Bulletin > Volume 50 Essences and Translations: On Buddhist Texts and Instrumentalism

O'Neill, Alexander James

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This article examines the concept of, what Lawrence Venuti describes as, “instrumentalism” in the translation of Buddhist texts. This refers to the assumption that translation transfers or reproduces an underlying invariant meaning in a source text. By exploring the origins of this tendency in Western and Sinitic translation discourse, it assesses the extent to which it appears in popular Buddhist studies discourse on so-called “Buddhist Hybrid English,” and proposes a humanistic and hermeneutical alternative. It presents this alternative based on two arguments: Venuti’s suggestion that translation is a creative and interpretative act that constructs value in the target language, and the Buddhist philosophical argument, drawing on the apoha theory of Dignāga and Dharmakīrti, which indicates that words do not possess fixed essences as instrumentalism assumes. The article concludes by proposing a vision for “radical translatability” and reflects on machine translation as a kind of reductio ad absurdum of the instrumentalist model.