Korea Journal of Buddhist Studies ISSN:1598-0642(Print) 불교학연구

Xuanzang is an eminent Buddhist scholar and translator in the 7th century Tang dynasty of China. Exerting a strong influence upon especially the fields of Abhidharma and Yogācāra, his translations have become a fundamental basis of the development of Buddhist studies in East Asia. This paper aims at investigating the terminology and the style of Xuanzang’s translation. For this, it focuses on the part of sarvāstivāda in the Abhidharmakośabhāṣya, reading it by comparison with its Sanskrit text, Tibetan translation, and Paramārtha’s Chinese translation. Xuanzang’s translation is characterized as follows: 1) Its style is both literal and liberal. While its most parts are a literal translation, the parts whose meaning of an original text is unclear are a liberal translation. 2) Xuanzang’s translation consists in a mixture of Sanskrit and Chinese word order. This causes a misreading not infrequently when one only follows Chinese order. 3) Xuanzang’s translation uses an identical Chinese word for a particular Sanskrit term regardless of its various meanings. For this reason, the meaning of the same word becomes differentiated in accordance with its different contexts. 4) Either employs Xuanzang’s translation an identical Chinese word to notify a specific Sanskrit grammar. Since a Sanskrit grammar plays a different role case by case, this Chinese word too should be differently interpreted according to what it expresses. The lack of understanding such characteristics of Xuanzang’s translation leads to errors in its Korean translations now available