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“And what is birth? Whatever birth, taking birth, descent, coming-to-be, coming-forth, appearance of aggregates, & acquisition of [sense] spheres of the various beings in this or that group of beings, that is called birth. [MN 141.11 translation by Thanissaro Bhikkhu]
On a sleepless night, not long ago, I went out to visit my old friends at Buddhism Without Boundaries and came across a topic called “Learning Pali” in which one poster asked why the person who started the thread would learn Pali. The suggestion was that in order to do a better translation than those we already have, one would have to understand Pali better than the scholars themselves.
I puzzled over the objection I felt for a while, turning various possibilities over: What if the scholar was great with grammar but had no grace or style in English, but the one seeking a “better translation” wrote beautifully and concisely? And is the assumption that when one does a translation, there’s no peeking at anyone else’s versions allowed, so that our newcomer couldn’t try to locate problems in the new translation by looking at the expert’s old translations? And how do we ever come up with a great new translator if we are too intimidated by scholarship to even start down that road?
But it turns out that my strongest argument for having a go at it is that it may just be that the translations we look at are made with one specific understanding of what the words should be saying in mind, and there is a possibility that this isn’t accurate. The only way we can ever know if this is so is to do what the Buddha suggests we do — go for direct experience: take a closer look.
With any language — never mind one from more than two millennia ago — there is lots of wiggle room, lots of flexibility in word meanings, so we aren’t likely to get to absolute certainty on any particular point, but there is really very little to gain (except preservation of the status quo) from not even taking the time to look.
Because a particular set of phrases gets brought up repeatedly by the people I encounter in conversations about “what the Buddha taught” — and because I could almost interpret the existing translations in terms of my understanding, but not quite — I decided to have a closer look at the Pali that underlay the words.
It turns out it was worth doing.
The translation by Thanissaro Bhikkhu that appears above is somewhat different than the one I worked with, which is the one by Bhikkhus Nanamoli and Bodhi in The Middle Length Discourses of the Buddha:
And what, friends, is birth? The birth of beings into the various orders of beings, their coming to birth, precipitation [in a womb], generation, the manifestation of the aggregates, obtaining the bases for contact — this is called birth.
It was that “precipitation [in a womb]” that pushed at my awareness, a catalyst to inspire me to have a closer look. What, I wondered, was in the Pali that suggested that this was specifically a birth in a womb? That and the “obtaining the bases for contact” nailed the meaning as a physical birth.
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