Chinese Buddhist Texts: An Introductory Reader. Graham Lock & Gary S. Linebarger. Routledge, 2018.
The influence of Buddhism on the Chinese language, on Chinese literature, on Chinese philosophy, on Chinese folk beliefs, on Chinese material culture and, of course, on Chinese religious beliefs and practices has been enormous. No serious student of these areas can afford to ignore this influence. And translations into Chinese of Buddhist texts were a major factor in the spread of the religion in China from the very beginning. The work of translation from Sanskrit and other languages of India and Central Asia began in the 1st Century CE during the Later Han dynasty and continued for more than a thousand years. This must surely count as one of the largest scale and most remarkable cases of cultural transmission in human history. Again, no student of translation or cultural diffusion can afford to ignore it. Finally, for those interested in Buddhism itself, there is the fact that very many important texts from the Indian tradition have been preserved only in Chinese and Tibetan translations, and some only in Chinese translations. In addition, China provides a fascinating and valuable case of how the Buddha-Dharma came to be re-expressed and re-interpreted in dialogue with, and occasionally in conflict with, indigenous systems of thought and belief. In the process, new ways of conceptualizing and practicing the Dharma developed, including the rise and spread of Chan or Zen Buddhism, which now has a place in global culture.
There are, of course, many translations of Chinese Buddhist texts into European languages. But these represent only a small portion of the entire corpus. In addition, any translation is inevitably one interpretation of a source text among other possible interpretations, all constrained by the semantic system of the target language. Nothing substitutes for a detailed understanding of precisely how the source text expresses the Buddha-Dharma.
In preparing the reader we had in mind students who have had at least one year’s college level study of Chinese and will know roughly 1000 of the most common characters in the language. This does not mean that students whose level of Chinese is below this cannot use the book. They will just have to work a bit harder; specifically, they will need to spend more time looking up words in a Chinese-English dictionary. Conversely those who have studied some Classical Chinese will have to work less hard, as they will already be familiar with the very many features that the language of Buddhist Chinese texts shares with Classical Chinese.
The reader is available in paperback, hardback and ebook versions. Go to the Routledge product page.
Review of Lock and Linebarger by John Kieschnick (Stanford University)
Review by Joshua Mason in Chinese as a Second Language:
https://www.jbe-platform.com/content/journals/10.1075/csl.00007.mas