A new translation of the Tipiṭaka into English

Fresh from my success updating my Pali grammar dictionary and creating a Markdown version of the Tipiṭaka in Brahmi script, I am now ready to tackle the next challenge: my own translation of the Tipiṭaka into English.

I’ve only just started, so I have translated just 10 suttas so far, all from the first vagga (group) in SN2 - Buddhavagga.

For example, this is my translation of Paṭiccasamuppādasutta (dependent origination):

What is so special about my translation and does the world really need another translation into English?

Well, the world does not need another translation, but I do. I have been dissatisfied with all the existing translations, mainly because they are inconsistent with how they translate Buddhist technical terms, and I wanted to be absolutely clear which technical terms have been used in the sutras.

So my approach is different in that I try to translate as naturally as possible, and avoid using “Buddhist Hybrid English.” I leave all the technical terms untranslated (but I provide parentheses showing what the meaning of the word in the context of the sutra is). This way I get the best of both worlds, I leave all the technical terms alone but I can also indicate what the contextual meaning of the terms are in each sutta.

For each translation, I provide a summary, the original text in Brahmi, my translation, and a commentary expressing my thoughts on the sutta.

Obviously I understand this is a massive task. At this stage I am not committing to translating the entire Tipiṭaka, only the bits I have an affinity to. I am starting with SN because that is a good place to start. I may do bits of AN or the Abhidhamma but I’ll probably avoid DN or MN.

I’ll see how much I get done before uni starts, after that you probably won’t hear from me for the rest of the year as I’ll be busy teaching.

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I leave all the technical terms untranslated (but I provide parentheses showing what the meaning of the word in the context of the sutra is)

I like what suttafriends.org does with hyperlinking such terms to pop-up windows with the definitions in them. I like your approach. Some technical terms are translated into “loaded” terms for native English speakers that are misleading. Example devas as “gods”, devas do not come close to the modern meaning of a god. There are many others as I am sure you know.

Another downside of translating too many of the technical terms is that in those translations newbies aren’t aware of “what you are talking about” right away or at all. Then nobody knows what they are talking about when they try to discuss it. For example, samadhi as “immersion” and jhana as “absorption”. It is easy for someone new to the translations to confuse those two translations.

I agree with your approach of only translating the suttas most important to you. There is so much redundancy in the Sutta Pitaka there is no need to do the whole thing.

Maybe do a new translation of “Word Of The Buddha”? It is about 60 pages of the dhamma being explained from sutta excerpts. The original translations are from a German who learned English. Ajahn Brahm is working on a new translation, but I am not certain it is finished. However, if you are only going to translate the most essential things, doing something like the “Word Of The Buddha” wouldn’t be a bad approach.

Good Luck!

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Thank you. Actually, I started a few years ago with this approach, but then I decided it is better to translate whole suttas rather than excerpts. Also, The Word of the Buddha tends to quote from DN and MN and I prefer to start with SN.

A few years ago, just after I learnt Pali, I translated the excepts from Rune Johansson’s Pali Buddhist Texts. I found this exercise most illuminating.

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It’s out now.

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Thank you for introducing this great website. I like their approach – offering things that people need at a particular time in their life.

Do you happen to know who runs this website? I’d like to do something similar in the Thai language.

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Sorry, I do not know who runs suttafriends.org.

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It’s owned by Mahamevnawa. I’m the admin.

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Bhikkhu Bodhi’s In the Buddha’s Words has a lot of SN suttas, so that might be a good source for a variety of suttas that illustrate important areas of Dhamma.

Thanks, but as I’ve explained I am going to choose suttas that I have an affinity to. They are not necessarily suttas that someone else has an affinity to. In particular, I find the selection of suttas in Bhikkhu Bodhi’s book quite strange - perhaps we have different priorities of what we regard as important.

In any case, currently I am translating sequentially, so I am not skipping any yet. I will skip when I find a bunch of suttas that seem to be substantially the same as the ones I have already translated.

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That reads like there might be interesting reasons for that preference. Care to share? No contention, just honest curiosity.

Several reasons, none of them particularly mysterious or earth shattering (no turning of the Dhamma wheel here :slight_smile: )

First of all, SN generally has shorter and more specific suttas, and perhaps easier to translate (although I have found a few that are difficult, for example 1.2.5 Kaccānagottasutta - I only managed to crack this after half a day, and then it became straightforward.

Secondly, SN has a lot of redundant material, I was planning to skip the repetitive suttas. so less to translate.

Finally, as per Joy Manne, DN can be characterised as propaganda - sermons for the laity, MN tends to be practitioner guides. Neither are likely to have been the Buddha’s original words, although some may have expanded from his teachings. Since I don’t consider myself to be a Buddhist, I am less interested in lay sermons or practitioner manuals - I am more interested in what the Buddha may have actually said, or, more precisely, meant.

Of course, SN is also full of made up suttas (Analayo has a theory that SN was ‘padded’ in order to compete with the other religions, ie. “Mine are bigger than yours”). I am starting to get a hang of detecting whether a sutta is made up or not by the linguistic patterns. Of course that is only a theory and I may be completely delusional. Let’s just put it down to personal preference rather than me claiming I have a Buddha radar.

But see for example my translations of 1.1.1 Paṭiccasamuppādasutta vs 1.1.2 Vibhaṅgasutta.

To me. it seems clear 1.1.2 is written quite some time after 1.1.1, it introduces new concepts i.e. kāmabhavo, rūpabhavo, arūpabhavo etc. which are hallmarks of a later period of Buddhism than what I think the Buddha would have directly taught. It represents the beginning of a tendency to over classify everything in minute detail which reached its peak in the Abhidhamma.

I don’t have an issue with the Abhidhamma as such, in fact, I started my studies 50 years ago with the Abhidhamma, but increasingly I feel the Buddha taught simply and tersely which is evident in many of the SN suttas.

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Your four-cycle model is quite interesting. What do you think if your “thought” process is represented in this way:

  1. Ignorance is followed by investigation and consideration (vacisankhara).

  2. Investigation and consideration are followed by discrimination (or “knowing the differences”).

  3. Discrimination is followed by naming and categorizing the different forms.

  4. Naming and categorizing the different forms are followed by activities (of thought) in six domains.

  5. The six domains are followed by contact or interaction (thoughts, ideas interacting, colliding, combining, or excluding one another).

  6. Contact or interaction is followed by sensation (or “receiving”). It is like a conclusion after the thinking process.

  7. Sensation is followed by desire or craving. Depending on the conclusion, a desire to reject the object or cling to it arises.

  8. Desire or craving is followed by absorption or intake (like absorbing food or fueling up).

  9. Absorption or intake is followed by production or operation (like the body producing cells after absorbing food or a machine starting to operate and produce products).

  10. Production is followed by birth, which means the products are released. Here, it could be ideas, words, or actions.

  11. Birth is followed by aging and death, which means the maturation and conclusion of the thought process, word and action.

  12. Joy, sorrow, happiness, and suffering arise accordingly.

What do you think?

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This is quite similar to the Abhidhamma representation of a mind cycle.

I think the Buddha meant something a little different though. I think he is saying everything we perceive, including our self, is “constructed”, ie. “generated within ourselves.”

If you look at Kaccānagottasutta, this is made clear. Between the extremes of “everything is real” (ie. the physical universe that we believe truly exists) and “everything is unreal” (ie. our perception of the universe is a complete illusion created by our minds, or, we are living in the Matrix), the Buddha advocates dependent origination as a middle path.

In other words, there is no reality vs unreality (or, we are not able to establish reality), but everything we perceive is constructed by us. It may bear some semblance to the physical universe, or it may not (depending on whether we are hallucinating or not).

So, because everything is constructed, we can unconstruct it. And in particular, we can deconstruct dukkha so it no longer exists in our perception of the world.

That is what Kaccānagotta sutta was trying so say - if we can truly see things as they are, the unreal will cease to exist, but even the real will cease to exist if we unconstruct them. At the end of the day, everything is just perceptions.

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Sorry, I also meant to add step 4 in the DO chain is not intended to be the “Naming and categorizing” as the Buddha envisaged it, or at least according to my interpretation. Step 4 represents the actual stimuli as they are detected by our senses, the “naming and categorisation” comes later (step 5, which is the cognisance of the stimuli, and step 6, where they are actually converted into symbolic representations (Bronkhorst came up with this and I quite like it), or “naming and categorising” (Gombrich calls it “apperception”)

The Buddha leaves open that what comes through into our sense organs may or may not be an accurate representation of the physical universe (for example, we could be colour blind, have defects in our eyes, our ears selectively filters out frequencies etc.) but the signal as it reaches our mind. Our mind then processes the signals and replace them with the mind’s perception of what the signal represents (which again, may or may not be reality, we could mistake a cat for a dog etc.)

So the Buddha realised our entire perception of the world is essentially made up and interpreted by us. That is an amazing insight from a man living more than 2500 years ago, that we now take for granted (actually, some of us still think our perceptions represent reality!).

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I have forgotten most of my previous abhidhamma knowledge so I don’t know if they are the same or not. Besides, I agree with most of the other things you shared, however, my biggest concern at the moment is rebirth (that’s why I’m looking into different interpretations of PS, to see if it really describes rebirth). I don’t know how, with the limited capacity of perception (as you shared), one can confirm something as vague as rebirth. I have tried to search for “proof” of it. But the searches always end in impermanence, uncertainty of perception. And my head always hits the wall of “unknowability”. At the end of each search, the question “then why do the suttas talk so much about rebirth?” comes to mind. Moreover, they always present rebirth as a real event that has actually happened. How strange!

But I seem to have realized something… I will think about it some more :pray:

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That was my concern too, for a long time. The Buddha’s philosophy is completely rational up to the point of declaring that there is no more rebirth. From what I can see, there is no way he can confidently predict that.

Any more than he can predict that the goal can be attained in the next life, or within 7 lives. To do so would imply a deterministic universe, and in a deterministic universe, it would be impossible to deconstruct at will in the way he advocates.

Anyway, I will be interested in your answer to this conundrum (via private message). I am not going to share my answer, because as I understand it any answer I give can be construed as breaking the forum rules.

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Oh, this could happen too. It’s not necessarily an implication of a deterministic universe, but we often make predictions about all sorts of things. Of course, our predictions are sometimes right and sometimes wrong, but for someone like the Buddha, his accuracy rate might be much higher.

Anyway, I’ve spent more than a day thinking and reflecting on rebirth. It seems that this time, I’m leaning toward the Buddhist schools that suggest there is an intermediate state between rebirth and death. How strange!

I also sent you a message, sorry for the delay! :pray:

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Thanks for the message!

I agree that we often make “predictions” that don’t imply the universe is deterministic. However, I think the Buddha’s declaration that there will be no more rebirths is more than a prediction (although I could be wrong).

Given the Buddha was eminently rational (probably the most rational person of his times) I think his statement was rational, and based on his experiential perspective. I think I’ll probably stop here.

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I think it’s following a certain Path per-se that one could say that after a certain amount of lifespans there would be no more rebirths and that there will be an Eternal entrance into Parinibbana that one will not leave. It must be some kind of a choice. Because in the Mahayana there is the words of many texts saying that Buddhas and certain Bodhisattas may remain forever, not entering full extinction, and even Arhats attaining Buddhahood after many lifetimes, even eons. So is it possible that when one says “rebirth has ended, etc”, in the next Emanation the Arhat may be living as a form of luminescent meditative being, not being reborn but instead Emanating. I think it was said in the Mahayana that Buddhas, Bodhisattas, and Arahants, can Emanate. :slight_smile:

Maybe one can Emanate from Parinibbana?

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Thank you for your insight into Mahayana beliefs. I am only recently starting to get acquainted with Mahayana doctrine, and I look forward to learning more.

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