I'm sitting at Chicago O'Hare Airport waiting for a flight to the edge of civilization. Actually it's a flight to LaCrosse, Wisconsin, where I will be picked up and driven to the edge of civilization. Tomorrow is the first day of the 2009 Great Sky Sesshin in Hokyoji monastery near Echizen, Minnesota. For the next eight days or so I will be inaccessible to Internet, cell phone and most other forms of communication with the outside world.
I heard that some people are deeply concerned about the forthcoming translation of Nagarjuna's Fundamental Wisdom of the Middle Way (aka MMK) by Gudo Nishijima as rewritten by me. That's so cute! You guys are funny!
When you look at Gudo's blog, what you're seeing is pretty much the raw material I had to work with. The book that's coming out from Monkfish is not that version. I had to have a lot of discussions with Nishijima Roshi, as well as sit around scratching my head and puzzling over his prose for many, many hours before arriving at the version we're publishing. Please don't worry your poor fevered brows that it's going to be a big long string of crazy Engrish. It won't. Haven't I said this about three times already?
I may publish the intro I wrote sometime prior to the book's release. But I'd need to get clear with Nishijima Roshi and the folks at Monk Fish before I do that. Translation is a funny thing. I used to be a translator and there is no way to translate even the most dirt simple stuff without interjecting your own interpretation. In fact the word "translation" is probably misleading. I don't think there is any such thing. It's all interpretation.
In the world of religious texts, one really good example is Baghavad Gita: As It Is by AC Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada. This is reportedly the most widely read translation of Bhagavad Gita in the world. Yet it is a highly interpretive version of the text.
Still, who is to say it doesn't mean what Prabhupada said it meant? It certainly meant that to him.
I was personally very interested in discovering what Nagarjuna's Fundamental Wisdom of the Middle Way meant to Nishijima Roshi. I made it my task to try and convey the meaning he found in the text as clearly as I possibly could. If you want a standard interpretation that follows all of the established patterns, assumptions and prejudices of Sanskrit scholarship, there are other versions available. I see no reason that there ought to be one more of those. They do not interest me.
Whether the Nishijima version of Nagajuna's masterwork is "correct" in the eyes of the Sanskrit scholarship community is just not something I can even bring myself to care about. People keep trying to get me to care, though. And I swear to God I really have tried. Maybe I'm kind of retarded or autistic or something in that way. It's like when I used to tell the folks I mentored at the Summit County Board of Mental Retardation to zip up their pants or whatever and they just couldn't see the point at all. That's how I am. It's no use trying to get me to care because I just don't.
The big difference between Nishijima Roshi's MMK and the others I've read is that, once I got through all the Engrish, the Nishijima version actually spoke to me. The others did not. They were intermittently interesting and contained the occasional good idea. But they didn't move me. This one does.
Blah-blah-blah... Now even I'm getting bored with this discussion!
So anyway, after I get done in the backwoods of Minnesota I'm flying straight to Frankfurt, Germany (via Chicago again). After just under a week in Frankfurt I'm off to Finland. Then back to Germany. Then to England, and then to Japan. Yikes!
This will definitely be my last post for a week or so. Maybe longer than that. But I'll report here whenever I can.
