When Being Original No Longer Matters: Reflections on the Sanskrit Text of the Lotus Sutra...

Dr Paul Harrison’s presentation titled 'When Being Original No Longer Matters: Reflections on the Sanskrit Text of the Lotus Sutra and its Uses'. This presentation was given on 15 December 2022 at the British Library conference 'The Lotus Sutra: The teachings, transmission and material culture of a sacred Buddhist text'.
The celebration of the completion of the project to digitise Chinese copies of the Lotus Sutra provides an opportunity to reflect on the transmission of this important scripture in the Indic languages in which it was composed and first circulated, in India and Central Asia. We assume that the Saddharmapundarīka began life in Prakrit and was gradually transformed into Sanskrit, and that the translations into Chinese were made while this process was still reaching its conclusion. This talk considers the sutra’s migration to East Asia and the reasons why the Chinese versions have come to occupy a position of prime importance, while the Sanskrit text has receded into the background. Among other things, it addresses the extraordinary situation that no modern translation of the complete Sanskrit text into a European language has been made since Eugène Burnouf’s Le Lotus de la Bonne Loi of 1852 and Hendrik Kern’s The Lotus of the True Law in 1884, while multiple renditions of Kumārajīva’s Chinese translation have continued to appear in the 21st century.
Organised to celebrate the successful close of the Lotus Sutra Project (2017 - 2022), the conference brought together an international group of scholars and the Project team to present on the impact of the Lotus Sutra as a critical Buddhist text. The conference investigated the teachings of the Lotus Sutra, the Lotus Sutra as represented at Dunhuang, and the methodology and results of the Lotus Sutra Project, which has now conserved, digitised and published nearly 800 Lotus Sutra manuscripts in the British Library’s collections.