L’Hymnaire manichéen chinois Xiabuzan 下部讚 à l’usage des Auditeurs: Un manuscrit trouvé à Dunhuang, traduit, commenté et annoté by Lucie Rault (review)

This book presents the first French translation of the complete collection of twenty-five Manichaean hymns and prayers in Chinese commonly known as the “Hymn-scroll.” The scroll dates to the Tang dynasty and was among the numerous manuscripts recovered by Marc Aurel Stein from the Mogao “library cave” at Dunhuang in the early years of the twentieth century and is today kept in the British Library (S. 2659). Apparently, Paul Pelliot intended to produce a French translation back in the 1920s, but, as explained by Tsui Chi (Cui Ji) in the foreword to his English translation of the Hymn-scroll (Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies 11 [1943]), he was “so occupied with other work” that he had to pass the task on to Ernst Waldschmidt and Wolfgang Lentz, who then translated some of the hymns into German (published in 1926 and 1933).

The title of the Hymn-scroll is short and simple: Xiabuzan yijuan 下部讚一卷, which literally translates as “Lower Section Hymns, One Scroll.” The translation is included in Tsui Chi’s “The Lower (Second?) Section of the Manichaean Hymns” and also in Helwig Schmidt-Glintzer’s German translation of the full collection, “Die untere Abteilung der Manichäischen Hymnen, ein Buch” (Chinese Manichaica [Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 1987]). Rault adheres to a more recently proposed alternative interpretation: hymns for (the use of) the Hearers, i.e., the lower section or category of the Manichaean community. Support for this may be found in another well-preserved Chinese Manichaean text from Dunhuang, the Sermon on the Light-Nous (kept in the National Library of China) or, as it is often called (in lack of a title), the “Traité manichéen”—this with reference to the French translation by Édouard Chavannes and Pelliot published in 1911. It has not been mentioned previously, and Rault does not refer to either, but the Chinese Sermon on the Light-Nous contains a sentence in which the word bu 部 appears to be used for categories of believers: “The gods and the good spirits, the limited and the unlimited, all the kings, the multitude of magnates, and the four categories of men and women, infinite and countless, having heard this holy text, were all overjoyed” (諸天善神, 有㝵无㝵, 及諸國王、群臣、士女四部之眾, 无量无數, 聞是經已, 皆大歡喜; cols. 317–18 of the scroll). The four categories of men and women are those of male and female Elect and male and female Hearers. The latter two categories form together the xiabu “lower category.” A four-fold division of believers is also found in the Buddhist monastic order: monks, nuns, laymen, laywomen.

Rault argues that the translator of the Xiabuzan, Daoming “Light of the Way,” is a “bouddhiste de formation.” That may well be true. The texts teem with Buddhist terminology and perhaps more so than one would expect in a collection of hymns for liturgical use of Manichaean communities in China. Rault admirably translates most Buddhist loanwords directly, not interpretatively, or gives Chinese transcriptions of the Sanskrit terms, or the Sanskrit only. The lack of consistency is a problem though. Why render foxing 佛性 (buddha-nature) as “Nature du Buddha” (col. 10) and “nature bouddhique originelle” (col. 39) when faxing 法性 (dharma-nature) is translated “être transcendant” (cols. 56–59)? And why give Chinese transliterations of some Sanskrit terms (e.g., luosha 羅剎, yecha 夜叉, niepan 涅槃), translations in other cases (e.g., Mowang 魔王 “le roi Démon”), or Sanskrit directly (e.g., kalpa, cols. 33, 40; nirvāna, col. 224; karma, cols. 225, 233)?

Rault states in the introduction that “Tout comme la poésie, la religion abonde en symboles abstraits. Une traduction littérale pourrait être dénuée de sens et même inexacte” (30). But the problem is that this means that the translation in places becomes inaccurate or inconsistent, or it becomes more elaborate as, for instance, in col. 137 where the two-character name Huiming 惠明 is “translated...