by Rebecca Lemov
Many people on the first day of their first Vipassana course with S.N. Goenka finding themselves awake at an unusual hour and sitting in an unusual place are surprised to hear the sounds of chanting that accompany the last 30-40 minutes of the early morning session. These sounds can be different things to different people (some are entranced, some are averse), but in almost every center outside India, most listeners will have at least one response in common: incomprehension. However mellifluous the sounds, however enchanting the voice, the words themselves are, at least until recently, left untranslated.
In fact, the chanting is in two languages: at times it is Hindi, Goenkaji's native language and the one in which he composes traditional, exhortational poems in couplets (dohas), which comprise a significant portion of the chanting. At other times it is Pali, through which the Buddha's suttas are conveyed in the closest surviving dialect to the language the Tathagatha spoke.
About ten years ago the publisher at Pariyatti, Rick Crutcher, had a seemingly simple idea: he would collect and translate the chanting from the ten-day course. Students in America and Europe had been asking over the years: "What is he saying?" "Is it a mysterious rite of some kind?" In India, however, he saw that students were moved to tears by the poetry of the language. It seemed clear that these poetic expressions of Goenkaji's teaching often have a powerful, inspirational effect on those who can understand their meaning. Perhaps Western students could, to some degree, share in this deeper understanding.
The simple idea soon became a rather more intricate undertaking. The Gem Set in Gold -- a decade in the making, and the result of a worldwide collaboration of scholars -- is the tangible result. The title refers to the metaphor Goenkaji uses to characterize the relationship between practice and theory, between the experience of sitting (patipatti) and the scholarly exploration of the Buddha's words and systematic teachings (pariyatti). The gem is to practice as the Buddha taught; the golden setting is the teachings that illuminate and contextualize the practice.
An international team began with translations of the Hindi dohas originally done by Bill Hart in the 1980s. Researchers on opposite sides of the globe audited the recordings of Goenkaji's chanting and worked to iron out minute variations (depending on which recordings were being used). For the Pali suttas from the morning chanting, scholars and Pali students from the Vipassana Research Institute started with the text from the Chattha Sangayana edition of the Tipitaka. Consulting traditional translations available from sources in Myanmar, Sri Lanka, and Thailand, they painstakingly retranslated and amended the older translations to modernize the English and, at times, update the language in the light of insights from the Vipassana practice. After many rounds of review, at last all the scholarly corrections, and judgments were brought together.
Throughout, the most pressing issue was that of translation itself. An issue that all translators face is how to preserve the 'feel' of the original language. A simple, literal translation is never either simple or literal for such a translation, no matter how accurate, cannot communicate the most basic truth of the language. (Especially when the words in question are poetic, literary, or scriptural.) In translating The Gem Set in Gold, Indian and non-Hindi-speaking contingents debated how to communicate the truth of what was being said, the poetry of the words, without distorting them or subjecting them to personal quirks of diction. As the literary scholar Walter Benjamin wrote in his famous essay The Task of the Translator, a translation is always more than a transmission.
"Even a poor translator will admit [that it is] the unfathomable, the mysterious, the 'poetic'that any true translation aims to bring across. A translation is like a new flowering of the original, a transformation and a renewal of something living." "Being a special and high form of life," Benjamin continued, "this flowering is governed by a special, high purposiveness."
The Gem Set in Gold is the result of years of scholarly efforts to allow these words to flower anew. The result of this remarkable interchange will be published by Pariyatti this summer.
Rebecca Lemov is a Vipassana student and the author of World as Laboratory: Experiments with Mice, Mazes and Men (Hill and Wang, 2005). She will begin a postdoctoral fellowship next year at Harvard in the history of science.