Daoist Vocabulary in Early Chinese Buddhist Translations? A Reappraisal
Jan
Nattier, Hua Hin, Thailand
It is commonly held that when Buddhism was
first transmitted to China, this foreign religion was understood — or rather,
misunderstood — through a Daoist conceptual lens. The first Buddhist
translators, so we are told, made free use of Daoist terminology, creating
confusion thaat was only cleared up centuries later, when Kumārajīva and his
colleagues began to eliminate such terms from Buddhist discourse. According to
this scenario, Chinese Buddhist translations followed a clear trajectory of
"progress," with the inappropriate choices made by early translators being
rectified in the more careful work of their successors. This paper examines some
of the indigenous religious terminology used during the first two centuries of
Buddhist translation activity in China. As it hopes to show, the actual pattern
of usage is much more complicated — and more interesting — than the simplistic
picture of the early appropriation, and subsequent abandonment, of "Daoist"
religious terms.
Jan Nattier's publications include Once Upon a
Future Time: Studies in a Buddhist Prophecy of Decline (on Buddhist predictions
of the decline and disappearance of Buddhism), A Few Good Men: The Bodhisattva
Path according to the Inquiry of Ugra (on early Mahāyāna Buddhism), and A Guide
to the Earliest Chinese Buddhist Translations: Texts from the Eastern Han and
Three Kingdoms Periods, as well as a number of articles on early Mahāyāna
Buddhism, Chinese Buddhist translations, and Buddhism in Central Asia. She is
now living and working in Hua Hin, Thailand, where she is engaged in the study
of 2nd and 3rd century Chinese Buddhist translations.
