Translations and Studies in Western Languages
Few Western scholars have explored the Prajñāpāramitā literature. The Russian scholar Eugène Obermiller (1901–35) was one of the first to edit and translate Sanskrit and Tibetan Prajñāpāramitā texts, but had a tragically short life beset by a severe handicap.
The great pioneer of the Prajñāpāramitā literature in the West was the Anglo-German scholar Edward Conze (1904–79), and he has been the only translator (until now) courageous enough to tackle the sheer immensity of this sūtra, from the Sanskrit of which—partly, as he used as his sources the two other long sūtras, too—he produced The Large Sūtra on Perfect Wisdom in 1975. Rather than a full translation, it is a one-volume abridgement of the content of the three long sūtras, structured using the more numerous chapter breaks and titles of the Eighteen Thousand, and arranged (indeed sometimes rearranged) according to the divisions and subdivisions drawn from the Abhisamayālaṃkāra, which are found as headings and subheadings throughout the translation.
Conze had forthright views on most topics, and his perspective on the Prajñāpāramitā literature was one that overwhelmingly emphasized the doctrinal content over its literary qualities. In his preface to another of his translations, that of the Eight Thousand, he says:
“A literal, word by word translation of the Prajñāpāramitā is tiresome to read, and practically unintelligible to anyone who does not have the Sanskrit original before him. If ever there was a case where the letter kills the spirit, it is here. The Sūtra itself was meant to be memorized, the translation is meant to be read. Lengthy repetitions, stereotyped phrases, and the piling up of synonyms were of great assistance to memory, but they irritate and distract the modern reader, and obscure from him the meaning of the text.”
Whether one agrees with this view or not, the result is that his combined translation of the long sūtras forms a useful and practical guide to the content of these works, yet is far from representing in English the full range of qualities that are to be found in the Sanskrit and Tibetan texts themselves.
The outstanding work of the late Stefano Zacchetti, mainly from Chinese and Sanskrit sources, certainly deserves mention. A recent set of volumes by Karl Brunnhölzl has also been a welcome addition to the available material in English, providing a wealth of detailed information and translated commentaries, mostly centered on works related to the Abhisamayālaṃkāra. Our own translator Gareth Sparham, a decade before embarking on his recent work for 84000 on the sūtras themselves, published an important four-volume translation of the Abhisamayālaṃkāra with the commentaries of Haribhadra and Vimuktisena.