Telling infelicities and hidden intelligibility: The "Interlingual Questions" from the Samyé Debate in Tibet (792–794)
- This article revisits two texts relevant to the so-called Samyé Debate, which presumable took place in the late 8th century between Chinese monk Moheyan (fl. second half of 8th c., 摩訶衍) and his Indo-Tibetan opponents. They are the \(\textit {Dunwu dasheng zhengli jue}\) 頓悟大乘正理决 [The Judgement on Sudden Awakening Being the True Principle of Mahāyāna] in Chinese and the Tibetan equivalent of the "old questions" and Moheyan’s answers. This article argues that lexical and grammatical infelicities can be used to reveal the interlingual nature of the questions and answers in these two texts. Whereas Moheyan’s answers were originally composed in Chinese and translated into Tibetan, the questions were originally formulated in Tibetan and translated into Chinese. The language barriers did not cause a breakdown in communication, as the two sides of the debate could manage to understand each other well via Tibetan as a written language.
| Author: | Yi DingGND |
|---|---|
| URN: | urn:nbn:de:hbz:294-86698 |
| DOI: | https://doi.org/10.46586/rub.br.203.178 |
| Series (Serial Number): | BuddhistRoad Paper (1.4) |
| Document Type: | Article |
| Language: | English |
| Date of Publication (online): | 2022/03/03 |
| Date of first Publication: | 2022/03/02 |
| Publishing Institution: | Ruhr-Universität Bochum, Universitätsbibliothek |
| Tag: | BuddhistRoad, Project ID: 725519 |
| Pagenumber: | 47 |
| Note: | BuddhistRoad, Project ID: 725519 |
| Relation (DC): | info:eu-repo/grantAgreement/EC/H2020/725519 |
| Institutes/Facilities: | Centrum für Religionswissenschaftliche Studien (CERES) |
| Dewey Decimal Classification: | Religion / Andere Religionen |
| OpenAIRE: | OpenAIRE |
| Licence (English): |  Creative Commons - CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 - Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International |
