New reader in Chinese Buddhist Texts

[Gralock]

I'd like to draw the attention to anyone interested in reading Chinese Buddhist texts to Chinese Buddhist Texts: An Introductory Reader by Lock & Linebarger, just published by Routledge. Additional resources are also being developed and made available on my website at  lockgraham.com. The website also has a forum where you can ask questions and also maybe tell us what you think of the book, point out any mistakes and suggest any Improvements (if we are lucky enough to make it to a second edition!). Thanks.

[somethingfunny]

Sounds interesting.  I never really understand what people mean by "A Reader", because I think different people mean different things.  

 

I see this description on the Routledge page:

 

"This reader aims to help students develop familiarity with features of Buddhist texts in Chinese, including patterns of organization, grammatical features and specialized vocabulary. It also aims to familiarize students with the use of a range of resources necessary for becoming independent readers of such texts."

 

But I'd like to know how exactly the reader helps students develop this familiarity.  Are there translations?  Exercises?

 

Can we see some sample pages?  Like, for example, unit eight is on The Platform Sutra.  That's a long text, with vastly different styles in different sections.  Have you pulled out a couple of sections to use which illustrate the overall style of the text?  Or do you provide a summary of what the whole text is about?

 

I guess your main market will be universities, but if I thought it looked good, I might be interested.  How did you develop the materials?  Are there any other Buddhist/Classical Chinese books you would compare it to?

 

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Edit: I see there is some sample text on the Routledge page.  Looks like translations and vocab lists.  I assume there's a bit more to it than this?

 

Ah, I'm going to have to make a bit more of this extra edit section.  I just had a quick look through some of the translations (or "gloss") and I think we're going to need some explaining.

 

For example, you provide the following:

无无明亦无无明尽

lack ignorance also lack ignorance exhaust

 

So, what's going on here then?  Do you explain what this line actually means at some other point?  Because "lack ignorance also lack ignorance exhaust" isn't really doing it for me.

[Gralock]

Thanks for taking the trouble to check the book out. I think the problem with the preview is that most of the pages are from the Orientation section so you don't get a whole unit to evaluate. So let me explain the format of the units. Each unit has just three short extracts from each text. I agree that given the length of some of the texts, three extracts is really not much more than a taste, but we felt that in an introductory reader it would be better to provide a 'taste' of a range of different texts in different genres, rather than focus on just one or two sutras throughout the whole book. Under each extract, the text is given again together with pinyin romanization and a word by word gloss. The gloss is intended as a 'prop' to help students to  see how the text works and to begin to work out the meaning for themselves. It is explained that a gloss just gives one of many possible meanings of a word, and contains no grammatical information such as suffixes showing tense, word class, number etc. (this 'prop' is in fact removed in the later units). The vocabulary lists give more information about the meanings and word classes of the words in the text, and notes explain any parts of the text that may be difficult to understand , that refer to Buddhist concepts or that contain grammatical features students may not be familiar with. We deliberately do not provide translations for the whole of each extract because we felt firstly that we didn't want to give the impression that there could be only one way of translating a text, and secondly because if instructors use it as a course book they might want to ask students to translate the texts themselves.

I hope this makes things a bit clearer - but I also hope I am not being too defensive. Please do continue to comment critically wherever you think it necessary. Apart from anything else, it'll help us develop some resources on the website  to support users of the book. Maybe I should also make a complete unit available somewhere.

[somethingfunny]

Not at all - defensive is what I want you to be, you did after all write the book!  Of course, my questions might seem a bit aggressive, but it's difficult to get a good idea of a book without holding it in your hand and flicking through it.

 

I think you're right in saying that a preview from the Orientation section is not that helpful.  A whole unit might not even be necessary, just enough to get an idea of how the book works.  For example, you can get quite a lot of Rouzer's "New Practical Primer in Literary Chinese" in pdf form, but even just the brief section in this post indicates how an independent learner might use the book.  I guess that's what I'm trying to understand really - texts, glosses and vocab lists are great if they're being used in a classroom setup, but you say that this book is also suitable for the independent learner.

 

I'd also be interested in how much discussion of background there is.  Something like 知命者不怨天，知己者不怨人。Doesn't really require me to know a great deal about ancient Chinese philosophy to understand.  However, 无无明亦无无明尽 is not only technically more complicated, but has multiple layers of complex, non-intuitive Chan Buddhist philosophy wrapped up in it.  So, for example, if you take The Platform Sutra (sorry, it's one of the only Buddhist texts I've read some of), if your excerpt is something like:

 

時，有一客買柴，使令送至客店；客收去，惠能得錢，却出門外，見一客誦經。惠能一聞經語，心即開悟，遂問：客誦何經？客曰：《金剛經》。

 

Then I can see it being pretty straightforward.  However, if your excerpt is something like:

 

菩提本無樹，明鏡亦非臺

本來無一物，何處惹塵埃？

 

Then there will probably need to be some more discussion, not just of the grammar, but the greater significance with respect to Buddhist philosophy.  Most of the notes in the preview available refer to grammatical issues.  Is this indicative of the rest of the book?

[somethingfunny]

I guess it would be helpful if you could tell me what I can get from your book that I can't get for free from here:

 

https://religiousstudies.stanford.edu/people/john-kieschnick/primer-chinese-buddhist-writings

[Gralock]

You have put your finger on an important issue that Gary (the co-author), I and the Routledge editor discussed a lot. Our view is that this is a language textbook, not a book that primarily teaches Buddhism or Buddhist philosophy. Obviously, any cut-off point between focusing on language and dealing with content will be to a large extent arbitrary, but we have had to make such judgements throughout. Our primary concern is that  readers will be able to understand the basic meaning of the text. We do give fairly brief explanations of Buddhist terms and concepts where they occur. We then  refer the reader to sources where they can get more information.  To take a simple example,  the word 空 occurs in the first unit on the Heart Sutra. In the introduction to the unit, we refer to the importance of 空 / sunyata in the prajna paramita sutras and gloss it briefly as having 'no intrinsic self-existence'. At the end of the unit in the Further Reading section there are references to translations and commentaries where the reader can further explore the concepts in the text. If one is teaching a course in Chinese Buddhist philosophy, this would clearly be inadequate, but to comprehensively explain how 空 has been interpreted by the different schools of Mahayana Buddhism would take up a rather large volume in itself.

 

I'll post later about the differences between our book and the Standford material. I need to go to bed now!

[Wippen (inactive)]

10 hours ago, somethingfunny said:

I never really understand what people mean by "A Reader",

Ditto. Always wondered that meself.

[Gralock]

Yes, "A Reader" is used in different senses. I think in the context of language learning and teaching, it usually implies material to help students read authentic texts with comprehension. Perhaps a clearer title would be: An Introduction to Reading Chinese Buddhist Texts.

 

As for the Standford material, there is definitely some useful stuff there, and of course it has the advantage of being free. However, compared to our book I think its limitations are firstly that the choice of texts is very limited. Students are not introduced to any of the important texts that have been so influential in East Asian Buddhism, and in East Asian culture more generally (e.g. Heart Sutra, Diamond Sutra, Lotus Sutra, Platform Sutra). Related to this, is that the content matter of some of the texts (e.g. Hell Realms) means that students get little or no exposure to many of the key terms and concepts in Chinese Buddhism. Secondly, most of the texts have only vocabulary lists after them and there are very few explanatory notes. I think that if you compare this with the explanatory notes in our book, you will find that they cover far more ground and are much more in depth. Perhaps another advantage of our book, particularly for students working on their own, is that there will be additional resources  on my website (lockgraham.com - unfortunately Routledge didn't include this address in the book, though it is on their products page) . These will include i. recordings of the extracts read in Putonghua (Units 1-4 uploaded so far) and, I hope, later in Cantonese, ii. a forum for asking and answering questions etc. and iii. links to other resources. We also plan to build a bank of draft translations of the texts, done by ourselves, instructors and students.

 

To be fair, I think the first section of the Standford material, which systematically introduces aspects of the grammar in the texts could be very useful, especially for students with very little previous study of Chinese. I don't remember seeing this before. It must have been added in the new edition. All such information of course is there in our book, but it tends to be scattered in the notes and in the appendix on word classes. 

[Gralock]

For your reference I attach a draft of the notes from Unit One, Extract One, so that you can get a flavour of them. The numbers refer to superscript numbers in the glossed text.

Notes from 1.1.docx

[evn108]

It means 讀本

[JannR]

Prof. Kieschnick has written a kind of review essay of Lock & Linebarger's new textbook in which he reflects on various issues related to studying Classical and Buddhist Chinese: https://networks.h-net.org/node/6060/reviews/2166658/kieschnick-lock-and-linebarger-chinese-buddhist-texts-introductory