Chinese is a language that leaves a great deal understood and implied - it does not lock an expression into an explicit structure. And I can certainly understand the point of not being able to fully reproduce the explicit grammar of Indic languages. But the overall implication is that this is somehow the reason Chinese Buddhism "went off the rails." (Which is loaded enough an assertion in the first place.) And that is where the conversation goes off the rails. It is not necessary to have "perfect grammar" or absolute explicitness to teach Dharma. The example of shen is instructive enough. I have hardly ever seen in used as it is discussed in the synopsis I quoted. In fact, it is typically used for atman, the heretical concept to Buddhists. The character used for self is wo. Thus, I naturally assumed the real argument there was the True Self discourse that arose from the Tathagata-garbha texts that Chinese Buddhism adopted as central doctrines early on.Ben Yuan wrote:Dharmakāya is not an agent, thus it is also not an underlying perceiver.Texts like the Mahaparinirvana-sutra clearly had the ideas of a permanent, transcendent self - styled as the dharmakaya - in them prior to arriving in China.
A transcendent self has no aggregates, including consciousness.
It is an ocean, not a stream.
It is a description of the ends, which can't be retroactively applied to all consciousness or perception without also stating that there is no consciousness or perception anymore, i.e. cleansed. This is not what Park is discussing, though certainly "consciousness" as the subject of rebirth 'did' exist in Indian thought - albeit to a lesser extent in Buddhism than one finds in Chinese translations.It seems obvious that you would have to lose a lot of subtleties and the majesty and beauty when you translate from Sanskrit into Chinese, perhaps to a lesser extent when you translate into English also.it hasn't much to do with some poor early translations or the lack of a highly structured grammar akin to Indic languages ...
Thus, the question of the existence of the self, in terms of translations, is not the biggest issue. Which, due to Chinese grammar, is more or less inherent to the nature of the task itself, when, as Malcolm and others point out, is less evident in translation to Tibetan or English. This is broader than what Park was discussing however, as far as I can see.
Charlie.