![]() Prior research results suggest that it is difficult to evaluate the credibility and validity of the translations because of the uncertainties related to the origin of the text. By comparing their chaptering, chapter titles, transliteration of Buddhist terminology, translation of the passage, punctuation, linguistic expressions, and missing parts in each edition, this analysis unveils the intra- and inter-differences between the Chinese and English renditions. The former three English translations were mainly based on Kumārajīva’s edition and the latter two on the Tibetan copy, illustrating a three-tier translation hierarchy in which the Chinese translations represent the first-tier, being directly translated from the Sanskrit original(s) the English renditions represent the second-tier, stemming from either Kumārajīva’s or the Tibetan edition and with the third-tier represented by Boin’s translation of Lamotte’s French copy into English. This study tabulates the three full classical Chinese translations and five English editions, among which are included in the Chinese renditions the works of Zhi Qian (the third century A.D.), Kumārajīva (the fifth century A.D.), and Xuan Zang (the seventh century A.D.) and the English versions translated by Luk, Watson, McRae, Lamotte/Boin, and Thurman between the 1970s and the 2000s. ![]() The aims of the current research are as follows: first, review the challenges of rendering Buddhist texts into Chinese and English through the study of the passage “the dharma of emancipation of the exhaustible and inexhaustible”, as articulated in the Vimalakīrti Nirdeśa Sūtra and second, discuss the scholarly argument by which these Chinese and English translations could have originated from different Sanskrit or Tibetan editions. Because this early presentation of Buddhism exists only in Latin, I have inserted excerpts that I have translated. ![]() These two notions of superstition and atheism seem contradictory, but in fact, they are derived from Intorcetta’s interpretation of the Buddhist theory of the “two truths.” I shall conclude with an evaluation of Intorcetta’s account. Then, I shall examine Intorcetta’s presentation of Chinese Buddhism, especially his understanding of the two faces of Buddhism: Pure Land Buddhism, which he categorized as superstition, and Chan Buddhism, categorized as atheism. In the first part of this study, I shall introduce the background of the Jesuit encounter with Buddhism, first in Japan and then in China, as well as their literary production on the subject. This text was later edited by the Flemish Jesuit Philippe Couplet (1623-1693) and published in Paris in 1687, within an encyclopedia on Chinese thought, entitled the Confucius Sinarum Philosophus (The Chinese Philosopher Confucius, thereafter called CSP). I propose here to examine a presentation of Buddhism written in Guangzhou by the Italian Jesuit Prospero Intorcetta (1626-1696), around the year 1668. They gradually came to understand that a common religious tradition connected the different brands of Buddhism found in Sri Lanka, Thailand, Japan and China. When the Europeans first came to Asia, they met with the multiform presence of Buddhism. The evolution of its representations, as the result of a search for ‘God’ when defining a religion, is analyzed from the historical point of view which reengages the translations in the cultural controversies during the period when the discovery of the Orient was used to both challenge and defend the European conscience. Through an analysis of vocabulary, style and interpretation of the translations, it shows that the image of Buddhism represented in these translations has changed from a monotheism, to a pantheism, a nihilism and a panpsychism. The present study is a historical and textual research of its four consecutive French translations from the eighteenth to the nineteenth century, respectively translated by Joseph de Guignes (1721–1800), Joseph Gabet (1808–1853) and Évariste Huc (1813–1860), Léon Feer (1830–1902), and Charles de Harlez (1832–1899). ![]() However, despite its importance, its French translations have never been studied systematically. Interestingly, after more than a millennium, its French translation also became the rst integral translation of a Buddhist sūtra published in western language. The Sutra of Forty-two Chapters (Sishi’er zhang jing 四十二章經) is traditionally considered to be the rst Buddhist sūtra translated into Chinese.
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