What's in a Translation?
If you've had any exposure to Zen at all, you've probably heard this one -- The senior monk of Hong-jen's monastery wrote a poem on a wall that went like this:
Our body is the bodhi tree
And our mind a mirror bright.
Carefully we wipe them hour by hour
And let no dust alight.
There is no bodhi tree
Nor stand of a mirror bright.
Since all is void,
Where can the dust alight?
These verses are from the A.F. Price / Wong Mou-Lam translation of the Platform Sutra. I'm working on a new feature about Huineng, which of course will include the story of how Huineng's verse earned him the title of Sixth Patriarch of Zen. There are many renderings of the two verses out there, however, and I began to look for some that sound less like greeting card poems. And what I found was confusion.
For example, this version of Huineng's verse is attributed to the late Philip Boas Yampolsky, an eminent scholar and translator:
Bodhi originally has no tree,
The mirror(-like mind) has no stand.
Buddha-nature (emptiness/oneness) is always clean and pure;
Where is there room for dust (to alight)?
Fundamentally no bodhi-tree exists
Nor the frame of a mirror bright.
Since all is voidness from the beginning,
Where can the dust alight?
This is from Thomas Cleary's translation of Master Keizan's Transmission of the Light (Denkoroku):
Enlightenment is basically not a tree
And the clear mirror not a stand.
Fundamentally there is not a single thing --
Where can dust collect?
It's not clear to me why these translations are focusing on a frame or a stand and not the mirror. Anyway, Yampolsky seems to say that because mind/Buddha nature are always clean and pure, dust cannot settle on it. But the other translations more or less say there is nothing to collect dust. Bodhi tree, mirror, mirror stand or frame, other artifacts or furniture cluttering up the place -- all void.
On the other hand -- this is in Robert Aitken's The Mind of Clover (p. 61):
When Chao-chou was sweeping the courtyard, a monk asked, "How can a speck of dust come into this holy ground?"
Chao-chou said, "Here comes another!"
Update: I have found another version of Huineng's verse, in The Shambhala Dictionary of Buddhism and Zen --
Fundamentally bodhi is no tree
Nor is the clear mirror a stand.
Since everything is primordially empty,
What is there for dust to cling to?
Comments
I don’t speak Chinese either, but let’s double guess what might be behind the translated concept of “stand/frame”. Maybe it is not just the stand or even the frame but also the metal backing that makes up the mirror. It’s difficult to put this in one word in English: “the mirror has no materials” “.. no frame and back”. Maybe that explains it.
As to your question, why focus on the stand/frame at all, and not simply on the mirror - well, if you carry the synonym “mind=mirror” then you can’t completely negate the mirror unless you start to talk in abstract concepts such as “the action mirroring” or “the reflecting”.
I think you have to include a note in your feature about the equivalence of mind and buddha nature, since it is essential to the understanding of this sutra, and if you think your readers don’t come with this background, you have to prepare them. Yampolsky’s literal translation is undoubtedly very academically justified and therefore you have to take it into account.
Craig — I see your point about the mirror.
Regarding translations — my understanding is that this very old Chinese is extremely elusive to translate into English, and the translator has to make a lot of guesses as to what exactly is meant. So you see the translator’s understanding of dharma in the translation. It’s unavoidable.
I hear “frame” and “stand” not so much as a physical aspect of the mirror, and more as a reference to its function: to frame our perception/experience, or function as a ground - an ultimate reference point - upon which we stand.
In all the translations, the dust still gets a bad rap … It’s the only thing that doesn’t get to be empty. (The point, perhaps, of the Chou-chou story.)
I am a translator (German-English) so I know how difficult it sometimes is to find an equivalent, and my languages are closely related. As Barbara says, old Chinese is quite different. And anyway, merely expressing the dharma in words is in itself a translation of the inexpressible, so the teacher’s understanding is always included.
And that provides a key to understanding Huineng’s verse. Remember, the whole message cannot be expressed perfectly in every verse. Here we have to accept that mind=mirror and dust=imperfection, even though these two ‘things’ (mirror-dust) are, ultimately, also ‘void’. But for the purposes of this analogy, mirror=thing :: frame/stand/…=not-thing. Huineng, as far as I understand, recognised that the senior monk was too attached to the monastic rituals (cleansing their mind and body every hour, steadfastly avoiding the danger of contamination through temptations etc.) Huineng recognised that if the body and ‘holder-of-mind’ are void, then actually, these monastic rites are not the ultimate enlightenment, and can even lead to monks trapping themselves in their habits and not making progress to enlightenment.
Only by recognising that even this ‘path’ is not enlightenment, can the monk really liberate himself.
Of course, this is not an easy message to digest, which is why the 5th Patriarch had to make a pragmatic decision. He saw that Huineng’s wisdom was so great that he would become the 6th Patriarch, but he also realised that the rest of the monks ‘weren’t ready for this’, which is why he sent Huineng away to a far flung place, secretly appointed as 6th Patriarch.
In other words, even though the dust is ultimately void, we shouldn’t throw away our feather dusters yet
To understand this poem, you must know Chinese, or you’ll get completely wrong.
I’ll explain this poem character by character.
The 1st sentence: 菩提本无树（I don’t know if your pc can show the chinese character)
菩提：bodhi. 本：originally/(not)…at all. 无：no. 树：tree.
Attention! Here is a Chinese grammar, that if you divide a word into two parts, each part still has its original meaning, especially used in poems. For example, bodhi tree is a word in Chinese, so here “bodhi” means bodhi tree, and “tree” means bodhi tree. So, it doesn’t mean that bodhi originally has no tree, or bodhi is not a tree originally. It means that “There is no bodhi tree”, or “the bodhi tree is substantially not a bodhi tree”.
The 2nd sentence: 明镜亦非台
明镜：a bright mirror. 亦：also. 非：not 台：stand.
Just like the 1st sentence, you can’t translate into “The mirror has no stand” or “the clear mirror not a stand”. It is “ The bright mirro is not a bright mirror either”. Attention, the stand of bright mirror is not a stand, but a mirror. A stand of mirror is just like a piece of paper. A piece of paper absolutely is paper, not piece, so you can understand a stand of mirror in Chinese.
The 3rd sentence: 本来无一物
本来：originally. 无：no. 一：one. 物：thing
This sentence focuses on “everything is empty”, not “nothing”. So the correct translation is “Since all is empty”.
The 4th sentence: 何处惹尘埃
何处：where. 惹：alight. 尘埃：dust
The easiest one, just means “Where can the dust alight？”
So, the first translation is correct. The second is wrong. The third one is almost right, except “from the beginning”. The last two translation is wrong.
OK, now we should know why “the bodhi tree is substantially not a bodhi tree”. If you ever read the Heart Sutra, you must remember “ the form is not different from emptiness……the form is the emptiness”. There is a core theory in Buddhism called “cause and condition”. It means everything is a dependent arising, and nothing is a thing-in-itself. If you understand this, you understand “the bodhi tree is substantially not a bodhi tree”.
The poem Huineng wrote is in the stand of so called “middle way”, which is against the womb of the tathagata which the previous poem stands for.
Guan, thank you so much for sorting through the bad translations for us! What you say clarifies the poem considerably.
Hello Dear Barbara,
Would like to know your comment for this tranlation:-
Bodhi has no tree
Clear mirror has no stand
Originally no thing
Where is dust
testing
Guan, thanks for your help understanding the characters, but also remember that translation is not a purely syntactic exercise. You must choose a translation to fit the audience and culture. To this day, after all the translations of this poem that I’ve read my favorite comes from a comic book on the history of Zen.
Wisdom never was a tree,
And the bright mirror has no stand.
There has never been anything,
So where could dust land?
It’s simple, and not so foreign to English ears/eyes that it is more accessible. I also like the hint of ironic humor in it, the “smack down” if you will.