The book-to give fair warning-book is filled with unique translations of common terminology. Each of the book’s chapters completely re-interprets one fundamental concept, such as meditation 禅, breath 気, absence 無, emptiness 空, rivers-and-mountains 山川, dark enigma 玄. Hinton examines the Chinese characters in their historical context-from modern writing to ancient scripts, like the Oracle Bone script. His methodology in uncovering the original understanding of Zen-continued here from his previous books Hunger Mountain and the Awakened Cosmos-is not unlike that of Heidegger in seeking to illuminate our preconceived notions vis-à-vis an analysis of language and etymology. The original nexus of meaning and practice of Chinese Zen or Chan is, he argues, almost entirely missing from the Anglophone tradition. This issue of translation is at the core of China Root, which discusses the ways in which Zen Buddhism has been mistranslated into English and therefore misunderstood. Re-interpreting fundamental concepts in Chinese landscape painting, poetry, and philosophy, his books aim to serve as a more authentic guide to Chinese thinking. Hinton has more recently been recognized for his books in prose. Differing worldviews make translations particularly tricky, which is why it is crucial that translations of the Chinese classics be informed by a firm understanding of ancient philosophical notions and practices. In addition, his innovative translations of Chinese poetry-including in-depth treatments of Li Po and Du Fu-have earned him numerous awards. Hinton, who began his career as a translator, was notably the first person in over a hundred years to create new versions in English of the four classics of Chinese philosophy. It was, in other words, a match made in heaven.Ĭhina Root: Taoism, Ch’an, and Original Zen, David Hinton (Shambhala, September 2020) While Hinton is not the first thinker to posit a strong influence of Daoism on Zen, he argues that in addition to the issues of translation, there were elements of the new religion from India that resonated strongly with the native Daoist belief system. This is because the Zen we know from Japan had already lost much of the original Daoist underpinnings of Chinese Zen-known as Chan-even before the religion traveled across the Pacific to America.Īs it is generally understood, as early thinkers in China grappled with the new philosophy from India and struggled to work out issues of localization, it was only natural that things would be reinterpreted through the lens of the native belief system-in this case, Daoism. In his latest book, David Hinton says that we in the West are not just once-removed from the original Zen-but twice removed. And when one language is translated and assimilated into another, it is inevitable that some conceptual connections will be lost and the meaning of ideas altered. Terminology had to be assimilated, for one thing. Buddhism would undergo profound changes as it was transmitted from its origins in India east into China, in the first century CE.
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