Meaningful Way Sutra
義足經
Yì Zú Jīng
Alternative translation:
Walk in Right Conduct Sutra
Literal translation:
Yì =
meaning, morality or right conduct.
Zú =
foot or to walk.
Jīng =
scripture or classical work.
Discussion: The Pali parallel Atthakavagga can be translated as
Chapter of Eights. Whilst the Sanskrit parallel Arthavargīyasūtra could be translated as
Meaningful Chapters Sutra.
In his 1947 translation P. Bapat translated the Yì Zú into Indian Prakrit, giving it the title of
Arthapada. He hypothesised this maybe due to a mistranslation of the Sanskrit title of the sutra or that Zhi Qian changed the wording to emphases a more moralistic tone than original intended by the Prakrit.
However, with the discovery of sutras from the buddhist canon in Gandhari, including fragments of the Arthapada, we can know shed light on what the original Prakrit title. The original Prakrit could have indeed been Arthapada and was not then a mistranslation. As reported in,
From Birch Bark to Digital Data:Recent Advances in Buddhist Manuscript Research 2009, The PhD dissertation of Dr Baums, “A Gāndhārī Commentary on Early Buddhist Verses...” has shown
“the authentic Gāndhārī term...can now be established as Arthapada” (Harrison & Hartmann, 2014 see footnote p.61). It would seem Zhi Qian did accurately translate the Prakrit words
artha and
pada, and so Bapat’s hypotheses as to the title being mistranslated from Sanskrit or perhaps changed by Zhi Qian was in the end incorrect.
In Prakrit
artha can be translated as:
meaning, purpose or goal, whilst
pada can mean
foot, walk and way. With the discovery of the Gandhari Arthapada and Zhi Qian's translation of the Prakrit title into Chinese as
Yi = meaning and
Zu = foot, further lends weight to the hypotheses that the Prakrit he was translating from was in fact Gandhari.
Also in Sanskrit
pada also carries the meaning of
verse as in the basic metric unit of poetry/song typically consisting of one line of verse as part of a four-line stanza. Interestingly this close association with foot/walking and verse/metre can be found in English usage, as in the case of a musician being asked to keep in
step with the beat/metre of the music (see wikipedia,
prosody).
.
Finally, the purpose of this translation is not to try and reconstruct and translate the original Prakrit but rather to translate the Chinese parallel into modern English and so I have translated the sutra title as the
Meaningful Way, nethertheless I feel this does get close to the meaning of the Gandhari title as well.
Bibliography
