CHINESE TRANSLATIONS
OF
SANSKRIT TEXTS.[91]
ell might M. Stanislas Julien put εὕρηκα on the title-page of his last work, in which he explains his method of deciphering the Sanskrit words which occur in the Chinese translations of the Buddhist literature of India. We endeavoured to explain the laborious character and the important results of his researches on this subject on a former occasion, when reviewing his translation of the 'Life and Travels of the Buddhist Pilgrim Hiouen-thsang.' At that time, however, M. Julien kept the key of his discoveries to himself. He gave us the results of his labours without giving us more than a general idea of the process by which those results had been obtained. He has now published his 'Méthode pour déchiffrer et transcrire les noms sanscrits qui se rencontrent dans les livres chinois,' and he has given to the public his Chinese-Sanskrit dictionary, the work of sixteen years of arduous labour, containing all the Chinese characters which are used for representing phonetically the technical terms and proper names of the Buddhist literature of India.
In order fully to appreciate the labours and discoveries of M. Julien in this remote field of Oriental literature, we must bear in mind that the doctrine of Buddha arose in India about two centuries before Alexander's invasion. It became the state religion of India soon after Alexander's conquest, and it produced a vast literature, which was collected into a canon at a council held about 246 b.c. Very soon after that council, Buddhism assumed a proselytizing character. It spread in the south to Ceylon, in the north to Kashmir, the Himalayan countries, Tibet, and China. In the historical annals of China, on which, in the absence of anything like historical literature in Sanskrit, we must mainly depend for information on the spreading of Buddhism, one Buddhist missionary is mentioned as early as 217 b.c.; and about the year 120 b.c. a Chinese general, after defeating the barbarous tribes north of the desert of Gobi, brought back as a trophy a golden statue—the statue of Buddha. It was not, however, till the year 65 a.d. that Buddhism was officially recognised by the Chinese Emperor as a third state religion. Ever since, it has shared equal honours with the doctrines of Confucius and Lao-tse in the Celestial Empire; and it is but lately that these three established religions have had to fear the encroachments of a new rival in the creed of the Chief of the rebels.
Once established in China, and well provided with monasteries and benefices, the Buddhist priesthood seems to have been most active in its literary labours. Immense as was the Buddhist literature of India, the Chinese swelled it to still more appalling proportions. The first thing to be done was to translate the canonical books. This seems to have been the joint work of Chinese who had acquired a knowledge of Sanskrit during their travels in India, and of Hindus who settled in Chinese monasteries in order to assist the native translators. The translation of books which profess to contain a new religious doctrine is under all circumstances a task of great difficulty. It was so particularly when the subtle abstractions of the Buddhist religion had to be clothed in the solid, matter-of-fact idiom of the Chinese. But there was another difficulty which it seemed almost impossible to overcome. Many words, not only proper names, but the technical terms also of the Buddhist creed, had to be preserved in Chinese. They were not to be translated, but to be transliterated. But how was this to be effected with a language which, like Chinese, had no phonetic alphabet? Every Chinese character is a word; it has both sound and meaning; and it is unfit, therefore, for the representation of the sound of foreign words. In modern times, certain characters have been set apart for the purpose of writing the proper names and titles of foreigners; but such is the peculiar nature of the Chinese system of writing, that even with this alphabet it is only possible to represent approximatively the pronunciation of foreign words. In the absence, however, of even such an alphabet, the translators of the Buddhist literature seem to have used their own discretion—or rather indiscretion—in appropriating, without any system, whatever Chinese characters seemed to them to come nearest to the sound of Sanskrit words. Now the whole Chinese language consists in reality of about four hundred words, or significative sounds, all monosyllabic. Each of these monosyllabic sounds embraces a large number of various meanings, and each of these various meanings is represented by its own sign. Thus it has happened that the Chinese Dictionary contains 43,496 signs, whereas the Chinese language commands only four hundred distinct utterances. Instead of being restricted, therefore, to one character which always expresses the same sound, the Buddhist translators were at liberty to express one and the same sound in a hundred different ways. Of this freedom they availed themselves to the fullest extent. Each translator, each monastery, fixed on its own characters for representing the pronunciation of Sanskrit words. There are more than twelve hundred Chinese characters employed by various writers in order to represent the forty-two simple letters of the Sanskrit alphabet. The result has been that even the Chinese were after a time unable to read—i. e. to pronounce—these random transliterations. What, then, was to be expected from Chinese scholars in Europe? Fortunately, the Chinese, to save themselves from their own perplexities, had some lists drawn up, exhibiting the principles followed by the various translators in representing the proper names, the names of places, and the technical terms of philosophy and religion which they had borrowed from the Sanskrit. With the help of these lists, and after sixteen years consecrated to the study of the Chinese translations of Sanskrit works and of other original compositions of Buddhist authors, M. Julien at last caught up the thread that was to lead him through this labyrinth; and by means of his knowledge of Sanskrit, which he acquired solely for that purpose, he is now able to do what not even the most learned among the Buddhists in China could accomplish—he is able to restore the exact form and meaning of every word transferred from Sanskrit into the Buddhist literature of China.
Without this laborious process, which would have tired out the patience and deadened the enthusiasm of most scholars, the treasures of the Buddhist literature preserved in Chinese were really useless. Abel Rémusat, who during his lifetime was considered the first Chinese scholar in Europe, attempted indeed a translation of the travels of Fahian, a Buddhist pilgrim, who visited India about the end of the fourth century after Christ. It was in many respects a most valuable work, but the hopelessness of reducing the uncouth Chinese terms to their Sanskrit originals made it most tantalising to look through its pages. Who was to guess that Ho-kia-lo was meant for the Sanskrit Vyâkarana, in the sense of sermons; Po-to for the Sanskrit Avadâna, parables; Kia-ye-i for the Sanskrit Kâsyapîyas, the followers of Kâsyapa? In some instances, Abel Rémusat, assisted by Chézy, guessed rightly; and later Sanskrit scholars, such as Burnouf, Lassen, and Wilson, succeeded in re-establishing, with more or less certainty, the original form of a number of Sanskrit words, in spite of their Chinese disguises. Still there was no system, and therefore no certainty, in these guesses, and many erroneous conclusions were drawn from fragmentary translations of Chinese writers on Buddhism, which even now are not yet entirely eliminated from the works of Oriental scholars. With M. Julien's method, mathematical certainty seems to have taken the place of learned conjectures; and whatever is to be learnt from the Chinese on the origin, the history, and the true character of Buddha's doctrine may now be had in an authentic and unambiguous form.
But even after the principal difficulties have been cleared away through the perseverance of M. Stanislas Julien, and after we have been allowed to reap the fruits of his labours in his masterly translation of the 'Voyages des Pèlerins Bouddhistes,' there still remains one point that requires some elucidation. How was it that the Chinese, whose ears no doubt are of the same construction as our own, should have made such sad work of the Sanskrit names which they transcribed with their own alphabet? Much may be explained by the defects of their language. Such common sounds as v, g, r, b, d, and short a, are unknown in Chinese as initials; no compound consonants are allowed, every consonant being followed by a vowel; and the final letters are limited to a very small number. This, no doubt, explains, to a great extent, the distorted appearance of many Sanskrit words when written in Chinese. Thus, Buddha could only be written Fo to. There was no sign for an initial b, nor was it possible to represent a double consonant, such as ddh. Fo to was the nearest approach to Buddha of which Chinese, when written, was capable. But was it so in speaking? Was it really impossible for Fahian and Hiouen-thsang, who had spent so many years in India, and who were acquainted with all the intricacies of Sanskrit grammar, to distinguish between the sounds of Buddha and Fo to? We cannot believe this. We are convinced that Hiouen-thsang, though he wrote, and could not but write, Fo to with the Chinese characters, pronounced Buddha just as we pronounce it, and that it was only among the unlearned that Fo to became at last the recognised name of the founder of Buddhism, abbreviated even to the monosyllabic Fo, which is now the most current appellation of 'the Enlightened.' In the same manner the Chinese pilgrims wrote Niepan, but they pronounced Nirvâna; they wrote Fan-lon-mo, and pronounced Brahma.
Nor is it necessary that we should throw all the blame of these distortions on the Chinese. On the contrary, it is almost certain that some of the discrepancies between the Sanskrit of their translations and the classical Sanskrit of Pânini were due to the corruption which, at the time when Buddhism arose, and still more at the time when Buddhism spread to China, had crept into the spoken language of India. Sanskrit had ceased to be the spoken language of the people previous to the time of Asoka. The edicts which are still preserved on the rocks of Dhauli, Girnar, and Kapurdigiri are written in a dialect which stands to Sanskrit in the same relation as Italian to Latin. Now it is true, no doubt, that the canonical books of the Buddhists are written in a tolerably correct Sanskrit, very different from the Italianized dialect of Asoka. But that Sanskrit was, like the Greek of Alexandria, like the Latin of Hungary, a learned idiom, written by the learned for the learned; it was no longer the living speech of India. Now it is curious that in many of the canonical Buddhist works which we still possess, the text which is written in Sanskrit prose is from time to time interrupted by poetical portions, called Gâthâs or ballads, in which the same things are told in verse which had before been related in prose. The dialect of these songs or ballads is full of what grammarians would call irregularities, that is to say, full of those changes which every language undergoes in the mouths of the people. In character these corruptions are the same as those which have been observed in the inscriptions of Asoka, and which afterwards appear in Pâli and the modern Prâkrit dialects of India. Various conjectures have been started to explain the amalgamation of the correct prose text and the free and easy poetical version of the same events, as embodied in the sacred literature of the Buddhists. Burnouf, the first who instituted a critical inquiry into the history and literature of Buddhism, supposed that there was, besides the canon fixed by the three convocations, another digest of Buddhist doctrines composed in the popular style, which may have developed itself, as he says, subsequently to the preaching of Sâkya, and which would thus be intermediate between the regular Sanskrit and the Pâli. He afterwards, however, inclines to another view—namely, that these Gâthâs were written out of India by men to whom Sanskrit was no longer familiar, and who endeavoured to write in the learned language, which they ill understood, with the freedom which is imparted by the habitual use of a popular but imperfectly determined dialect. Other Sanskrit scholars have proposed other solutions of this strange mixture of correct prose and incorrect poetry in the Buddhist literature; but none of them was satisfactory. The problem seems to have been solved at last by a native scholar, Babu Rajendralal, a curious instance of the reaction of European antiquarian research on the native mind of India. Babu Rajendralal reads Sanskrit of course with the greatest ease. He is a pandit by profession, but he is at the same time a scholar and critic in our sense of the word. He has edited Sanskrit texts after a careful collation of MSS., and in his various contributions to the 'Journal of the Asiatic Society of Bengal,' he has proved himself completely above the prejudices of his class, freed from the erroneous views on the history and literature of India in which every Brahman is brought up, and thoroughly imbued with those principles of criticism which men like Colebrooke, Lassen, and Burnouf have followed in their researches into the literary treasures of his country. His English is remarkably clear and simple, and his arguments would do credit to any Sanskrit scholar in England. We quote from his remarks on Burnouf's account of the Gâthâs, as given in that scholar's 'Histoire du Buddhisme Indien:'