Translating Religion

What is Lost and Gained?

Michael DeJonge, Christiane Tietz, Michael DeJonge, Christiane Tietz

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781317529941
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Comparative Religion

Translating Religion advances thinking about translation as a critical category in religious studies, combining theoretical reflection about processes of translation in religion with focused case studies that are international, interdisciplinary, and interreligious. By operating with broad conceptions of both religion and translation, this volume makes clear that processes of translation, broadly construed, are everywhere in both religious life and the study of religion; at the same time, the theory and practice of translation and the advancement of translation studies as a field has developed in the context of concerns about the possibility and propriety of translating religious texts. The nature of religions as living historical traditions depends on the translation of religion from the past into the present. Interreligious dialogue and the comparative study of religion require the translation of religion from one tradition to another. Understanding the historical diffusion of the world's religions requires coming to terms with the success and failure of translating a religion from one cultural context into another. Contributors ask what it means to translate religion, both textually and conceptually, and how the translation of religious content might differ from the translation of other aspects of human culture. This volume proposes that questions on the nature of translation find particularly acute expression in the domains of religion, and argues that theoretical approaches from translation studies can be fruitfully brought to bear on contemporary religious studies.

1 Translating Dao

Cross-Cultural Translation as a Hermeneutic of Edification

Wei Zhang

Translating Daoism

What is known today as Daoism in the West is one of the traditions of ancient China, dating back to the sixth through the fifth centuries BC. The formative beginning of Daoism was associated with an individual, Laozi, and a small volume of ‘philosophical poems,’ known as the Daodejing or Laozi, named after him (though the texts were composite and are regarded as multilayered and multiauthored).

Compared to Confucianism, Daoism has proven difficult to translate, both linguistically and culturally. There are the “ineffable” dao, the ruling concepts of “nothingness” (wu), nonaction (wuwei), and the doctrine of the unity of opposites (yin and yang). Stylistically, Daoist authors were fond of using apophatic language, and culturally specific metaphoric expressions. These concepts and linguistic practices seem to resist the process of translation generally and make a literal translation impossible. Moreover, as a tradition, Daoism seems to be discontinuous. There have been no obvious dominate or representative religious institutions or orders, nor a single set of texts claiming to be authoritative among all followers of the different schools within the Daoist tradition so conceived by Western scholars. Daoism seems, then, to represent one of the most dire cases for translation, particularly if one is concerned with one-to-one meaning equivalence. Yet, if I can show that even here cultural and linguistic translation has something positive to offer, then one should see the prospects of translation more generally as positive. In fact, I do so by arguing that not only in spite of, but also because of, such seemingly insurmountable differences, such translation projects can be edifying.

History of Translating the Daodejing

As a number of sinologists have pointed out, the Daodejing, the first known Daoist classic, is the most frequently translated text of the Eastern traditions. Thus far, there have been more than two hundred translations in seventeen languages.¹ The earliest-known Western translations of the Daodejing were perhaps by Jesuit missionary scholars, who produced several Latin versions of the text in the eighteenth century.² But the missionary scholars favored Confucian texts over the Daodejing for the alleged reason that the latter was associated with obscure traditions and native superstitions. The first scholarly translations of the Daodejing were done by the French orientalist Stanislas Jullien in 1841 and the English sinologist James Legge in 1891.³

The first half of the twentieth century saw increased interest in the Daoist tradition among Western intellectuals, and the Daodejing attracted the attention of a long and impressive list of translators. The scholarly treatment and translation of the Daodejing by the German sinologist Richard Wilhelm in 1911 was followed by the translations of the orientalist Paul Carus in 1913 and the English sinologist Arthur Waley in 1934. Not only sinologists and orientalists but prominent religious scholars and philosophers tried their hand at translation as well. These included Martin Buber, C. G. Jung, and, perhaps most unlikely, Martin Heidegger, who was reported to have collaborated with a Chinese scholar to produce a translation in 1946.⁴

In the latter third of the twentieth century, archaeologists unearthed previously unknown versions of the Daodejing from a number of locales in China. This naturally began a series of new translations. Robert G. Henricks incorporated “the startling new documents found at Guodian” into his 2000 translation. Rudolf G. Wanger included the most authoritative Chinese commentator’s work, “Wang Bi’s Commentary on the Laozi,” in his 2003 effort. And Roger Ames and David Hall’s translation, featuring “the recently discovered bamboo texts,” appeared in 2003. According to Harold D. Roth, this new wave of translations created “a textual revolution,” or “textual archaeology” in the Western academic studies of Daoism.⁵

This far from exhaustive survey of translations shows that there has been a sustained, and indeed increasing, interest in translating the Daodejing. However, as we shall see, the number of translations is not indicative of the ease with which the Daodejing may be translated.

History of Translating the Term Dao

The sheer number of translations of the Daodejing may mislead one to believe that translation is not especially difficult here. In fact, this may be a manifestation of the difficulties inherent in translating this text. The heart of this difficulty may lay its central concept of the dao. In the Daodejing, a number of adjectives point to the dao’s mysterious nature; it is “subtle,” “deep,” “grand,” “empty,” and “dark.” Ultimately, we are told that the dao is the “mystery of all mysteries.”⁶ The begetter of all, dao cannot be named after what it has begotten. Ultimately, the dao resists all concepts and language. As the text states, the dao cannot be named. The “dao that can be spoken is not the real dao.” These references to the dao’s ineffability serve to warn readers of the Daodejing and practitioners of dao of the difficulties that await them. Such warnings also seem to rule out translation. If it is impossible to name the dao in the native tongue, translation into foreign languages and concepts appears utterly futile.

The concept of dao does not, however, merely challenge the linguistic practice of translation, but the cultural as well. In the Daodejing, dao is not simply described as the “beginning” of all things, or, the cosmic “mother” who engenders all. This “beginning” has since “degraded” with the advance of culture and civilization. Because of this, the text also speaks of a “return” to dao that involves undoing civilization and all that it entails, which includes learning, thinking, knowledge, and so forth. Here the concept of dao not only rejects the application of language and translation of itself but also challenges the cultural and intellectual foundations necessary for translation of any kind.

But these warnings have obviously not deterred those who would attempt to name the dao and penetrate its mysteries, both in the land of its origin and, as we have already seen, outside of it. In fact, the Western program of translation has, in effect, transformed dao into that which “can be told.”⁷ Thus, the “unnamable” dao has been given numerous names, generating a large body of literature explicating its meaning and significance. It has been rendered as “natural law,” “metaphysical reality,” “principle or pattern,” or “method” and “doctrine.” It has even been understood as something “very like God.”⁸

Perhaps the most ordinary and common translation of dao is “way.” But the reader of the Daodejing quickly discovers that it can mean the way things are (the ontological), a way of knowing (the epistemological), or a way things ought to be (the moral or ethical). Hence, it is difficult to identify dao with a single, specific path. The ambiguity of the word has given rise to a great variety of translations. A sample of translations gives a sense of the challenge facing translators as well as their creativity. Here are some translations of the first two lines of chapter one in the Daodejing:

The Tao that can be expressed is not the eternal Tao. The name that can be named is not the eternal name.⁹

The Reason that can be reasoned is not the eternal Reason. The name that can be named is not the eternal name.¹⁰

The Way that can be “way”-ed is not the constant Way. The name that can be named is not the constant Name.¹¹

A way can be a guide, but not a fixed path; names can be given, but not permanent labels.¹²

Way-making (dao) that can be put into words is not really way-making, and naming (ming) that can assign fixed reference to things is not really naming.¹³

In these translations, we see a number of strategies that were attempted to disclose different aspects of dao. Wilhelm’s translation strategy is to leave dao untranslated, as if to heed the warning of its ineffability. Note that both Wilhelm and Carus translated dao as something “eternal” (even though the Chinese adjective chang, qualifying dao, was perhaps best rendered as constant), thus associating dao with a theistic, timeless reality. Cleary chooses an indirect translation strategy, avoiding claims of what dao is in favor of what it can and cannot be. This emphasizes the function of dao, as that which leads or guides, without identifying an essence of dao.

Graham treats dao as a verb, uncovering yet another semantic dimension of the word obscured by the translation of dao as “way.” Since in the classical Chinese lexicon, “to dao” means “to speak,” Grahams’s translation actually captures the “pun” in the original verses, which indicates a paradoxical relation between the linguistic convention and the “ultimate” reality. The problem is, however, that in English there is not a ready-made word for both “way” and “speech,” and that expresses the paradoxical relation between language and reality. But Graham’s translation indeed highlights what has been obscured in the most common English translation of dao as a mere noun.

Ames and Hall’s translation continues to highlight the dynamic nature of dao. They suggest that in the classical Chinese lexicon, dao was employed as a loan word from its verbal cognate, to “lead forth” or “guide through,” specifically used in the areas of irrigation, where the verb cognate of dao means the channeling of water to the right pathway in order to divert flooding,¹⁴ and in medicine, where it refers to the guiding of proper flow of the qi or bio-energy to avert blood clots and energetic stagnation. Since the verbal form of dao originally meant to be “gerundive, processional, and dynamic,” Ames and Hall conclude that the “neologism” of dao should be “way-making.”¹⁵

Most translators would shy away from Carus’s rendering of dao as “Reason,” which harkens to the Greek word logos and thus seems to suggest an illegitimate conflation of Western metaphysics and early Chinese thought. But the resonances of logos with dao recognized by German translators of Daoist texts dispel some of these concerns. As Buber explained in his afterword to a 1910 edition of Tschung-Tse (or Zhaungzi, a Daoist classic of the fourth century BC),

The word Tao means way, path; but it also has the meaning of speech [Rede]. It has sometimes been rendered by ‘logos.’ That among Laozi and his disciples, the term Tao has always been developed metaphorically, and the linguistic atmosphere is actually related to that of the Heraclitean logos.¹⁶

Buber sensed that in the early community of Daoists, the concept of dao was being articulated in a linguistic environment similar to or parallel with that of Heraclitean where the concept logos was conceptualized. But Buber did not offer any further explanation on such a perceived linguistic parallel.

Decades later, Heidegger endorsed Buber’s use of logos for appropriating dao. He stated in his language lecture series,

The key word in Laotse’s poetic thinking is Tao, which ‘properly speaking’ means way. But because we are prone to think of ‘way” superficially, as a stretch connecting two places, our word ‘way’ has all too rashly been considered unfit to name what Tao says. Tao is then translated as reason, mind, raison, meaning, logos.¹⁷

Here Heidegger objected to the ordinary understanding of dao as a noun but ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Preface
• Introduction: Translating Religion
• 1 Translating Dao: Cross-Cultural Translation as a Hermeneutic of Edification
• 2 Historical Translation: Pseudo-Dionysius, Thomas Aquinas, and the Unknown God
• 3 Philological Limits of Translating Religion: Śraddhā and Dharma in Hindu Texts
• 4 Translating Religion between Parents and Children
• 5 Thick Translation of Religion between Cultures: The Basel Mission in Ghana
• 6 Habermas’s Call for Translating Religion into Secular Language
• 7 Does Allah Translate ‘God’? Translating Concepts between Religions
• 8 Translating Religious Symbol Systems: Some Preliminary Remarks on Christian Art in China
• Conclusion: What is Lost and Gained?
• Contributors
• Index