Modern-Day Translations of the Eight Thousand
The few translations of the Eight Thousand into modern languages that have been made are mostly incomplete and not readily available. The first and most complete was a French translation made by Eugène Burnouf between 1837 and 1839 from two of the manuscripts sent from Nepal by B. H. Hodgson. Burnouf lamented that he had been unable to consult any commentarial works, but nevertheless produced a painstaking and remarkable translation, comparing his manuscripts with others of the Twenty-Five Thousand and Hundred Thousand-Line sūtras and with the Tibetan text. Of the Eight Thousand’s thirty-two chapters, he completed the first twenty-seven and most of the twenty-eighth, but apart from a few extracts his translation remained unpublished until recently.30
Eleven chapters were translated into German by Max Walleser in 1914, and a number of single chapters or other short excerpts in French and German were published in the first half of the twentieth century. A complete translation of the Sanskrit into Japanese by Kajiyama and Teruyoshi was published in 1974.
Meanwhile, in 1958, the great pioneer of Prajñāpāramitā studies in English, Edward Conze, first published his influential and widely read translation of the text. Although it is complete in the sense that it covers all thirty-two chapters, Conze chose to omit or paraphrase much of the repetitive detail that is characteristic of the original, but that he considered would be an impediment to modern readers. As we shall discuss further below, in this respect, valuable though it has been, his translation is significantly less than a complete one.