What a reader is holding here is English made from Chinese made from Sanskrit, and Beal states the chain in his first paragraphs rather than leaving it to be discovered. The Chinese version is Dharmaraksha's, of about 420 A.D.; the original is Asvaghosha's Sanskrit life of the Buddha. Beal did not collate the two: "The original Sanskrit, I am told, differs considerably from the Chinese translation, and except in the restoration of proper names ... the assistance derived from it has been very little." I AM TOLD. He is reporting, not asserting, and he marks which it is.
The Fo-sho-hing-tsan-king: A Life of Buddha — SBE Vol. 19 (trans. Samuel Beal, 1883)
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The translator’s English as printed (Samuel Beal). The original-language text is not held; names are romanised as the translator printed them.
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THE
SACRED BOOKS OF THE EAST
TRANSLATED
BY VARIOUS ORIENTAL SCHOLARS
AND EDITED BY
F. MAX MULLER
VOL. XIX
@rford "AT THE CLARENDON PRESS
p. 1883
[ AM rights reserved | as 3
THE
FO-SHO-HING-TSAN-KING
A LIFE OF BUDDHA
BY
ASVAGHOSHA BODHISATTVA
TRANSLATED FROM SANSKRIT INTO CHINESE
BY
p. 420
AND FROM CHINESE INTO ENGLISH
BY
SAMUEL BEAL artes wor ‘
UNiV, feos ‘TY
4 z rw y o&
@rford
AT THE CLARENDON PRESS
p. 1883
[AM rights reserved }
™ ,
CONTENTS.
INTRODUCTION . . . . .
Rw A
Oona
10.
11.
12.
13.
14.
15,
16.
17.
18.
19,
BOOK I.
_The Birth. . . . ..
Living in the Palace .
. Disgust at Sorrow . Putting away Desire . . Leaving the City
BOOK II.
. The Return of Xhandaka . . . Entering the Place (Wood) of Austerities . . The General Grief of the Palace
. The Mission to seek the Prince
BOOK III.
Bimbisfra Raga invites the Prince
The Reply to Bimbiséra Raga
Visit to Arada Udrarima .
Defeats Mara
O-wei-san-pou-ti (Abhisambodhi)
Turning the Law-wheel
BOOK IV.
Bimbiséra R4ga becomes a Disciple .
The Great Disciple becomes a Hermit :
Conversion of the ‘Supporter of the Orphans and
Destitute’ (Anâthapindada) . . .
Interview between Father and Son
PAGE ix
20
29
38
47
59
40
81
94
III
11g
131
147
156
168
180
192
He then names the physical conditions of the work, which is the kind of detail that usually goes unrecorded and always matters: this is "a first translation of a text comprising nearly 10,000 lines of poetry, printed in the original without stops or notes of any sort, and in a difficult style of Chinese composition." Unpunctuated. Where a sentence ends is itself part of what he had to decide, and every English full stop in this volume is his.
Having said the Sanskrit helped him little, he does not leave the reader to take that on trust. The back matter carries a "Comparative List of 17 Chapters of the Sanskrit and Chinese Copies of the Buddhakarita" and an "Example of the Style of the Expanded Sûtras, as translated into Chinese." He prints the means of checking the divergence he has just warned about — apparatus offered against his own text.
AND THEN THE APPENDIX THIS ARCHIVE SHOULD HAVE READ FIRST. Beal closes the volume with a note titled "The same Title given to different Works." In 1883 he treated it as a standing hazard of Buddhist bibliography — one name, several books, and nothing in a catalogue to say which you have. This is the single most productive defect class in this collection: the Sacred Books run met a hole at volume 38 because that volume was filed as its own work; Plato title-records shadowed the real Timaeus; SBE 15 and 49 were reported as an acquisition gap while held under other keys; six reader issues were built from a truncated numeric key. Eight rediscoveries of a hazard a translator had already tabulated for us.
His account of how the schools divided is worth reading beside the Vinaya volumes, because he assembles it from two traditions that disagree. He quotes the Ceylonese Dîpavamsa on the schism at Vaisâlî a century after the Nirvâna — the excommunicated Vaggiputtakas who "gained another party" and held a rival council — and sets against it the Mahâsanghika Vinaya as Fa-hien brought it from Pâtaliputra and rendered it into Chinese around 420 A.D. A Pali chronicle from Ceylon and a Chinese translation of the other side's own rulebook, on the same event.
He is also candid that the division he works with is a modern construct and a recent one: "This term is now well recognised" — Northern Buddhism, meaning Nepal, Tibet, China, Japan and Mongolia as against Ceylon, Burma and Siam. He names it as a term of art in the act of using it, which is more than most of the categories a reader meets in this series get.