ShantidevaRecensioner

Translated by Kate Crosby and Andrew Skilton; copyright 1995
From Translators' Introduction:

"Santideva was a medieval Indian Buddhist monk, who wrote for the benefit of his contemporaries and colleagues. To translate his work presents a number of challenges and problems to the modern translator. The intention of the present translators has been to produce a prose translation into standard British English, which will be accessible to the ordinary reader. Our emphasis has been upon accuracy and clarity, attempting to give, where possible, a literal representation of Santideva's text, so long as this is compatible with the canons of standard English usage. We have tried to eschew the clumsy and opaque hybrids which Sanskrit often generates in English, although the technical language of Indian Buddhism which the author employed has often stretched our determination....

"One topical translation problem revolves around the issue of gender. Our policy has been to translate Santideva with the minimum of interpretation. It remains an unavoidable fact that he wrote the BODHICARYAVATARA for a monastic audience which without doubt would have been predominantly male, if not exclusively so.... For example, sexual craving and attachment is understood entirely in terms of that of a man for a woman (e.g. 8.41 ff.) There could be little justification for translators to change this, unless they were offering an exegesis of the work for the benefit of practising Buddhists, whereby it would be very important to explain that such attachment is seen as a danger to both men and women, regardless of Santideva's specific audience or the traditional social status of women. More pertinently, we are confronted by the problem of the gender of the listener addressed throughout the poem. In Sanskrit the masculine gender is regarded as inclusive or universal. It may refer to males only or to males and females inclusively, whereas feminine grammatical form refers only to females. Here, the author uses the masculine gender alone. Given this, and that men were probably in the majority in his audience, we have translated accordingly. However, whenever no gender is specified we have attempted to render the sentence into gender-neutral English, for we are both convinced that Santideva's message is, and should appear, as applicable to women as it is to men." pp. xxxv-xxxvi

translated from the Tibetan by the Padmakara Translation Group; revised translation copyright 2006
From Preface to the Revised Edition:

"When the first edition of THE WAY OF THE BODHISATTVA was published in 1997, it was stated that the commentary the Nyingma master Khenpo Kunzang Pelden (1872-1943) had been consulted for the elucidation of difficult passages. At the time, a translation into English of that long and important work was no more than a pious dream. Now, after a wait of almost ten years and many intervening projects, this task has been completed; and the careful reading and study of the text that it involved prompted us to revisit and overhaul our original version of THE WAY OF THE BODHISATTVA, correcting errors and, where possible, making it a tauter, more literal, reflection of the Tibetan original. We hope that we have been able to rectify the perhaps undue freedom of expression in the earlier rendering that led some of its readers to question its accuracy, while at the same time maintaining and improving on the stylistic features that others found attractive." pg. xi

".... The Sanskrit transmission of the BODHICHARYAVATARA ... was interrupted and lost in the calamities that engulfed Indian Buddhism in the twelfth century. By consequence, the oral transmission and explanatory lineage of Shantideva's teaching exist only in Tibetan and for obvious reasons cannot be resurrected from the Sanskrit relics." pg. xv

"The translation of the BODHICHARYAVATARA into verse, or rather rhythmic prose is an attempt to come to terms with this difficulty [of literal vs. aesthetic renderings]. The result is a kind of blank verse (sometimes very blank) that can rarely claim the status of poetry and might best be described as a literary experiment. Its purpose is to provide a vehicle that, by being not altogether unpleasant, might contribute positively to the expression and propagation of Shantideva's teaching." pg xvii

Translation by Vesna A. Wallace and B. Alan Wallace; copyright 1997.
From the Introduction:
"Although the BODHICARYAVATARA has already been translated several times into English, earlier translations have been based exclusively on either Sanskrit versions or Tibetan translations. To the best of our knowledge, no earlier translation into English, including the recent translation by Kate Crosby and Andrew Skilton, has drawn from both the Sanskrit version and its authoritative Sanskrit commentary of Prajnakarmati as well as Tibetan translations and commentaries. Our present translation is based on two Sanskrit editions, namely, Louis de la Vallee Poussin's edition (1901) ... and P.L. Vaidya's edition (1960) ...; and it is also based the Tibetan Derge edition, entitled the BODHISATTVA-CARYAVATARA translated by by Sarvajnadeva and dPalbrtsegs. We have also consulted two Tibetan commentaries to this work.... [P]ronouncements concerning which of the extant Sanskrit and Tibetan versions is truer to the original appear to be highly speculative, with very little basis in historical fact. This translation attempts to let these versions speak for themselves - as closely as the English allows - leaving our readers to make their own judgments concerning the degree of antiquity, authenticity, and overall coherence of the Sanskrit and Tibetan renditions of Santideva's classic treatise."
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