A rare antique kammavaca (Buddhist Pali manuscript) currently offered in our gallery was recently featured in the fall edition of the well known Canadian based quarterly magazine, Buddhadharma. The article titled, Milestones – Exploring Buddhist Translation Today, discusses the historical and ongoing work of translating the Pali canon, as well as the many subsequent Buddhist texts from the Mahayana Buddhist tradition so that they are preserved and made available for study today and for future generations of seekers.
In the countries where Buddhism first spread, namely, Sri Lanka, China, and Tibet, the translator’s role was extremely important and highly honored. An error in translation could lead to a missed clue of vital importance about the nature of consciousness. To do justice to the work was to perform an act of great merit, for if it facilitated the awakening of even one being, the existence of the text was priceless. “The Tibetan word for translator is lotsawa, meaning cosmic-eye.”
The article notes that, “Forty years ago, Buddhist books in English were hard to find, and today there are probably more translations than most of us can read in one lifetime.” Fellow of the Tsadra Foundation, Sarah Harding makes the comment, “Until about 2000, many translation efforts were random, and often began when a lama asked for a text in his lineage to be translated or when academics would find good PhD projects to undertake. Now a number of organizations are working in a more cohesive fashion. Because of the massive volume of some anthologies, a number of translations today are only published digitally. Technology has changed translation tremendously, just in terms of time and the ability to look something up quickly (on the internet) without flipping through giant pages of text.”
Griffith Foulk, co-editor-in-chief of the Soto Zen Text Project expresses concern that, “we’re building digital canons; they’re so easy to access that they’ve become almost the only thing people look at. There is a danger that what isn’t input digitally will fall by the wayside and be ignored. Then, when everything exists on the cloud, civilization will pull the plug on the whole thing and it will go poof!”
Also calling into question the wisdom of relying too much on the fickle longevity of digitally preserved documents is Bhikkhu Bodhi, “There are older Pali texts preserved in the form of palm-leaf manuscripts…..across Sri Lanka, Burma, and Thailand. In these tropical countries, the manuscripts tend to decay…Now that they’re no longer being copied, what’s coming to pass is that the electronic edition becomes the single authoritative version of the text; variant readings preserved in these palm-leaf manuscripts will likely be lost.”
Below is a collection of rare antique Buddhist manuscripts and manuscript pages offered in our gallery – click on the image for more information. Please contact us at info@sabaidesignsgallery.com to inquire about any of these artifacts.
