Tricycle | Awake in the World

Dr. Peter Masefield belongs to that rare breed of scholars who thrive on translating ancient Buddhist texts into English. An Englishman from Birmingham who has spent much of his adult life in Asia and Australia, Dr. Masefield has translated a number of texts for the Pali Text Society, the Oxford-based organization that pioneered the study and translation of Theravada Buddhist texts in the West over a hundred years ago.

His translations include the commentary on the Vimanavatthu, a collection of stories describing the heavenly delights that await supporters of the community of monks. The Vimanavatthu is one in a larger collection of texts that make up the Sutta Pitaka, the overall collection of discourses of the Buddha and of some of his immediate disciples. The Sutta Pitaka, together with the Vinaya Pitaka and the Abhidhamma Pitaka, constitute the Tipitaka, or the Pali canon. According to the Theravada tradition, the Pali canon records the complete teachings of the historical Buddha. Depending on how you count them, there are some forty-five separate texts in the canon, some quite short, and others filling several printed volumes. Each canonical text is explained and interpreted by a commentarial text, often much longer than the text that it explains.

At first meeting, Dr. Masefield, a tall, lanky man of about sixty years, may seem a fragile and eccentric scholar, isolated and protected among his books. With a little prompting, however, he will tell you, with sparkling eyes and a keen wit, of adventures in places ranging from Indonesia to Korea to the Indian subcontinent: stories of poisonous snakes, lethal falling coconuts, and drunken bats, or of his bout of elephantiasis after climbing Adam's Peak in Sri Lanka to see the footprint of the Buddha. What he saw was the outline of a foot sketched in a slab of concrete that protected the actual imprint and the precious stone that held it.

As a young man with a general interest in all things Indian, Dr. Masefield spent several months traveling—often hitchhiking—in India and Sri Lanka. The experience inspired him to study Indian religions at university back in England. While working on his Ph.D. at Lancaster, he returned for two years to Sri Lanka, where he taught himself the Pali language. Living and studying in Buddhist lands gave Dr. Masefield a perspective unusual among Western Buddhist scholars, and his 1986 book, Divine Revelation in Pali Buddhism, was ahead of its time in recognizing that there is more to the Buddhism of the Pali canon than the rational and scientific aspects that Western scholars so often emphasize.

Dr. Masefield is currently a lecturer at Mahachulalongkorn Buddhist University in Bangkok and is consulting on the editing of previously unpublished palm-leaf manuscripts of Pali texts. I interviewed Dr. Masefield at his home, a small apartment overlooking a quiet, tree-lined lane in Bangkok. Settling into his ample sofa, we discussed translation. As the light faded and evening became night, Dr. Masefield would occasionally leap up and reach for a book from among the piles that graced the television cabinet, in order to illustrate the details of his craft.

–Stephen A. Evans



Dr. Masefield, your specialty is translating Pali into English. What is Pali? Pali is a vernacular form of Sanskrit spoken in northern India around the time of the Buddha. Strictly speaking, however, the term Pali does not refer to a language. Rather, the term has traditionally been used to denote the Theravada canon as opposed to the commentaries. Hence one speaks of the "Dhammapada-pali" to distinguish that canonical text from the "Dhammapada-atthakatha," the commentary on that same Dhammapada. Traditionally, the language of both canon and commentary is Magadhi, the dialect of the region of Magadha, in which the Buddha spent much of his time. However, perhaps as a result of some early misunderstanding amongst scholars in the West, it has become fashionable to use the term Pali to denote the language.

Pali, or Magadhi, then, is a dead language? It's a dead language in the sense that it is not spoken anymore, but it is still used in the Theravada Buddhist traditions of Southeast Asia, whose texts are preserved in that language.

And the Pali Text Society has translated those texts? The PTS has translated most of what we call the Pali canon, those books whose contents are attributed to the mouth of the Buddha, whereas there is a very wide body of commentarial material, very little of which has been translated.

But if the words of the Buddha have been translated, do we really need the commentaries? The commentaries help us understand the teachings of the Buddha. For example, they serve in some ways as a dictionary or thesaurus. They explain the meanings of the words in the Pali canon itself and, indeed, the various Pali-English dictionaries are compiled, in large part, on the basis of the commentaries.

Didn't the commentaries come much, much later? Why should we trust the explanations of someone who lived a thousand years after the Buddha? Well, one thousand years later is still fifteen hundred years closer to the Buddha than we are now. But this is to misunderstand the commentarial tradition. The Buddhist tradition was, from its beginning, oral. Various portions of the Pali canon were put together as recitations at the First Council following the death of the Buddha. Now, the canon is quite large—in print it fills some fifty volumes. This was all memorized and passed on orally by monk-reciters known as bhanakas.

So the teachings of the Buddha were not written down at the time? That's right. In the early period you could not just go to the library and pick up the section of the Pali canon that you might be interested in. Instead, you would seek out the services of the group of bhanakas charged with memorizing that portion of the Buddha's teachings. It may well have been that certain parts of the teachings were not immediately clear. The expert on that area of the teaching, the bhanaka, would then have provided explanations, or partial commentaries.

So the bhanakas memorized the texts, and then, when they recited them for someone, would perhaps explain some parts of the texts. Then those explanations were also memorized, and passed on along with the text? That's right.

When was it finally written down? Well, memorization and recitation continue to the present day, but both the canonical and commentarial material were finally written down in Sri Lanka around the first century before or after Christ. The commentarial material continued to expand, and by the fifth century was so vast that it no doubt required systematization. The point, though, is that the commentaries are not the views of fifth-century authors. Rather, they are compilations and summaries of previously existing commentarial collections that had grown up along with the transmission of the canon from the time of the Buddha.

If I understand what you said about the commentaries explaining the words in the canon, when a translator of the canon comes across words and phrases he does not understand, he or she goes to the commentaries. Yes, and often the commentaries may offer more than one interpretation of difficult words and phrases, all of which must be taken into consideration.