![]() The verb, you say, primarily signifies “to know.” Do I have that right? Yes, that is correct. In your paper you argue that “waking up” is only one meaning of the root budh and in fact is a secondary or derivative meaning. They maintained that the verbal root budh means “to awaken,” and therefore that I should render bodhi or sambodhi as “awakening” and buddha as “the awakened one.” So I wrote that paper because I decided I had to come to the defense of “enlightenment.” In recent years, I noticed that more and more Western translators were using “awakening” and “awakened one.” I was quite tolerant of translators making their personal choices between the two alternatives, but recently some of my scholar friends challenged my use of “enlightenment” and “enlightened one,” telling me this was incorrect. In my own translation work I have adhered to these renderings. They all used “enlightenment” for bodhi or sambodhi, and “the enlightened one” to refer to the Buddha. When I began to translate Buddhist texts during my early years in Sri Lanka, I took as my models the earlier generation of Western translators of Buddhist texts into English, including the British monk Bhikkhu Ñāṇamoli, the German monks Nyanatiloka and Nyanaponika, the English-educated Sri Lankan monk Walpola Rahula, and others like Piyadassi and Nārada. ![]() You see how it’s become an ingrained habit of the mind. Why is it important which word we use to translate the Buddha’s awakening? Well, you said his “awakening.” Tricycle spoke to Bhikkhu Bodhi about his paper and how our choice regarding this one word can change how we think about the Buddha’s teachings. In contrast, Bhikkhu Bodhi argues that the case for “awakening” is actually inaccurate and misleading and that its widespread use has concealed from the average English speaker a crucial aspect of the Buddha’s supreme attainment. Norman, and its current president, Rupert Gethin, as well as prominent Western dharma teachers have adopted “awakening” as a translation of the Pali word bodhi, some contending that this is a more accurate rendering. He notes that scholars such as the former president of the Pali Text Society, K. ![]() The rise of “awakening” was not simply an emergent phenomenon but a deliberate decision by prominent scholars and translators whose word choices have since reverberated throughout the wider culture of Buddhist practitioners, as Bhikkhu Bodhi explains in his recent paper “ On Translating ‘Buddha’” (published in November 2020 in the Journal of the Oxford Centre for Buddhist Studies). Besides, isn’t the dharma beyond words-wouldn’t it, by any other name, smell as sweet?īut according to the scholar, translator, and monk Bhikkhu Bodhi, it’s not that simple. ” Perhaps you have noticed this change as well and thought, So what? Trends change, like all conditioned things. The once nearly ubiquitous English word for the Buddha’s realization under the Bodhi tree, “enlightenment,” has fallen out of favor and has increasingly been going by a different name, “awakening. In recent years, a subtle shift has occurred. ![]()
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