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Missing source: Translation of Buddhist text into Vietnamese?
Minna,
This is a great question. Ironically, I have long thought this myself --
that the concept of filial piety had a Buddhist origin as well as a
Confucian one -- but I never, I believe, wrote this in print. The proof is
that I remember seeing Vietnamese Buddhist tracts that talked about "hi?u."
Sorry, but it has been some time, and I can't remember which. This Buddhist
discussion of "hi?u" would make sense, as Buddhism both talks of
householder morality -- the morality of the lay believer -- as well as of
the monk/ nun.
Shawn McHale
On Fri, Dec 27, 2013 at 10:49 AM, Minna Hakkarainen <
minna.hakkarainen at helsinki.fi> wrote:
> Dear List,
>
> I wonder if anyone can help me to trace a source that I am now unable to
> locate. I remember having read years ago an interesting claim that
> Confucian ideas (e.g. on filial piety) penetrated Vietnamese people through
> Buddhist texts that were translated from Chinese into Vietnamese by
> Confucian mandarins. That is, mandarins e.g. added 'Confucian' stories to
> original texts thus making them not identical, but slightly different in
> their contents as compared to the original Chinese language texts.
>
> However, I am now unable to find the source of this very interesting piece
> of information. If anyone is familiar with it, as I assume, I would be
> extremely grateful if you could share that with me privately or through the
> list.
>
> Wishing you all interesting research projects in 2014!
>
> Best,
>
> Minna Hakkarainen
> University of Helsinki
> _______________________________________________
> Vsg mailing list
> Vsg at u.washington.edu
> http://mailman1.u.washington.edu/mailman/listinfo/vsg
>
--
Shawn McHale
Associate Professor of History
George Washington University
Washington, DC 20052 USA
Hello,
There is a wonderful article that shows that the notion of filial piety belongs to Theravada Buddhism from Southeast Asia (unlike Indian Buddhism). The notion is encapsulated in the word "gun".
Note sur la piété filiale en Asie du Sud-Est theravadin : la notion de « gun »
Grégory Kourilsky
Un examen des textes et des pratiques bouddhiques en usage en Thaïlande, au Laos et au Cambodge met en évidence le fait que l’obligation envers les géniteurs fait partie d’un ensemble de prescriptions dont aucun fidèle ne peut s’affranchir. Bien que le bouddhisme indien n’exclue pas la piété filiale des préoccupations religieuses, l’importance ainsi accordée à la « gratitude » ou au « devoir de reconnaissance » envers les parents est un trait qui semble distinguer la tradition dite « theravadin » de la péninsule Indochinoise du bouddhisme de l’Inde ou de Ceylan.Au coeur de cette conception de la piété filiale, on trouve la notion de gun. Bien qu’emprunté au vocabulaire de l’Inde ancienne, le terme gun a fait l’objet de réinterprétations locales qui lui ont donné une dimension nouvelle à caractère polysémique. La notion de gun, ainsi « revisitée », est peut-être l’un des liens ultimes qui rattache encore le bouddhisme « orthodoxe » tel qu’il est aujourd’hui majoritairement pratiqué dans la région à la tradition dite du kammatthan d’Asie du Sud-Est.
http://www.efeo.fr/archives/aseanie_art_20.shtml#2
Best wishes,
Nicolas Lainez
Ehess/NUS
Early Buddhist stories contain examples of what we can call "filial piety"
but it wasn't categorized as a specific value and given a clear label.
Similarly, there are statements in early Chinese texts that demonstrate the
idea of what we could call "karmic retribution," but those statements were
never developed into a clear theory and given a label. It was only after
Buddhism became prominent in China that "Confucian" scholars
"re-discovered" and popularized statements in the Yijing and Shujing that
express the idea of karmic retribution, and it is (I think) only since
Kenneth Ch'en declared that filial piety was a unique aspect of Chinese
Buddhism that scholars (John Strong and others) have looked at early
Buddhist sources and said that the concept is demonstrated in Indian texts
as well.
So there are examples of "filial piety" in Indian Buddhism and of "karmic
retribution" in the Five Classics, but this does not mean that there are
"dual origins" of these concepts.
Liam Kelley
University of Hawaii
On Thu, Jan 2, 2014 at 4:00 PM, Will Pore <willpore at gmail.com> wrote:
> It will not be new to those who know even a little about Neo-Confucianism,
> i.e. the Confucianism of East Asia since Zhu Xi (12th century C.E.), that
> it was heavily influenced by Buddhism. In fact, Zhu was criticized by
> contemporary "Confucians" as a "cunning Buddhist." I wonder what the
> chronology of the phenomenon Monsieur Lainez writes of/quotes from is.
>
> Will Pore
>
>
> On Fri, Jan 3, 2014 at 10:05 AM, Tai, Hue-Tam <hhtai at fas.harvard.edu>wrote:
>
>> This is interesting. "Gun" sounds close to "on/an" which is a term of
>> Chinese origin and means gratitude. It does not exclusively cover gratitude
>> toward one's progenitors, as witness the term "cam on" which means "thank
>> you" and the ubiquitous "to quoc ghi on" in martyrs cemeteries.
>> I wonder if there is a connection.
>>
>> The conventional interpretation is that while Buddhism enjoins the
>> faithful to be filial, it was Confucianism that, in the countries of East
>> Asia, provided content to the precept. In other countries, filial piety
>> would be expressed differently. In China, Confucianism predated the arrival
>> of Buddhism by several centuries (with Luy Lau being a stopping point for
>> Buddhist monks on their way to China from India.
>>
>> Hue Tam Ho Tai
Dear all,
I cannot but agree with Michele and sincerely thank all those who have
responded to my question. They have given me a lot to think about!
Best,
Minna Hakkarainen
PhD candidate
University of Helsinki
Lainaus "Thompson, C. M." <thompsonc2 at southernct.edu>:
> Dear John,
> Many thanks for your very interesting and informative posts on this
> thread. This has been great! This sort of discussion is why I
> love VSG.
> cheers
> Michele
>
>
> Michele Thompson
> Professor of Southeast Asian History
> Dept. of History
> Southern Connecticut State Univ.
>
>
>
>
> On Jan 4, 2014, at 1:03 AM, John Phan wrote:
>
> Dear list,
>
> Many thanks for an interesting thread.
>
> Regarding the Kourilsky quote on filial piety and Theravada Buddhism
> posted above, it strikes me that Vietnam may not actually be under
> discussion in this otherwise interesting abstract. The term "gun"
> derives from Sanskrit/Pali guna, meaning virtue or merit, but
> acquiring the connotation of "gratitude" in mainland Southeast Asian
> usage (cf. or'kun, "thank you," in Khmer; ru khun "to recognize
> merit"--but with the sense of recognizing what others have done for
> you). It is this semantic shift from "merit" to "gratitude" (that
> may have taken place originally in Khmer) that Kourilsky seems to be
> noting in his short abstract. I am not sure whether Han ? (Viet.
> on) was ever associated with guna, but at any rate, it does not seem
> to me that Kourilsky is dealing with Vietnam when he speaks of
> Southeast Asia (but rather Thailand, Laos, and Cambodia), nor of
> Vietnamese/Sinitic-style filial piety, nor of any kind of Confucian
> concepts. Rather, he seems to be dealing with semantic shifts in
> the concept of guna (away from its classical, Indic sense) as
> observable in the Buddhistic traditions of Thailand, Laos, and
> Cambodia. But that is all hard to determine from such a short
> abstract.
>
> As for the questions about the dating of the Ph?t thuy?t apocryphal
> sutra, and of No^m more generally, thanks to Bac Nhan for posting
> Nguyen Quang Hong's excellent slideshow and article. Regarding the
> Ph?t thuy?t, Thay Hong's major argument (as revised in his
> meticulous 2008 collected works), as Bac Nhan already stated, is
> that the Nom translations of the Ph?t thuy?t include a large
> inventory of what are called sesquisyllabic words--words with a
> minor + major syllable structure, like modern Khmer ch'ngai for
> "day" (cf. related Vietnamese ngày). As I argue in my forthcoming
> article (see link in last post), as well as chapter 7 of my
> dissertation (viewable here<https://ninjal.academia.edu/JohnPhan>;
> sorry for the shameless plugs), evidence for complex syllable
> structure cannot definitively be tied to the 12th century, and such
> a structure may have persisted quite late in the history of
> Vietnamese and the Muong languages. One major factor that
> complicates using complex syllable structure to date the Ph?t thuy?t
> is that because loss of minor syllables is not a regular or
> systematic sound-change, the presence or absence of syllabically
> complex forms vs. monosyllabic forms (or their coexistence) can vary
> quite a bit from region to region, dialect to dialect, and social
> register to social register. For example, in modern Phnom Penh
> dialect of Khmer, many minor syllables are fashionably dropped, as
> in "Nom Penh" for Ph-nom Penh (incidentally, the Nom/Ph-nom here is
> cognate with Viet. non, as in non núi), although it is robustly
> maintained virtually everywhere else. Moreover, the major points of
> reference for Nguyen Quang Hong were Nguyen Trai's Qu?c âm thi t?p
> ????, and the 17th century Han-Nom dictionary, the Ch? nam ng?c âm
> gi?i nghia ??????. While the Qu?c âm thi t?p dates to the High Le
> of the mid/late 15th century, extant versions date only from the
> late publishing boom of the 18th-19th centuries. Furthermore, even
> if the extant version of the Qu?c âm thi t?p conserves older forms
> of No^m, that No^m probably reflects Nguyen Trai's native dialect,
> the innovative and elite language of the Red River Delta (home to
> the epicenter of Sino-Viet culture), a variety that may have
> demonstrated comparatively fewer syllabically complex forms than
> anywhere else (a fact quite possibly exacerbated by the prosodically
> strict regulated verse/lu?t thi format of the poems). Finally, the
> time depth separating the 12th from 15th centuries is only 300 years
> or so--a remarkably important and dramatic period of time from a
> historical and intellectual point of view, but a very shallow--and
> therefore ambiguous--slice of time from the point of view of
> historical linguistics and phonological change. The moral of the
> story is that presence of minor syllables is not a reliable landmark
> for dating the Ph?t thuy?t.
>
> Shimizu, on the other hand, points toward two taboo characters that
> are religiously observed in the No^m text of the Ph?t thuy?t, one
> activated in 1428, and the other in 1497. If the text observes
> these taboos, then it must have post-dated their activation by the
> court. For this reason, I agree with Dr. Tai, and side with Dr.
> Shimizu in his dating of the No^m text of the Ph?t thuy?t to the
> 15th century (for full discussion of these dating issues, please see
> my forthcoming article, and also chapter 7 of my dissertation).
>
> As for the dating of No^m more specifically, as Nguyen Quang Hong,
> as well as Dao Duy Anh and Nguyen Tai Can before him have amply
> pointed out, there is a significant amount of circumstantial
> evidence from historical annals like the Ð?i Vi?t s? ký toàn thu
> ?????? that a form of Vietnamese writing was being practiced and
> developed over the Tran and Ho dynasties, but no "smoking gun."
> This, combined with the fact that we have a working No^m system by
> the time of the Ph?t thuy?t strongly suggests that No^m probably
> developed over the first few centuries of the 2nd millennium,
> although I believe that it did not really blossom into a cultivated
> medium until the 17th century. I address this question specifically
> in the article/chapter noted above.
>
> Regarding the issue raised by Will Pore concerning Neo-Confucianism
> and its displacement of a Buddhistic intellectual climate, Keith
> Taylor addresses these issues in his 2002 article (mentioned last
> post), as do I in my forthcoming article (see above). It is an
> issue of great interest to me; thank you for bringing it up.
>
> Finally, I'd also like to point Minna in the direction of another
> work by Keith Taylor in 2005, entitled "Sino-Vietnamese Translation
> from Classical to Vernacular" (in Rethinking Asian Translation
> Traditions), which discusses alterations to a Literary Sinitic
> Buddhist text in the course of its translation into Vietnamese
> (though not explicitly concepts of filial piety).
>
> Please excuse the lengthy post.
>
> Best wishes, John
>
>
> On Sat, Jan 4, 2014 at 8:52 AM, Ngô Thanh Nhàn
> <nhan at temple.edu<mailto:nhan at temple.edu>> wrote:
> Here are the links to Prof. Nguy?n Quang H?ng paper
> "Nh?ng ch?ng tích Ch? Nôm xua nh?t hi?n còn"
> in Vietnamese at
> http://www.temple.edu/vietnamese_center/nomstudies/NgQuangHong_chungtich_chuNom.pdf
> and English "Earliest evidence of Ch? Nôm"
> http://www.temple.edu/vietnamese_center/nomstudies/earliest_evidence_of_chu_Nom.pdf
>
> Best,
> Nhàn
>
> On Jan 3, 2014, at 12:27 PM, Ngô Thanh Nhàn wrote:
>
> Dear Prof. Hue Tam,
>
> I have been reading this thread of discussion with much interest.
> I have been reading Trúc Lâm tông ch? nguyên thanh recently by
> Ngô Th?i Nh?m, the known 4th patriarch of the Bamboo Forest
> Zen in Vietnam, who showed the similarity of Confucianism and
> Buddhism.
>
> Note that Chinese Buddhism of Ðu?ng Tam T?ng came to China
> when Confucianism was at its best… However, in Vietnam,
> Buddhist monks helped the kings when Confucianism was
> not at all known to or followed by the first dynasties.
>
> My understanding of Buddhist luân h?i as the worst kind
> of "punishment" under which one has no one to judge, no one
> to fear, but yourself and your own actions of free will. There
> is no need for th?p di?n diêm vuong well described in Kinh
> Ð?a t?ng… As a child, I would ask, how do you feel pain in
> the horrific tortures if you were a ghost?
>
> And in luân h?i, "ch? hi?u" is not as strong as that of
> the Confucian virtues. In theater, you might have heard
> that in order to "tr? thù" someone, you tell them that if you
> die failing in this life, you will reincarnate to be their
> children ;-)
>
> Thanks to all the clarifications from this thread on Kinh Ð?a T?ng
> (?) and Ph?t thuy?t d?i báo ph? m?u ân tr?ng kinh.
>
> Prof. Nguy?n Quang H?ng came to Temple in 2008 with his
> article "Nh?ng ch?ng tích Ch? Nôm xua nh?t hi?n còn", which
> was presented at Yale again in powerpoint as "The earliest evidence
> of Ch? Nôm"… He used the historical reconstruction of Vietnamese
> from M. Ferlus (and Nguy?n Tài C?n) as Proto-Vi?t-Mu?ng to match
> with a large number of two ideogram representation of one complex
> syllables (74 Cv-CVC occurrences) and 63 Nôm ideograms composed of
> two ideograms combined as CCVC in Ph?t thuy?t Ð?i báo Ph? m?u ân…
> to arrive at the position that ch? Nôm in this Sutra must have been
> done around XIIth Century. I will post these two versions online
> today for your reference.
>
> For Prof. H?ng, "ch? Nôm" is "ch? Nôm" in Hán-Nôm texts with
> Vietnamese syntax, not those found here and there in Hán
> texts on steles or tombstones of the Lý Dynasty (from 1174 on).
> He also cites Cu tr?n l?c d?o phú written solely in Nôm by
> King Tr?n Nhân Tông (Tr?n Khâm: 1258-1308).
>
> Cheers,
> Nhàn
>
> On Jan 3, 2014, at 10:24 AM, Tai, Hue-Tam wrote:
> Like Liam, I find John's comments very a propos. Liam's reference to
> the Jade Register reminds me that when we visited the Giac Lam
> pagoda in 1993, we saw a large panel depicting the ten hells that
> awaited sinners (unfilial children, disrespectful daughters-in-law,
> slacker students... I took a picture to show my students:-)). this
> Buddhist vision of hell shows clearly the influence of Confucian
> notions of a bureaucratically organized otherworld that was already
> prevalent in the Han dynasty. Incidentally, my current research on
> the Ho Chi Minh cult shows that Vietnamese deeply believe that the
> otherworld is a vast bureaucracy, where permissions, travel
> documents, etc... are needed.
> Neo-Confucianism, which, as others pointed out was introduced into
> Vietnam during the Ming Occupation, was, again as Will Pore
> mentioned, an attempt by Zhu Xi to counter the popularity of
> Buddhism by co-opting many of its tenets. The result was "The Three
> Teachings Are One" (Tam Giao Dong Nhut). If we follow Lionel Jensen
> in Manufacturing Confucianism, the idea that China was Confucian was
> a Jesuit invention. Of course, the Jesuits encountered
> neo-Confucianism.
>
> Regarding the apocryphal sutra mentioned by John, I am inclined to
> side with Shimizu rather than Nguyen Quang Hong. Vietnamese scholars
> have claimed that the earliest use of Nom dates from the 12th
> century (with Han Thuyen), but others date its introduction to later
> centuries. Perhaps John and Ngo Thanh Nhan may chime in on this
> question.
>
> Hue Tam Ho Tai
>
> Sent from my iPad
>
> On Jan 3, 2014, at 4:38, "Liam Kelley"
> <<mailto:liam at hawaii.edu>liam at hawaii.edu<mailto:liam at hawaii.edu>>
> wrote:
>
> John's comments are not left of anything. They are right on target.
> I find it amazing that after decades of intense production of
> knowledge about Asia since World War II the most commonplace and
> widespread forms of knowledge that existed in East Asia are still so
> poorly understood. John mentions an "apocryphal sutra" - that's
> exactly the kind of text that was ubiquitous. We've spent so much
> time creating "textbook definitions" of Confucianism, Buddhism,
> Daoism, etc, but so few scholars have actually looked at the kinds
> of texts that actually had the widest circulation, like apocryphal
> Buddhism texts and morality books. The Analects of Confucius have
> been published endlessly in modern times, but the only translation I
> know of a popular work like the Jade Register (which was published
> extensively in the past all across East Asia and including in
> Vietnam) is on professor emeritus David K. Jordan's obscure website
> <http://weber.ucsd.edu/~dkjordan/chin/yuhlih/yuhlih-intro.html>
> <http://weber.ucsd.edu/~dkjordan/chin/yuhlih/yuhlih-intro.html>
> http://weber.ucsd.edu/~dkjordan/chin/yuhlih/yuhlih-intro.html. But
> works like the Jade Register represent the CORE of East Asian
> popular culture. What does it say? It says that if you are not
> filial you will enter a Buddhist hell and suffer!!! So is that
> Buddhism? Is it Confucianism? It's the common East Asian cultural
> core. Filial piety is at the center of that cultural core, and every
> "tradition" in the larger East Asian cultural world emphasizes it.
>
> People desperately need to shed the "modern Western textbook"
> understanding of "religions/philosophies" that elite Westerners
> created and that elite Asian intellectuals like Tran Trong Kim and
> Feng Youlan emulated in the early twentieth century and look at the
> incredibly abundant sources about popular beliefs that people like
> David Jordan have examined. There are literally hundreds of such
> texts that people can look at for premodern Vietnam - from morality
> books to spirit writing to ledgers of merit and demerit to
> aphocryphal Buddhist texts - people just need to read these works
> and look at what people like Jordan and David Overmyer and Cynthia
> Brokaw have talked about for years with regards to China (and dozens
> of Vietnamese are immediately available to anyone online at
> <http://nomfoundation.org/nom-project/Digital-Library-of-Han-Nom>
> <http://nomfoundation.org/nom-project/Digital-Library-of-Han-Nom>
> http://nomfoundation.org/nom-project/Digital-Library-of-Han-Nom).
>
> Sorry to sound cranky, but it just frustrates me that it's 2014 and
> people who deal with Vietnam are still in the dark about this stuff
> and wondering what is Confucianism what is Buddhism what influenced
> what, etc. On the one hand, people who study about Vietnam need to
> catch up with what scholars who research about China have already
> done, and on the other hand, people who research about Vietnam need
> to read premodern Vietnamese sources and write about them. Sources
> about stuff like this abound, but people simply don't don't read them.
>
> Grumpy (in part because I have had a cold for the past 10 days, and
> in part because I have had several beers), but sincerely hoping that
> someone will please research and write about this because it is so
> important,
>
> Liam Kelley
> University of Hawaii
>
>
> On Thu, Jan 2, 2014 at 10:37 PM, John Phan
> <<mailto:jdp49 at cornell.edu><mailto:jdp49 at cornell.edu>jdp49 at cornell.edu<mailto:jdp49 at cornell.edu>>
> wrote:
> Dear Minna and list,
>
> This is slightly to the left of your question, but one of the
> earliest, most important Nom texts is religious text called the Ph?t
> thuy?t d?i báo ph? m?u ân tr?ng kinh ????????? ("Sutra of the
> Buddha's Teachings on the Profound Grace of Parents"), sometimes
> translated in the Korean context as the "Sutra of Filial Piety." It
> mostly deals with the kindness of parents, and the debt incurred by
> children thereby. It is considered a "false scripture" or
> apocryphal sutra (ng?y kinh ??, as opposed to chân kinh ??), and is
> among the best-known Buddhist texts in the Korean canon. When and
> how it came to Vietnam is a matter of debate: Nguy?n Quang H?ng
> (2008), argues for a date as early as the 12th century, but Shimizu,
> 2008, argues convincingly that the earliest layer dates to around
> the 15th century. The question of dating is interesting for the
> issue you raise, because it was with the Ming colonization of Dai
> Viet at the dawn of the 15th century, and the subsequent Le Dynasty
> that Neo-Confucianism really took root. At any rate, the text is a
> Buddhist sutra that deals explicitly with filial piety. There are
> several works on it, including my forthcoming article early modern
> vernacularization, which you can download
> here<https://www.academia.edu/5243139/Rebooting_the_Vernacular_in_17th_Century_Vietnam>.
>
> You probably already know of it, but Keith Taylor also discussed
> some of the issues you are interested in, in his (2002) article
> "Vietnamese Confucian Narratives" (in Rethinking Confucianism,
> Elman, Duncan, & Ooms, eds, pp. 337-369).
>
> Best wishes and happy new year,
>
> John
>
>
> On Fri, Jan 3, 2014 at 5:13 PM, Hoang Ngo
> <<mailto:ngohoang at gmail.com><mailto:ngohoang at gmail.com>ngohoang at gmail.com<mailto:ngohoang at gmail.com>>
> wrote:
> Hi Minna et all,
>
> I don't have any sources to offer you. But I want to add that the
> concept of "hi?u" in Buddhism was also a shifting discourse.
>
> In my research on the Buddhist revival, the concept of "hi?u" in the
> Buddhist context emerged during the 1930s and 1940s. At the time,
> the term "nhà Ph?t" was often used to refer to Buddhism. I interpret
> this term as "family/house/home of the Buddha." In this context of
> "family/house/home," the Buddha was not only the owner but also the
> father and mother. Thus, lay people (Ph?t t?) or "children of the
> Buddha" took on filial piety as part of their religious
> responsibility.
>
> I find the reworking of "hi?u" during the revival interesting
> because the revivalists, particularly in Hue, claimed that Buddhism
> could and should replace Confucianism as the new morality for
> Vietnam. They also claimed that Buddhism was in decline because of
> Confucianism (I can go on and on about the debate on the decline of
> Buddhism, but I just want to note that I see the revival as a
> Buddhist response to "epistemic anxiety" brought on by French
> colonialism).
>
> The concept of "hi?u" then became gendered during the 1950s. "Hi?u"
> or "báo hi?u" was mostly, if not strictly, used to refer to Vu Lan
> -- a Buddhist Mother's Day, so to speak. This was where the story of
> M?c Ki?n Liên saving his mother from hell (?) gained traction and
> became the symbol of "filial piety."
>
> I think that during the 1950s the revival was in a different phase
> with revivalists institutionalizing Buddhism and trying to apply
> Buddhism to social issues. This was when the term "nhà Ph?t" was
> replaced by "d?o Ph?t," and the Buddha was no longer a loving parent
> but rather a "doctor," a scientific figure, who could prescribe
> medicine to cure "ignorance" and "illness" brought on by colonial
> modernity. In a sense, Buddhism became an idea for social change,
> something bigger and beyond the family.
>
> Happy New Year. Take care.
>
> hoang
> PhD Candidate, History
> University of Washington - Seattle
Dear Professor Phan,
Thank you particularly for addressing the question of dating the changes in
"Confucianism" due to Buddhism in Vietnam/Southeast Asia referred to in the
Lainez quotation. So, I presume that it would be safe to say that in your
opinion these changes most likely occurred in the fifteenth century during
the Ming occupation.
On Fri, Jan 3, 2014 at 5:37 PM, John Phan <jdp49 at cornell.edu> wrote:
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