Japanese Vernacular Glossing Of Sinitic Buddhist Texts: Ninth Century Narrative Techniques And A Vivid Translation Of A Parable Of Self-Sacrifice

Document Type

Book Chapter

Publication Date

2024

Published In

Routledge Handbook of East Asian Translation

Abstract

The earliest examples of translation in Japanese are found in glossed Sinitic Buddhist texts rendered into the vernacular via kanbun kundoku (‘Sinitic script, vernacular reading’). This chapter explores early Heian-period (794–1185 CE) narrative techniques used in a 9th-century Japanese translation of the Golden Light Sutra’s parable of Prince Mahāsattva, who sacrificed himself to feed a starving tigress and her cubs. The Japanese glossing upon the Sinitic sutra paints an intimate tale of the hero’s literal self-sacrifice and the pain of loss felt by his bereaved family as richly depicted through careful consideration of the source text. In particular, this study focuses on the morpho-syntactic representations of tense, aspect, modality, and mirativity found in the Japanese rendition that were mostly left to context in the Sinitic source text. In examining this vivid representation of early kanbun kundoku, this chapter argues that the vernacular glosses we find on early Heian Buddhist texts are evidence of acts of translation performed to bring the fantastic and inspirational stories therein to a domestic audience who were unable to fully access the source texts in their original Chinese.

Published By

Routledge

Editor(s)

R. Meade, C. Shih, and K. H. Kim

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