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Thoughts on the Soto Zen Text Project The Many Faces of Dogen Mt. Tremper, July 8-11, 2004 Some months ago, when he was helping to organize the talks for this conference and trying to get us all to come up with our topics, Griff Foulk suggested that I do something on our Sōtō Zen Text Project translations. This seemed like a good idea, partly because I had no other topic in mind, but also because the topic seems a good one to talk about with this particular group. After all, among our speakers here are most of the best translators of Dōgen, and among our audience here we probably have some of the most careful readers of those translations; so this setting gives us an unusual opportunity to discuss together not only our particular translation project but also broader issues in the translation and interpretation of Dōgen’s texts. In order to encourage such discussion, I’ll say just a few words about our project, make a couple of observations on the broader issues, and then open the floor to discussion. So, first something on our project. The translation project. The idea for the Sōtō Zen Text Project goes back to the 1990s and the founding of the International Division as a separate unit of the Sōtōshū Headquarters. The people who set up that unit wanted to sponsor authoratative translations of Sōtō materials for use in the international community and asked several of us to a planning meeting in Tokyo. The project we have now represents a somewht modified version of what came out of that meeting. It’s a team of four translators, with Griff and myself as editors, plus Stanley Weinstein, emeritus professor at Yale, and Will Bodiford, of UCLA. We report to an editorial board in Tokyo, chaired by Prof. Nara Yasuaki, former president of Komazawa University, and including representatives of Komazawa, the International Division, and the American Sōtō community. The board meets once a year to set policy. The goal of the project is to translate all the texts of the official scriptural canon (seiten) of the Sōtōshū, consisting mainly of the basic works of Dōgen and Keizan, plus other materials helpful for Sōtō Zen practice — e.g., the liturgy (Nikka gongyō seiten) and the ritual manual for priests (Gyōji kihan). Our first publication was a version of the liturgy worked out over two years in a series of meetings with representatives of the American Sōtō groups. Griff is currently trying to finish up the ritual manual, which should be available perhaps in late 2005 or early 2006. Meanwhile, Stanley and I are working away on Dōgen’s Shōbōgenzō, and Will has started on Keizan’s Denkōroku. Most of our work won’t be published for a while yet. But the project has a web site, where we’ve begun putting up our translations as we get permission from the International Division. The translators and the editorial board want to put up as much material as we can, but we’re constrained by copyright concerns in the Sōtōshū. So, at this point, we’ve been limited to only a small selection of our work. If you’re interested in our project, please visit the site, send us your comments, and join our e-mail list for announcements. That’s as much as I’ll say by way of introduction to our project. If you have questions, we can talk more about it later. Let me turn now to the translations themselves. The Shōbōgenzō translations. My own job has been primarily to serve as translator and editor for the Shōbōgenzō, and I want to focus on this work in particular here. As you know, the Shōbōgenzō is a massive collection of essays, in its most comprehensive version containing about one hundred texts. All of these texts have already been translated into English, some of them many times. There are now three complete translations of the Shōbōgenzō and something over half a dozen volumes of selected translations. Some of these may be a little disappointing, but some are really good. Why, then, do another version? In one sense, the answer’s easy: a text as interesting and obscure as the Shōbōgenzō can never have too many translations, each one capturing some feature of, or approach to, the text missed by the others. Still, there are a couple of specific reasons for doing this particular version. From the perspective of the Sōtō organization, the answer is probably largely institutional: the organization is now sponsoring an authorized edition of the Shōbōgenzō in Japanese. It would also like to have an authorized edition in English. Since Dōgen is the founder of Sōtō, and his Shōbōgenzō is the most important scripture of the school, this felt need for an official version is easy to understand. But so what? What does this mean for us as readers of the Shōbōgenzō? After all, it’s not as if we’re all going to stop reading the other translations and adopt the church version as our bible. Just because it’s been authorized in Tokyo doesn’t mean it’s better than what we’ve got already. Frankly, speaking as one of the translators, I don’t think our translations will be better than the best of what we’ve got already. Of course, it’s not so easy to say what makes a “better” translation. OK, we want to it to be accurate. But what does that mean? True to the letter of the original? True to the meaning? True to the spirit? True to Dōgen’s intention in writing it? True to the varied Sōtō traditions of interpretation? This is something we could talk about later. But for now, if by “better” we mean the translation that we put by our bedside or stuff in our back pack when we go camping, I don’t think I’d choose ours. If ours are going to be better in any way, they’ll be better in some other way than this, good for something else besides bedtime reading. As academics, none of us on the translation team is particularly invested in producing an authorized church edition, supposed somehow to supersede the other translations. Back at the original planning meeting in Tokyo, we made the point that, for us, this project was only worth doing if it provided a translation of the Shōbōgenzō that gave the reader not just an “official” English version of the text but a set a materials that would encourage and support close study of Dōgen’s writings. Whatever else we may say about the Shōbōgenzō translations we have so far, they’re not intended primarily as aids to studying Dōgen’s writings. They’re intended primarily to convey Dōgen’s message to the English reader. The original form in which that message was written is less important for such translation than its content; and the chief trick is to come up with English versions that convey that content to the reader. Of course, the distinction here between form and content can be a tricky one, and I want to come back to this issue later; but for the time being, let’s just say that what’s different about our project’s translations is that we tend to tip the balance back toward the form of the original. In other words, our project is aiming not just to provide new translations but to do translations that provide a lot of information on the language of the original Japanese text — its syntax and diction; its obscurities, ambiguities, and equivocations; its literary characteristics, and so on. Practically speaking, this goal means two things for us a translators: first, the adoption of a translation style that seeks, as much as possible, to mimick Dōgen’s writing in its word choice and grammatical structure; second, the production of an elaborate apparatus to inform the reader of what’s going on “behind” the translations — not only the usual notes on technical terms, people, and books, but also information on what’s present in Dōgen’s Japanese (either explicitly or implicitly) that’s missing or obscured in the English, and what’s present in the English that’s missing or obscure in the Japanese — what the translator has added or clarified out of linguistic necessity or interpretive preference. This kind of “linguistically hypersensitive” translation can be a painful business, for both reader and translator. For the reader, it tends to yield an English text at its best often odd and clunky, at its worst downright bewildering, sometimes even grotesque. Not the sort of thing you’d want on your bed stand for entertainment or inspiration. The reading of this kind of text can often seem less a pleasure than a chore, less like reading than cryptography — in effect the breaking of Dōgen’s code and the retranslation of the translation into natural, readable English. Because of the difficulty of Dōgen’s way of thinking and expressing himself, this sense of reading the Shōbōgenzō as “decoding” Dōgen is something we’re likely to feel in any reasonably faithful translation of the work; but it gets exacerbated to the extent that the translation tries to reproduce not only his way of thinking but the style in which he expresses himself. For the translator, this style of translation demands not only a lot of time and energy spent tracking down and recording information on the language but, more painfully, a kind of schizophrenic struggle between the two roles of philological curator of the Japanese document and literary creator of the English text. This is a struggle, of course, that all translators face to one degree or another, as they labor to give voice to another’s words; but it becomes intensified to the extent that the translator’s own voice is expected to convey not only the content of the other’s message but also, as it were, the foreign inflections and alien accents of the other’s speech patterns. Perhaps both reader and translator can take heart from the understanding that what we’re trying to produce is not so much a translation as a set of resources for other translators, and for teachers and scholars who want to work closely with the texts of Shōbōgenzō. Still, I think what we’re doing can also raise some interesting broader questions for all of us about how we view the Shōbōgenzō and its author. I’ll come back to this point, but first let me give you an example of what we’re doing. The Ocean Seal Samādhi. Just before I came here, I sent off a Shōbōgenzō translation for the next issue of Dharma Eye, the Sōtō Zen journal that has been including one of our pieces in each issue. The text in this case was the Ocean Seal Samādhi, Dōgen’s comments on the famous state of concentration, known as the kaiin zanmai, in which it’s said that all things are revealed to the mind like images on the surface of the water, the state in which it’s said the Buddha taught the Avataṃsaka-sūtra. Here’s one passage from the text, where Dōgen is summing up his view of the samādhi.
Here, in Dōgen’s view, the ocean seal samādhi is not just about the Buddha sitting under the bodhi tree in total enlightenment, or about us sitting on our meditation cushions tripping out on the universe; it’s about everything that’s going on around us all the time, about us already embedded in, interacting with, what’s going on. It’s about the self as the practice of reaching out to others and letting ourselves be touched by them. I don’t know about you, but I like this passage. This is the kind of Dōgen I really like. Unfortunately, this is not what Dōgen actually said in his Ocean Seal Samādhi. I called it “Dōgen’s view” of the samādhi, but it’s really Carl’s personal view of what Dōgen meant to say about the samādhi. That’s probably why I like it: it’s my homemade commentary on the text, not a translation. Here’s a translation of what he actually said.
Hmm. This is not so easy as it looked. Seems this passage is not just about my practice of being myself together with others. There’s this thing about “actualizing detachment” in the eternal world. There’s an ocean in front of me and the Lotus Sūtra behind me; but “front and back exist together.” And then there’s the business of “the very long thread” that may be, under certain circumstances, “like a fishing line.” What’s going on here? And what’s this got to do with Carl’s personal reading? This version comes from one of the published complete translations of the Shōbōgenzō. For me, it’s actually more difficult to understand than the original, but at least it’s in English that looks like English. The version I just sent to Dharma Eye is something else again. Here it is, with the Japanese text for those who are curious.
We seem to be going from bad to worse here. Going from merely odd English to something that’s barely English at all. “The groping for a pillow is in the ocean I always preached”? Nasty. Going from obscurity to almost total mystery. “The former face is the I always preached of the slightest motion of a single wave and 10,000 waves follow”? What could that mean? Does it mean anything? I think you can feel here what I called the “pain” in this sort of translation for both reader and translator — the pain of the reader faced with a text that both boggles the mind by its cryptic content and offends the eye by its awkward language; the pain of the translator obliged to produce a text that masks both the message and the music of the original in its slavish fidelity to the author’s every word. If we care about the message and the music of the original, there must be better ways of dealing with this passage; and, in fact, some of the existing translations of this passage probably do deal with it better. Form and content. What this version does best is give us some insight into the literary character of the passage. What jumps off the page here are the quotation marks. It turns out that virtually every sentence of the original is composed of material picked up from other sources. It turns out that Dōgen is not just putting down his thoughts on the ocean seal samādhi but is weaving together a complex fabric of literary allusions — allusions that bring the Lotus Sūtra into conversation with the poems and sayings of the Zen masters; allusions that play with the theme of water (the water of the ocean seal samādhi, the ocean of the nāga king where Mañjuśrī taught the Lotus Sūtra, the waters in which the Zen master Decheng fishes with a thousand-foot line); allusions that invoke the body in that water: the body of Mañjuśrī in the ocean, the “hands and eyes” of the Bodhisattva Avalokiteśvara in the night, the “former and latter heads and faces” on the face of the ocean. Put more broadly, it turns out that to understand this passage, whether in the original or in translation, the reader needs to recognize what literary critics like to call the “inter-textuality” of the text — the text as in part a “conversation” with other texts. For most of us, who will have a hard time keeping up with this conversation, that means we need footnotes, to bring us up to speed on the sources of the allusions. And, in fact, we added some notes like this to the version I sent to Dharma Eye. But these footnotes, of course, even as they help us sort out some of the sources of the passage, actually serve to distort the literary character of the text, by unraveling the complex patterns of its fabric into their component strands, and by turning its rhetorical play into sober textual reference. Our apparatus for decoding the text becomes something like the explanation of a joke: by the time we “get it,” it’s already too late to get it. Dōgen’s original didn’t come with footnotes, and this should give us pause. Our passage must have been written not for people like us but for people who would “get it” — for an audience immersed in the literature it draws on, people who would recognize at a glance Decheng’s poem on fishing. Whether Dōgen was actually surrounded by many such people, or he was talking over the heads of most of his audience most of the time, we can’t say with certainty; but the fact remains that passages like this, and like many others in the Shōbōgenzō, are not just sending a coded message to Carl in 21st-century California about the nature of the self swimming in the ocean of the world around us: they’re sending an explicit message to Dōgen’s disciples in 13th-century Japan about what it means to play in the waters of the literary world of Zen. I trust you can begin to see now why I worried earlier about my distinction between form and content, between what Dōgen has to say and the way he says it. If he isn’t just telling us about Zen but also showing his disciples how to talk about Zen, it becomes difficult to separate the way he talks from what he has to say. If talking about Zen is not only a matter of talking as a Zen master but also of talking like a Zen master, then how do we separate Zen thought from Zen talk? The Zen message from Zen style and genre? Perhaps, in short, we have to treat many passages in the Shōbōgenzō somewhat the way we would treat a genre like poetry: “their medium,” as the fellow said, may be a large part of “their message.” Perhaps in such passages we have to let Dōgen speak to his own audience in his own idiom if we are going to hear what he had to say. The many faces and heads of Dōgen. Needless to say, these issues of how audience and idiom should impact our understandings are juicy ones, well worth talking about together. But before I stop and we start talking together, I want to go back to our Ocean Seal Samādhi passage for a moment and point out just one example there of the sort of linguistic and literary features that can raise broader questions for us about how we think of the Shōbōgenzō and Dōgen’s Zen.
The translation is struggling here to capture an elaborate pun. Dōgen is playing with two ordinary Chinese counters: mien, literally “face,” used where we might say, “two pieces, or sheets, of paper”; and tou, similar to our “two head of cattle.” Ordinarily, we’d be better off ignoring such counters in translation and saying here simply “the former and latter.” But Dōgen doesn’t want us to ignore them: he wants us to see in them our “original face” on the face of the ocean; he wants us to recognize the “head” we’re always putting on top of our heads. This kind of language game is very common throughout the Shōbōgenzō, where seemingly ordinary Chinese terms are suddenly highlighted in surprising ways: cut off from their natural language settings and held up for inspection, re-attached to other terms in novel combinations, reversed in syntactical order, turned from adverbs into nouns, from nouns into verbs, and so on. If you do too much Shōbōgenzō, you begin having dreams in which you’re in a book store with Dōgen, and he’s interpreting the titles.
Sound familiar? This sort of word play is all over the Shōbōgenzō. It’s what I call “Dōgen on a roll.” What kind of game is this? And how is it related to Dōgen’s Zen? Is this a wise Zen master messing with our minds? Or just a wise guy messing around with words, like some French deconstructionist on too much green tea? Messing with minds by messing with words is a game Dōgen learned from the Chinese Zen texts, which are filled with all sorts of linguistic play. But the particular kind of play we see in our example and in many other places throughout the Shōbōgenzō, based on shifting the linguistic functions of parts of speech, is not so common in China. It’s probably something Dōgen could do better, and was tempted to do more, than the Chinese because he was reading their texts through the eyes of a Japanese student of the language, for whom the words “stood out,” as it were, in ways they would not for the native reader. This kind of play, then, leaves us with a sense of Dōgen as someone at once an insider and an outsider in the Chinese Zen language game. We tend to treat Dōgen as a wise Zen master, not a wise guy, as a master of Zen, not a Japanese student of Chinese language. But the fact is, Dōgen is also an outsider, an eccentric. His Zen is different from that of both his Chinese and Japanese contemporaries. His Shōbōgenzō is a different kind of book from other texts of his time, a genre almost sui generis. And his use of language in the Shōbōgenzō is different from other authors, very odd and very self-consciously odd. How are we to understand this book and its language? How are we to understand the author’s view of his book and the language in which he chose to write it? How are we to understand the author, his book, and his language as Zen? Translations like those of the Sōtō Zen Text Project that seek to preserve something of Dōgen’s language may not be the sort you want on your night stand; but, if they can serve not just to help other translators or scholars do their work but to get us thinking about big questions such as these, then I’ll be happy enough with our efforts. |