This is another in a series of weekly blog posts comparing and contrasting the Sanskrit and Chinese Lotus Sutra translations.
In considering Chapter 11, Beholding the Stūpa of Treasures – or as H. Kern titles the chapter, Apparition of a Stūpa – I noticed an interesting difference among the nine easy and six difficult acts.
Murano has:
It is not difficult
To grasp the sky,
And wander about with it
From place to place.It is difficult
To copy and keep this sūtra
Or cause others to copy it
After my extinction.
Kern, on the other hand, says:
22. To throw down the totality of ether-element after compressing it in one fist, and to leave it behind after having thrown it away, is not difficult.
23. But to copy a Sūtra like this in the period after my extinction, that is difficult.
At the time I thought it interesting to consider the “ether-element” and “the sky” in context of the five elements of physical existence:
- Earth
- Water
- Fire
- Wind
- Void (Ether)
But the quibble over sky vs. ether was a rabbit hole I thought I would step around after my brief glance inside.
Then I got to Chapter 15, The Appearance of the Bodhisattvas from Underground, or as Kern has it, Chapter 14, Issuing of Bodhisattvas from the Gaps of the Earth.
Where were these great bodhisattvas before they sprung up through the earth and filled the skies?
Murano says at the start and later in gāthās:
They had lived in the sky below this Sahā-World.
But Kern says:
who had been staying in the element of ether underneath this great earth, close to this Sahā world.
Later in gāthās, Kern says:
40. They dwell in the domain of ether, in the lower portion of the field, those heroes who, unwearied, are striving day and night to attain superior knowledge.
Now it seemed I needed to explore that rabbit hole and the difference between ether and the sky.
Back in Chapter 11, the other English translations of Kumārajīva’s Chinese Lotus Sutra agreed with Murano on the difficult task. For example, the Modern Risshō Kōsei-kai translation offers:
If someone
Could grab hold of the sky
And, carrying it, travel about,
That would not be difficult.
Gene Reeves offered:
If someone
Took the sky in his hand
And wandered around with it,
That would not be difficult.
But even in that chapter there was a hint of dissent. Leon Hurvitz, who used both Kumārajīva’s Chinese translation and a Sanskrit compilation of the Lotus Sutra, offered:
If there should be a man
Who, holding open space in his hand,
Were to walk about with it,
Even that would not be difficult.
I was happy to leave that rabbit hole unexplored in Chapter 11, but Murano’s placement of the bodhisattvas in the “sky below this Sahā-World” was not supported by the other translators of Kumārajīva.
The 1975 Risshō Kōsei-kai translation has the bodhisattvas “dwelling in [infinite] space below this sahā-world.” A footnote for “[infinite] space” offered this:
Sanskrit ākāśa (space, ether) is often used as a synonym for śūnyatā (void).
Burton Watson has the bodhisattvas “dwelling in the world of empty space underneath the sahā world.”
None of the translators of Kumārajīva’s Chinese Lotus Sutra has the bodhisattvas dwelling in the sky.
In one of the side tunnels of this rabbit hole I found a nugget of information that offered one possible reason why Murano chose the word sky.
In Japanese, the five elements of physical existence are called godai.
Hisao Inagaki’s “A Dictionary of Japanese Buddhist Terms” (1989) explains godai in these terms:
Godai ‘The five great (elements)’; also godaishu ‘the five great seeds’; the five elements which constitute things in the world: (1) chidai, the earth element; (2) suidai , the water element; (3) kadai, the fire element; (4) fūdai, the wind element; and (5) kūdai, the space element.
The 1965 Japanese English Buddhist Dictionary (Daitō Shuppansha publisher) offers this definition of godai:
Godai pañca mahābhūtāni. The five elements. I. The five elements which are believed to be the components of all forms of matter: the earth-element (pṛthivī-dhātu), water-element (ap-dhātu), fire-element (tejo-dhātu), wind-element (vāyu-dhātu), and air-element (ākāśa-dhātu).
The Princeton Dictionary of Buddhism includes “sky” among the synonyms for ākāśa: “space” or “spatiality”; “sky,” and “ether.” In addition, there are several online resources that define “ākāśa-dhātu” as the element of “sky or space.” See here and here and here. So Murano’s choice of “sky” rather than the empty space other translators used is defensible.
Personally, I’m disappointed that the home of these bodhisattvas is a void beneath this world. I enjoyed the idea that these bodhisattvas were in the sky. I’ve never been to Australia, but I imagined these great bodhisattvas in the sky would be quite a spectacle.