Malcolm wrote: ↑Wed Nov 14, 2018 4:33 pm
The main thing you fail to explain, in fact, is how all these highly skilled Indian Panditas were unable to detect that the text before them was spurious, great paṇḍitas such as Śṛī Siṃhaprabha, his disciple, Vimalamitra, and so on. If one is to take your contention seriously, one has to assume that between whatever date you assign in the mid-7th century for the composition of this text in China, it needed to make its way back to India, where it was enthusiastically received as authentic by the Vajrayāna community in India no later than the mid 8th century, and from there transmitted to Tibet. One must assume their Sanskrit and expertise in their own literature was superior to yours.
You are right this is weird. And I
cannot explain it. And I am happy to stipulate that many people with better skills and more intelligence have preceded me in this field. I am an unlikely person to be in this role.
There's no short version of this story, so if you will indulge me, let me relate how I got into this line of research after some years of being focussed on early Buddhism.
I was independently reading and publishing research on Pāḷi texts for some years when a colleague of mine audited the intro to Sanskrit class at Cambridge University and suggested I do the same. So in 2009 I started the course, but my health packed up and I had to drop out after two terms. In 2012, I asked if I could do it again and they said yes. This time I completed two years of
intensive Sanskrit study. I was drilled very rigorously in how to parse a Sanskrit sentence by Vincenzo Vergiani (for which I am very grateful!)
The first text I thought to read outside class was the Heart Sutra. I had been chanting it in English regularly for many years and I had even learned and chanted it in Sanskrit every day for 4 months on my ordination retreat, in 2005. It is the most popular Mahāyāna text and there are at least 60 published translations. So I figured that I could hardly go wrong.
But I was surprised to find that I could not parse the first long sentence (it has three clauses) according to the rigour I had learned from Vincenzo. And I could not see the logic of Conze's translation. Of course I assumed that it was my error. Perhaps Sanskrit was very much more difficult that Pali or I had not absorbed sufficient experience of real-life Sanskrit to read independently? I kept worrying at it, and managed to translate most of the rest of the text (or so I thought). I worked on other texts for a while.
At the time I was studying, Vincenzo was running a major project to catalogue and photograph
Sanskrit manuscripts in the Cambridge University Library. I knew that four of Conze's sources for his edition were included in the collection, so I got permission to look at them. I spent a couple of weeks transcribing the manuscripts - from Lantsa, Modern Nepalese (2), and 13th C Nepalese Hooked Script. And I tracked down most of Conze's other sources and transcribed them - including the famous Hōryūji Manuscript. I had to learn about 7 or 8 different Indian scripts on top of Devanāgarī and Japanese Siddham which I already knew.
My transcriptions and other primary resources are online along with other primary research material.
I worked through the manuscripts and I noticed something that suddenly made sense of it. Conze had
pañcaskandhās in the nominative plural, leaving
vyavalokayati sma as an intransitive verb which he translated as "looks down". This did not make sense. But In some of the manuscripts the word was
pañcaskandhāṃṣ in the accusative plural. A simple matter of a missing anusvara. The verb was, in fact, transitive and
pañcaskandhāṃṣ was the object. When I looked into it I discovered that
vyava√lok means "examine". So now instead of an unparsable mess, I had Avalokiteśvara examining the five skandhas and seeing that they lacked svabhāva.
I worked through all of the Chinese texts, and even through the canonical Tibetan, with help from Jan Nattier and Jonathan Silk who kindly responded to my unsolicited emails.
I wrote it all up. I had several Sanskrit experts read and critique it. And it was published in 2015 after getting through peer review where three more experts did their best to find fault (it was quite a difficult process on this occasion).
A complex of grammatical simple but vitally important errors have been present in the Sanskrit Heart Sutra since Conze edited it 1948. Note that these are errors
introduced by Conze. He revised his text in 1967 and did not notice that it did not make sense. In between 1948 and 2015 some of the greatest scholars of Sanskrit and/or Mahāyana Buddhism examined, studied, and importantly translated the text without noticing that it did not make sense (including Jan Nattier!). It would not surprise me in the least if people continued to pretend to translate Conze's text without noticing or fixing the error.
I had no thoughts even then of continuing to criticise the text, but I found another major error which I partially corrected in print earlier this year and will complete early next year. I then began to look more closely at Nattier's work once more, closely reading her article and all of the footnotes. I started take the Heart Sutra text apart word by word. Although I did not read it until a couple of years later, in 2014 Matthew Orsborn (writing as Huifeng) had already published some examples of ancient mistranslation in the Chinese Heart Sutra and this turned out to be decisive in understanding what the text is talking about.
So when you ask, "how could those ancient experts not see that something was amiss?" I can only shrug and say
I don't know. I only know that
it happens all the time and
no one notices. And frankly, the implications of this are
absolutely staggering .
At a minimum there are currently no trustworthy English translations of the Heart Sutra in existence. Translations from Chinese are slightly more reliable, but are still problematic (because of Matthew's work). The whole enterprise of commentary on the text is called into question and this goes right back to Kuījī and Woncheuk (something Lusthaus fails to notice).
The good news is that when you correct all the mistakes the text makes a great deal more sense and provides a fascinating way into a style of practice that was once very important though it has long since disappeared, i.e.
anupalambghayoga, "the yoga of nonapprehension".