多音介入管絃齊鳴的場景佛典語言研究的文化二重奏

A Inter-cultural Study of the Language of the Chinese Translations of the Buddhist Scriptures

在中土幾近千年的佛經翻譯工程裡，能夠從容於梵、漢兩種語文之中並成功地進行其間包括詞匯與語法在內的各項轉換手續，這一類著名的譯例固然極多；但是，其間「漢化」失敗的情況，其實也屢見不鮮。尤其是當某些梵語特有的語言現象出現於文本之際，譯家們往往會因於「漢語對應物」的缺如而被迫採取逐語直譯的方式來進行其翻譯工作。在前人所謂「五種不翻」的翻譯準則裡，學者之間對於「此地無故不翻」的研究，多半都只停留在詞匯層的考察，而對於句式層面上的不翻，則甚少著墨。然而，這種在句式層面上徒具漢語物質性外衣的直譯式文句，卻屢屢為不諳梵語的中土讀者帶來了理解上的困擾與疑惑。單從漢語本位的立場而強行解讀這些語句與詞匯的結果，固然形構了佛教「在地化」的契機，但它卻也同時遮蔽了這些外來語言現象的真實面貌，並從而阻礙了我們恰如其分地評估它們對漢語流變所造成的影響。本文擬以佛經開場套語之中「與……俱」的句式為例，並輔以「經行、身分」等佛經譯詞的詞義構成，而試圖說明在研究這一類經由翻譯手段而來的語句或詞匯之際，不論其研究目的是漢語本身的流變，或是佛教思想的在地轉折，目的語的專業功底以及本土思想的深厚學殖，固然是不可或缺的，但是源頭語的初步知識與佛教文化的基本素養，也同樣是研究過程裡兩項應該備足的重要資具。

In the long history of translating the Buddhist Canons from Sanskrit into Chinese, some translators succeeded in converting smoothly the Sanskrit Scriptures into Chinese both in the lexical and the syntactic aspects, but some failed. Their failure took place most often when there happened to be no “equivalent” in the Chinese language to the original Sanskrit texts. As a result, rigidly literal translation, the radical form of which was the so-called “five occasions of no translation”, became the ordinary technique in tackling such difficulty. And “there was no equivalent in the Chinese language” was counted as one of the “five occasions of no translation”: “No local existence, no translation”. Most studies of this special occasion concentrated on the lexical aspect, in negligence of the syntactic aspect. Such negligence leads to perplexities for readers with no or little knowledge of Sanskrit. To read those “not translated” texts merely with their mother language might give rise to the critical moment of the “localization” of Buddhism. But at the same time, it might also veil the reality of the relevant linguistic phenomena in Sanskrit, thus hinder our appropriate understanding of the influence of these linguistic phenomena on the change of Chinese language. This essay attempts to show, with the sentences in preludial discourse such as “together with” and words such as cavkramana, avga as examples, that: to investigate the change of the Chinese language or the localization of Buddhism through those sentences or words originated from the process of translation, a good knowledge of Sanskrit and the Buddhist culture is as important as a good knowledge of the Chinese language and thought.