Abstract
The Diamond Sutra (Vajracchedikā-prajñāpāramitā-sūtra) is one of the most popular and important Buddhist scriptures which has been translated by six different translators. Among them, Dharmagupta’s translation of the Diamond Sutra is a word-for-word literal translation, without paying attention to the Chinese morphology and sytax. Zacchetti (1996) called Dharmagupta’s translation “unfinished”. In this paper we have discussed the various rendition techniques used specifically by Dharmgupta to demonstrate that his translation of the Diamond Sutra is a superliteral translation with every single word of the Sanskrit text translated into Chinese. Sanskrit is a highly inflected language while Chinese is an analytic language in that each word consists of a single morpheme. Dharmagupta translated the Sanskrit suffixes using Chinese characters as if they were suffixes. In Section 2, three kinds of nominal inflections are illustrated: the masculine/feminine singular accusative suffix -am is translated using the Chinese character 邊 /pen/ ‘border, boundary’; the dative plural suffix -bhyas is translated by the Chinese character 等 /tong/ ‘a plural indicator; grade, rank’; and the locative suffixes are translated by the Chinese character 中 /trjuwng/ ‘in; center, middle’. In Section 3, four different verbal inflections are shown: the first person singular present suffix -mi is translated as 我 /nga/ ‘I, me’; the gerund (or absolutive) suffixes -ya and -tvā are translated as 已 /yi/ ‘stop, cease, end; already’; the gerundive suffix -tavya is translated as 應 /Ɂing/ ‘should, ought to’; and the simple future suffixes -sya and -iṣya are translated as 當 /tang/ ‘ought to, should, must’. The suffixes are translated into separate Chinese characters which, unlike Sanskrit suffixes, are independent morphemes. That is why many readers can not comprehend Dharmagupta’s translation of the Diamond Sutra, and why some scholars even punctuate their translations into wrong phrases.