Coming to Terms with Chinese Buddhism: A Reading of the Treasure Store Treatise

Introduction to the Translation

Introduction to Translation 137 Introduction to the Translation The Treasure Store Treatise belongs to a loosely defined genre of Chinese literature known as lun
(essay, disquisition), a genre that affords the author considerable latitude in matters of compositional structure and style. Early Chinese literary critics agree that a lun should be “refined” or “subtle” (ching-wei
), and “logical” or “reasonable” (li
) but offer little more.1 As I suggested in Chapter 1, the Treasure Store Treatise appears to have been composed self-consciously in the style of Buddhist treatises of the Six Dynasties period, evoking the “mystical” tone of dark-learning authors like Wang Pi (226–249) as well as early Chinese Buddhist essayists such as Seng-chao, and there are copious allusions to the works that preoccupied such writers, notably the Tao-te ching and the Chuang-tzu. As is typical of Chinese literary prose, the Treasure Store Treatise makes liberal use of parallelism, including metrical, grammatical (lexical and syntactic), and phonic parallel constructions. The text also abounds in puns, rhymes, assonance, alliteration, and other euphonic devices. Such devices seem designed, at least in part, to display the author’s erudition and literary virtuosity. However, the parallelism of the Treasure Store Treatise is not nearly as regulated or structured as “parallel prose” proper (p’ien-t’i wen
 ),2 and the phrasing of the Treasure Store Treatise is generally four characters in length. Such phrasing results in an imposing thumpity-thump that might well seem tiresome, if not cloying, to those familiar with more sophisticated genres of T’ang literature. The monotony of the four-character phrasing is broken by the occasional transitional particle such as fu
(marking a change in topic), ku
(“therefore”), or shih-i
 (“hence”). The overall effect is reminiscent of a number of early Ch’an works, notably the verse composi137 138 Treasure Store Treatise tions associated with the Ox Head lineage—the Hsin-wang ming, Hsin ming, Hsin-hsin ming, and so on—discussed in Chapter 1. By the T’ang, the four-character poetic form was falling out of favor, having been supplanted by verse in lines of five or seven characters. The dominant use of four-character phrasing in these early Ch’an texts gives them an antiquated tone, lending them the authority of age. It also renders the task of translation particularly difficult, as the shorter phrases allow for fewer grammatical or syntactic markers. The Treasure Store Treatise alludes to a wide variety of works through the use of readily identifiable terminology, tropes, and even syntactic structures. As the text progresses, there is an increased use of scriptural quotation to punctuate and bolster the argument. Most of the identifiable quotations are culled from Buddhist s^tras popular in eighth-century China, although the sources are never explicitly named. The concise and laconic compositional style, the frequent use of parallel four-character lines without connectives, and the many textual allusions result in a complex and multilayered text that is, at times, well-nigh impenetrable. In translating the text I have adopted the principle of charity: I assume the Treasure Store Treatise to be meaningful and coherent. One might offer an aesthetic or moral defense for this stance, but I prefer a functional one: it is simply unavoidable, since incoherence is, in a word, incoherent. At the same time, there is no avoiding the difficulties encountered in the attempt to uncover the context in which such coherence must be situated. This raises a host of hermeneutic issues, including the cross-cultural application of standards for “coherence” or “rationality,” that I will resist exploring here. Certainly, there is reason to believe that the audience of a medieval Chinese Buddhist composition would have judged the text’s success according to criteria that today’s Western reader might find perplexing, if not flawed. The Chinese, as many have noted, do not always place as much value as we might on logical rigor in the abstract Aristotelian sense. At the same time, a Chinese reader might laud the literary elegance and persuasive force of an argument by analogy that a modern philosopher would castigate as spurious or sophistic.3 In a similar vein, one must remember that not every statement in a Chinese essay or lun is meant to be an assertion, whether ethical, soteriological, or philosophical. Language functions in many ways, not all of which are pleasing to logicians. Richard Robinson has characterized the rhetorical mode dominant in Chinese San...