Review of Gómez and Harrison, trans. Vimalakīrtinirdeśa: The Teaching of Vimalakīrti [BSR 2024] (original) (raw)

It is good to now have the English translation of the Vimalakīrtinirdeśa Sūtra by Luis Gómez and Paul Harrison (GH), based on the Sanskrit manuscript discovered by Taisho University researchers in 1999. Before this discovery, except for a few passages quoted in other texts, the sūtra was known only from old/ancient translations into Chinese and Tibetan and all modern translations were based on one or more of these. A few modern-language translations of the Sanskrit text have already appeared (GH 2022, xx), but GH's can be considered the first scholarly translation into English and is distinguished also by the fact that GH are both eminent scholars of these texts. In his introduction, Harrison explains that work on the translation began in 2010 at a workshop sponsored by Mangalam Research Center. Following the workshop, the chapters were divided between the participants, who submitted their translations to GH for editing. GH then ended up doing a "complete reworking" of the text up to the final part of the last chapter. Harrison comments that they "had the impression that not a single word was left unchanged by the process." After Gómez's lamented passing in 2017, Harrison finished the translation of the final chapter and some passages that he and Gómez had left unresolved (ix-xv). GH base their translation on the edition of the text published by the Taisho group in 2006 but make several dozen emendations on the basis of the Tibetan and Chinese translations, the manuscript facsimiles, and their own judgement. The majority of these are fairly intuitive, involving just a single syllable or word break, but some are more substantial. Although the more substantial emendations are generally somewhat conjectural, as GH acknowledge, they are carefully done and justified and represent a significant contribution to the establishment of the text. GH present their emendations in a list in an appendix and their justifications in the endnotes to the translation. Putting them together or cross-referencing them would improve convenience. The style of the translation is generally quite loose. In many cases, GH add to, subtract from, or modify what the text says in small but significant ways. Harrison does not address this in his introduction, but their approach seems similar to the one Gómez adopted for his 1995 translations of the Sukhāvatīvyūha Sūtras, which he refers to as "free rendering," and describes as taking "liberties…not customary in scholarly translations," including, but not limited to, the incorporation of commentarial material directly into the text. Gómez argues that this approach is