linguistic study of Buddhist scriptures and scripture languages such as Sanskrit, Pali, Gandhara, Tibetan, Mongolian, Uighur and Manchu, and at the same time, take these languages as a frame of reference and make full use of the versions, collations and Manchu in China's traditional philology. I sincerely hope that more schools offering master's and doctoral courses related to Buddhist studies will take one or more languages as one of the compulsory courses for each student.
Of course, I'm not saying that everyone engaged in Buddhist research must be proficient in these basic philology, but there is no doubt that there are not too many people engaged in these basic studies in Buddhist research in China, but they are far from enough. The importance of this aspect cannot be overemphasized. For example, T.602, which belongs to An Shigao in the Tripitaka, is an important specimen used by many scholars to analyze the early meditation documents of An Shigao and China. However, Zuo Guanming's research shows that it was not translated by An Shigao at all, or even a Buddhist scripture. An Shigao's original works are hidden in the Japanese "Gong Guozhi". Then, looking back, how valuable are the many inferences we have made based on this classic as "An Shigao's translation of classics"?
Needless to say, in the past, in the field of Chinese Buddhism in China, philology, especially Indo-European philology, besides the tradition of Oriental Languages Department of Peking University represented by Ji Xianlin, Wang, Duan Qing and Ye Shaoyong, and a few colleges and universities such as Renmin University (such as Master Weishan) and Fudan University (such as Serina Liu) which have gradually developed in recent years, can be said to be a rather marginal field of Buddhist research.
But in fact, as this book constantly emphasizes, Buddhist philology (of course, including Buddhist China philology) is the cornerstone of all Buddhist studies in the past, present and future. If we can't even understand or really understand the original intention of Buddhist scriptures or basic Buddhist documents, how can we talk about their history and philosophy? We hope to introduce some of the best achievements of western Buddhist philology through the publication of such a small book. Of course, we hope to take this booklet as a starting point, bring more excellent works on West Indian studies, Buddhist teaching and philology to China academic circles, and attract more students to join the research team of Buddhist literature.
Speaking of the translation of this book, I first read it in 2008. When I was in Fudan, I was basically trained in China's traditional philology (I want to thank my tutor, Mr. Chen, and Mr. Chen who taught me philology, although I didn't learn it well). After going abroad in 2006, I felt my eyes were wide open. I gulped down a large number of monographs on western Buddhist studies at the rate of browsing nearly 100 books every year, and also enjoyed the elegance of western Buddhist philology research.
Besides me, the main translator of this book is Dr. Chen Shifeng, whom I met from September 20 13. He is an Australian Chinese from Singapore and has lived in Australia for nearly 30 years. His major is agronomy (1987, Ph.D. in agronomy, University of Queensland), but he studied Sanskrit in the Australian National University, an important Buddhist research center, for one year in 2007-2008. After that, he continued to study Sanskrit and Pali for many years. Since 20 14, he has translated many research articles by Professor Norman, and our correspondence mainly discusses some professional issues.
On February 18 this year, Shi Feng wrote to Miss Karen Windland, the head of the office of the Pali Scripture Society, asking about the translation copyright of a paper by Professor Norman. The next day, he received an email from Professor William Prut, who is now in charge of Mr. Norman's copyright. Professor Pratt, as everyone in the circle knows, is also an outstanding Buddhist philologist. Therefore, I also got in touch with Pratt himself and wrote to ask if I could get the translation authorization of Norman's book on March 4. The next day, he wrote back and said that it was no problem, and told me that in August that year, he would take the opportunity to sort out the catalogue of Burmese scriptures for the Myanmar government, and then we could meet. Later, the publishing house needed more formal authorization, and Shifeng wrote to get their written consent.
Although we got the authorization, I was busy translating paul williams's masterpiece Mahā yā na Food in the first half of 20 14, so this book, like many of my research projects, was dragged down. This year, I believe, is also a busy year, traveling between Australia, Singapore and Guangzhou.
20 15 was busy preparing several conference papers after teaching. In September, I compiled a collection of Chinese-translated Buddhist philology for Zuo Guanming. Apart from a month's temporary help, I finally finished translating ten articles with a manuscript of about 300,000 to 400,000 words in March, 20 16, but soon other chores kept popping up. That is, in165438+1October this year, Shifeng asked me about Norman's translation and offered to cooperate with me in translation.
At that time, I proposed to coordinate Chinese translation, compile the target language index, and give priority to finding domestic publishing houses. If not, the Singapore Journal of Buddhist Studies edited by me will be published as a special issue. In this way, free online downloads can be provided, and free periodicals can be sent directly to universities and research institutions, which can also serve the purpose of wide circulation. But later, I felt that teaching and administration, coupled with constant chores, were really weak, so I finished translating chapter 3- 10 of the fashion. Therefore, most of the translations of this book are attributed to the fashion, and I just started reading this book.
Fashion Chapter 3-10 He sent me the first translation on September 29, 20 16. My translation of two chapters was postponed until February this year. After that, I tried my best to proofread all the translations and began to compile the target language index until May 15. I commented on all the translations in the revised mode and sent them to the fashion. Shi Feng considered this translation and sent it back to me on August 14. On this basis, I printed it out and read it again, revised some obvious typos, grammatical errors and mistranslations, and sent it back to Shifeng for retrial on August 25th. On September 7th, the fashion part was finalized, and our whole book was basically completed (I will compile a terminology index after the proof is clear).
Shi Feng may be one of the few scholars in the field of academic translation in China. Although his mother tongue is Chinese, Chinese is a little weaker than his English. So his real strength is Chinese-English translation. Just at the beginning of this year, it took him only three or four months to translate my long article "Re-study on Doubt and Falsification" (Yan Fu Buddhism Research, 20 12, Volume 7: 1 15- 182). It involves not only the professional knowledge of Buddhist philology, but also a large number of specialized terms and terms. It really surprised me that he finished the English translation in such a short time. So his understanding of English rarely makes mistakes. My main job is to modify and translate his Chinese expression. Of course, there will still be mistranslation and misinformation. We sincerely welcome any criticism here and will use it as a spur to prepare for the improvement of the next edition.
When I was revising the whole book, on March 10, I sent a short message on Sina Weibo, asking if any domestic academic publishing houses were interested. At the first time, Mr. Liu Sai from Shanghai Ancient Books Publishing House contacted me about publishing. Although this book was not published in Shanghai ancient books in the end, I really can't forget Mr. Liu's deep friendship and feel extremely sorry for not responding positively to Mr. Liu's request for help.
Almost at the same time, Brother Lin from Zhejiang University sent a message saying that he had contacted Dr. Li Biyan from Chinese and Western Bookstore. Dr. Li was very interested in this book. 1 1 In the morning, Master Chen Yinque of Fudan also sent me a short message, telling me that if there is any problem with the publication of this book, he can help. At midnight on March 12, Professor Yang Lu from Peking University sent a short message, strongly recommending Dr. Li Biyan and Chinese and Western Bookstore. His original words were: "... Chinese and Western Bookstore is the best publishing house teaching Buddhism in India at present, and Li Biyan is the best editor. Cindy's book has just been published. You might as well consider making a series independently, including two books by Norman. Chinese and Western (bookstores) are highly recommended. ..... "On March 14, Dr. Li Biyan sent me an email asking about the specific issues of publication.
On the same day, Professor Chen Huaiyu of Arizona State University also recommended the publication of this book to Dr. Li Biyan. On March 17, Professor Ye Shaoyong of Peking University recommended me and introduced that the series of Indian Studies was published by Chinese and Western Bookstore. If anyone still thinks that the recommendation of these teachers and friends is not enough, I took a walk with Mr. Yan Yaozhong after dinner when I attended the seminar "From Xiangyuan to Ceylon: Life and Legacy of the Han Monk Fa Xian" in Shaanxi on March 26th. He heard that our book was published and recommended Dr. Li Biyan to me. It was also during this meeting that Professor Wang Song of Peking University learned that the book had not been signed by the publishing house and offered to help solve the publishing problem. April 13 Brother Liu Zhenxiong of Fudan sent an email asking if the book was found. If not, it can be included in his translation series.
This thin booklet has alarmed so many teachers and friends, which really makes me feel ashamed. At the same time, I want to take this opportunity to sincerely thank these teachers and friends for their selfless help. Of course, I also want to thank Dr. Li Biyan for his academic passion, Mr. Wu for his professional and meticulous editing and proofreading, and the Chinese and Western Bookstore for their unremitting support for "Academic Unpopular", so that those of us who have "special hobbies" have found a small private plot.
Jiyun 2065438+September 8, 2007 Bishan, Singapore
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