More people are indeed familiar with “Dharma”, but in Mahayana & New Age contexts; using the Pali term isn’t a simple dialectical choice, but an active stratagem to freight the term with a differentiation from the nebulous semantic realm that surrounds Western understandings of ‘Dharma’.
Otherwise, “Teaching” seems best; it will be implicit throughout that it is the Buddha’s Teaching, and thereby the historical Buddha, not e.g. a mystical Mahayana Buddha teaching Bodhisattva Paths on the sly, a mystical Guru teaching Union with True Self on the sly, etc.
Yes, dhamma has multiple different meanings, but these were meanings that people learnt through using the language. Using words with flexible meanings that you have experienced in living contexts is a very different thing than being told in a glossary or a dictionary that a word has different meanings. It’s simply not felt in the same way.
And regarding your second point, this violates the the principle of “least meaning”, which I have discussed earlier. Words are just words. The Buddha conveyed what he was saying by stating it clearly, not by leaving semantic nuances in words for linguists to discover. So yes, you’re quite right to say that there is a significance to the fact that the Buddha’s teaching is in accord with reality. But this is stated clearly and explicitly many times in the Suttas. Whether or not our rendering of one word, even a central word like dhamma, fully captures this doesn’t make any major difference. The overriding requirement—which I have set myself in making this translation—is that each sentence should be fully comprehensible to a modern, average English speaker who is not an expert.
I’d suggest doing some reading on the topic of readability. It has been studied quite widely, and the results are pretty powerful. There is simply no doubt that the more readable a text is, the more it will be read and the better it will be comprehended.
Of course the difference in one small detail does not change it greatly. But the readability of the text is nothing more than the cumulative effect of thousands of tiny decisions exactly like this. And it is precisely in the difficult cases that the need for a clear decision is most important.
One problem I can imagine running into when using Sanskrit is, that the reader will not find dharma when he is looking to find it in the accompanying Pali text.
I assume not all readers will look at the Pali text and the ones that do are probably to a certain extent familiar with Sanskrit and Pali.
But it could create unnecessary confusion for some folks.
Sāvakasaṅgha really just means “community of disciples” and it gets its more definite meaning from the context. The context shows us that it refers to the noble ones, but I also think it shows that it refers to monastics. “Worthy of offerings” etc., has a distinct monastic flavour.
In this case I would propose to just render it as “community of disciples” and let the context speak for itself.
I think dispensing with Indic terms as far as possible is a good idea, but perhaps more important for the suttas than for the vinaya. The vinaya is more specialised, and will be far less widely read than the suttas. Moreover, those who are likely to read it will in most cases have a deeper interest in Buddhism. For this reason I have wondered whether I should really translate kathina and paṇḍaka, for instance, or even bhante when it refers to the Buddha. (Actually I don’t think I have any untranslated terms apart from these three.) I probably will change bhante (to “venerable sir”?), and I semi-translate kathina as “kathina ceremony,” but I suppose I could render it as “robe-making ceremony.” Paṇḍaka is more tricky, and I am not sure if any translation will be satisfactory. Any thoughts?
As for vinaya I have used “training,” as I have for sikkhā. It seems to be very rare that they occur together, and if it should happen there are other ways of dealing with that, such as translating them both as one term or using a different translation on those odd occasions.
Indeed. And for this reason it is important to lower the bar as much as possible. When all the terms are English, at least you get a feel that you understand what’s going on. As you keep on engaging, you will soon enough find out that more study is required. But getting people started requires reducing the entry barriers to a minimum.
In this context I would render Dhamma as the Truth, or something similar. You are of course quite right that the term is very multifaceted and needs to be rendered in a number of different ways depending on context. One such context that is usually fairly cut and dried is when it refers to the teachings of the Buddha.
On “order” vs. “community”, the former is more specific for a monastic group; the only problem I see is that it typically refers to a monastic order as a whole, rather than the community in a monastery, whereas Sangha of course can be both. But in the Suttas it is probably mostly the former.
I agree.
Some time ago, Stephen Anacker did a translation of a number of Vasubandhu’s works, and he didn’t use any Indic terms. It seems fine! One problem is that everyone seems to have pretty much random ideas about what is untranslatable. Someone thinks dukkha can’t be translated, someone else thinks its jhāna, and for someone else its nibbāna. And the reason why—because there’s no English word that covers it—seems to apply equally, or equally badly, in every case.
Not really. It is a hard one, especially as terms these days are much more to do with sense of identity, whereas pandaka seems to be both physical and perhaps cultural.
I remember trying to read suttas years ago, when I just got into Buddhism. I had to look up so many terms! This was partly because I’m not a native English speaker, but I heard English speakers have similar troubles with words like aggregates. Even things like setting in motion the wheel of Dhamma, which now seems so natural, meant nothing to me. Dhamma and discipline did neither. So, Bhante, I think it’s a good idea to translate everything.
(I just used Bhante… I wouldn’t have done that many moons ago. For Bhante I like “Your Reverence”. Perhaps a bit old fashioned or Christian in flavour. Anyway, that’s just me.)
