A Study Of The Tangut Translation Of Mahāsāhasrapramardana-nāma-sūtra

Tangut Buddhist scriptures have two origins, one being translated from Chinese, and the other being translated from Tibetan (hereafter Tibetan-Tangut Buddhist scriptures). The majority of Tibetan-Tangut Buddhist scriptures have yet to be thoroughly studied, including Mahāsāhasrapramardana-nāma-sūtra (hereafter Mahāsāhasrapramardana). The first purpose of this study is to collate and compare the extant twenty-eight fragmented Tangut Mahāsāhasrapramardana copies and to integrate them into a complete scripture. The second purpose of this work is to translate the whole sūtra into Chinese. Third, this study identifies certain principles of the Tibetan-Tangut translation process along with addressing a number of other relevant issues.Mahāsāhasrapramardana-nāma-sūtra is one of the Pa?carak.sā, the collection of five important Mahayana Buddhist sūtras. Its Tangut version, in both the first and second editions, was translated from Tibetan and consists of three volumes. All of the Tangut Mahāsāhasrapramardana texts were excavated in the Khara Khoto ruins of Inner Mongolia in 1909 and are now preserved in Russia. Prior to the present research there had been no methodical study of the Tangut Mahāsāhasrapramardana. H. A. Nevsky and Ishihama Juntarō, in a 1930 article, noted that they had studied the first volume of the text, but their research has thus far never been seen. In addition, the Tangut Mahāsāhasrapramardana has only been cited in four Tangut scripture catalogs:Тангутскиерукописииксилографы(З.И.ГорбачеваandЕ.И.Кычанов, 1963), Tangut Avatam.saka (3) (Tatsuo Nishida, 1977), the Tangut Tripitaka (Eric Grinstead, 1973) andКаталогтангутскихбуддийскихпамятников(Е.И.Кычанов, 1999). A thorough study of the Tangut Mahāsāhasrapramardana text is therefore in order.Only a few scholars have investigated the principles that guided the Tibetan-Tangut translation process, namely Wang Jingru (1932), H. A. Nevsky and Ishihama Juntarō(1932), Nie Hongyin, (2005), Sun Bojun (2007) and Duan Yuquan (2009). These scholars found that the Tangut translators tended to translate Buddhist terms in Tibetan sūtra following specific conventions which were different from conventions used in translating Chinese sūtra. This discovery has been hailed as a breakthrough in the study of Tangut Buddhist history, Tangut etymology and Tangut phonology. However, a systematic study of the translation principles of Tibetan-Tangut Buddhist scriptures is still lacking. By studying more texts, we can hope to further our understanding of the translation principles of Tibetan-Tangut sūtras. On the basis of the above scholars' achievement, this study further investigates the translation practices by specifically analyzing the translation of the names 'āyus.mat', 'Nāgarāja' and 'Yak.sa' in the Tangut Mahāsāhasrapramardana. Moreover, this study provides supplementary resources for further studies of Tangut Buddhism and Tangut lexicology.From this study, a number of principles used to create the Tangut translation of Mahāsāhasrapramardana are identified. These principles are as follows: 1) Literal translation from the Tibetan. 2) Combination of transcription and translation from Tibetan. For instance, if a Tibetan word is itself a combination of transcription and translation from Sanskrit, its Tangut translation was usually a combination of transcription and translation as well. 3) Combination of Sanskrit transcription and Tibetan translation. For example, a Tibetan word that originated from a direct translation from Sanskrit might be translated into Tangut via partial transcription of Sanskrit and partial translation of Tibetan. 4) Transcription from Tibetan. Examples of this method come from Tibetan words that had been translated directly from Sanskrit but were translated into Tangut using a transcription from Tibetan. This method implies that the Tangut translators of the scripture were not well versed in Tibetan. 5) Transcription from Sanskrit. In this case, a Tibetan word that had been translated from Sanskrit was translated into Tangut using its transcription from Sanskrit. Scholars have noted that Tangut translators of Tibetan Buddhist scriptures referred to the original Sanskrit documents.This study adopts a method called five-line interpretation: the first line is in Tangut, the second line is the Chinese translation of each Tangut character, the third line is Tibetan, the fourth line is the interpretation, and the last is the Chinese edition added in the end of each volume. Additional annotations follow directly the interpretation. The five-line method was used to facilitate detection of the differences in translations of the Buddhist terms by examining three different editions: Tangut, Tibetan and Chinese. Hence, this method proved very useful in inferring the principles used by the Tangut translators in translating the text from Tibetan.