The Dharma Torch Project translates the Chinese Buddhist scriptures as they have actually come down to us. Its main goal is not to reconstruct a lost Indian original, nor to rewrite an ancient translation so that it agrees with later Buddhist orthodoxy.
When translating a Chinese Buddhist text, there are at least three possible aims. A translator may try to recover the Indian-language text that once stood behind the Chinese version. They may try to express what the scripture is supposed to mean according to accepted Buddhist doctrine. Or they may try to show what the surviving Chinese text itself actually says.
This project follows the third approach.
These three approaches can all be legitimate, but they should not be confused. Even when modern scholarship can show with considerable confidence that an ancient Chinese translator misunderstood a Sanskrit word or passage, silently correcting that mistake changes the nature of the translation. The result would no longer be a translation of the surviving Chinese text. It would instead be a reconstruction based on Sanskrit manuscripts, Tibetan translations, parallel Chinese versions, and modern scholarship.
For this project, the surviving Chinese scripture is treated as a historical witness in its own right. The translation should remain faithful to that witness, rather than to a hypothetical original or to a doctrinal standard developed later.
An apparent mistranslation may also be valuable historical evidence. Unusual expressions in Chinese Buddhist texts can reveal how translators understood their source material, what kind of Indian or Central Asian text they may have used, and how the Chinese language first absorbed unfamiliar Buddhist ideas. They can also show how Indian concepts of the body, death, consciousness, and rebirth entered an already established Chinese cultural world.
Such expressions may help scholars understand the translation process itself. Early Buddhist translation was often not the work of one person quietly translating a Sanskrit manuscript word by word. It could involve foreign monks reciting a text, interpreters explaining it, Chinese assistants writing it down, and literary editors polishing the final wording. What appears to be an error may have arisen at any stage of this collaborative process.
A mistranslation can therefore have two different meanings at the same time. When compared with a Sanskrit text, it may be judged inaccurate. In the history of Chinese Buddhism, however, it remains a real and influential fact. There is no contradiction between these two judgments.
In some cases, an inaccurate translation may even have had greater historical influence than the original meaning. Chinese commentators, religious communities, ritual specialists, artists, and ordinary believers usually responded to the Chinese wording available to them, not to a Sanskrit meaning reconstructed by modern scholars. If a disputed expression shaped commentaries, doctrinal debates, ritual practices, Buddhist images, or popular beliefs, then its importance cannot be dismissed simply because it began as a translation mistake.
At the same time, the word “mistranslation” must be used carefully. A difference between a Chinese translation and a surviving Sanskrit version does not automatically prove that the Chinese translator made an error. The translator may have worked from a different Sanskrit recension that has since been lost. The source may have been written in Gāndhārī, another Middle Indo-Aryan language, or a Central Asian language rather than in the Sanskrit version known today. The text may have been explained orally or transmitted through an intermediate language. The Chinese version may preserve an earlier or later form of the scripture. The translation team may have deliberately shortened, interpreted, or rewritten the passage. The Chinese text may also have been damaged during later copying, while the surviving Sanskrit text may itself reflect later revision or Sanskritization.
For these reasons, the project uses terms such as “misreading” or “mistranslation” only when the linguistic, grammatical, phonetic, and textual evidence is strong.
The same principle applies to ancient expressions that later Buddhists might consider doctrinally awkward or nonstandard. Some early Chinese Buddhist texts use terms such as hunshen (魂神), meaning something like “soul” and/or “spirit,” in descriptions of death and rebirth. They speak of the “soul/spirit” surviving, going to another destination, or seeking another body.
To a modern reader familiar with the Buddhist teaching of non-self, such language may sound as though an enduring soul moves from one body to another. Later Chinese debates over whether the “spirit” is destroyed at death show that these words were not merely harmless stylistic choices. They could influence how Chinese readers understood consciousness, personal continuity, death, and rebirth.
This project therefore does not silently replace expressions such as “soul/spirit” with later, more doctrinally standard terms such as “consciousness” or “continuity.” If the ancient Chinese text says “soul/spirit,” the English translation should allow the reader to see that this is what the text says. For example, a sentence that literally states that the “soul/spirit does not perish and seeks another body” should not be rewritten as “the continuity of consciousness remains unbroken and takes rebirth according to karma.” The second version may sound more acceptable within later Buddhist doctrine, but it conceals the historical language and conceptual choices of the Chinese translation.
This project does not attempt to correct ancient translators on doctrinal grounds. Its purpose is not to make them say what they should have said. Its purpose is to let modern readers hear what they actually said—including their interpretations, choices, compromises, and mistakes.
Dharma Torch 