Buddhist Medicine in Crosscultural Translation: Disease, Healing, and the Body in the Chinese Tripitaka

The Center for East Asian Studies at the University of Pennsylvania presents a talk on the translation of medical doctrine in a large collection of Chinese Buddhist sources.

As huge volumes of Buddhist literature were transmitted to China in the early medieval period, translators faced the challenge of rendering in a new language the wide range of Indian technical and scientific terminology found in their source texts. My research investigates the translation of medical doctrine in a large collection of Chinese Buddhist sources translated during the medieval period (200-800 C.E.) in light of methodologies developed in the field of Translation Studies. I examine the wide range of translation strategies employed in the attempt to make foreign knowledge accessible to Chinese readers. The decision to use translation terms that underscored the foreignness of the source texts, or conversely to use vocabulary drawn from the Chinese context that emphasized Buddhism's compatibility with indigenous knowledge, were important choices that had an appreciable impact on Buddhism's ability to position itself within the Chinese religiomedical landscape. Acts of translation were not only means by which Buddhist ideas and practices could be explained to Chinese audiences, but simultaneously were also acts of boundary-work and identity-construction by which claims of superiority over other contemporary traditions could be established and maintained, and by which Buddhism's unique contributions to China could be showcased. Understanding the Chinese reception of Indian medicine as a process of negotiation and adaptation allows historical analysis to move beyond a limited focus on the so-called accuracy of translations, instead revealing the cultural resonances and social logics of translated texts in their historical context