Buddhism was Murdered!

Please call the coroner.

Yesterday, I was reading John Canti’s introduction to his translation of the Perfection of Wisdom Sūtra in 25,000 Lines. It saddened me. Not because his scholarship is bad—it isn’t. Not because what he wrote was boring—is wasn’t. It saddened me because despite his obvious joy in translating this text, he felt compelled to frame the text by regurgitating the standard western speculations about the origins of the text and its history. Inflicting upon the reader the usual speculations about the provenance of the text, which he may indeed believe, detracts from the overall quality of his introduction and, at this point, is completely unnecessary.

At this point I must ask— do we really need to continue to recycle the speculations of the Buddhologists of the last century?

Gareth Spareham’s introduction to his on-going translation of the 100,000 Line version illustrates the problem perfectly:

From a historical perspective, a group of “long Prajñāpāramitā sūtras,” including texts that exist variably in Sanskrit, Chinese, and Tibetan, appears to have been one distinctive genre that took form from the early Prakrit literature on the perfection of wisdom that first appeared in writing in the first centuries ʙᴄᴇ and ᴄᴇ. Modern scholars have disagreed about which of the geographically dispersed Buddhist communities of the time may have first given rise to this literature, some favoring its origin among the Mahāsāṅghikas of Andhra in the south of India, while others point to evidence of its early flourishing in the northwest regions such as Gandhāra.

Honestly, who care what a group of 19th and 20th century scholars thought, who could not come to even a shred of consensus? What is even the point of describing such lack of certainty and speculation? But cite it one must, otherwise one will not be taken seriously by the forensic pathologists who dominate Buddhist studies. Academic Buddhists studies will be the death of the Dharma, no matter how interesting the papers it produces may be.

The sad thing is that the regurgitation of such opinions is wholly unnecessary in Buddhist translation work. Our job is to translate the text and if necessary, discuss issues to enhance the reader’s understanding of the text, not engage in social studies, historical speculation, anthropology, etc. To the extent that we must engage in comparing multiple versions of the same text to find the best reading, we must, but our job ends there.

So, the next time you read in a translation of a Buddhist sūtra or tantra something like “Such and such a text emerged from the such and such a milieu for such and such a reason,” know that you are essentially reading an autopsy report.