It’s been over a month since my last update on my translation work. I began the year with a general idea of updating my previous translations that needed polishing and correction, and I republished a much improved edition of Kumarajiva’s Diamond Sutra in February.
In March things changed somewhat when I rediscovered some of my translations from the Middle-Length Agama preserved at SuttaCentral. There has been work accomplished in recent years in translating the Chinese Agamas at BDK, which is encouraging. After some thought, I decided to move in a different direction and began work on updating the translations at SuttaCentral to support their open source philosophy. The first three sutras of the Middle-Length Agama have been given a fresh translation, and I have to say that the old translations were less than stellar. The references we have today compared to 2004, in addition to the experience I’ve gained since then, makes quite a difference.
I also experimented with social media over the past month and a half. I drafted translations of the Chinese Dharmapada and posted them in four or five verse segments with illustrations in a photo album on the Dharma Pearls Facebook page. The English needs polishing, but it’s been an interesting project. It’s unfortunate that Facebook doesn’t make publishing texts in coherent collections very easy. They do provide “Notes,” which are like individual web pages, but there’s no way to organize them. The photo albums are the only way I could find to present a text in a linear fashion.
Of course, all of this has caused multi-tasking overload, as I can only spend 1/3 of my time on these projects. When the middle of April arrived, I took some time to think about an overall strategy going forwards.
What I’ve settled on is to focus on texts in the Agama, Avadana, and Prajna divisions of the Chinese canon that either could use a new translation or aren’t likely to be translated. For the time being, this will mean continuing to work on the Middle-Length Agama, the Dharmapada, and the smaller perfection of wisdom sutras. That’s alot of material for one person working part-time, which means I’ll work on each in a rotating fashion.
I’ve also decided to cease any new translations to polish what’s been completed thus far and work on a publishing process. I’ll be working on publishing PDFs to my Patreon page to make it more valuable to anyone interesting in subscribing to my work. For the general public, I want to publish the translations as eBooks, too. This will be the main goal for May.
I hope everyone is having a good year so far. It’s been an interesting challenge here as I settle into a new home on the west coast and work on creative projects on a shoestring budget. Life is best lived when it’s challenging (in a good way), and we can give something back to the world that’s meaningful.
Dharma Pearls 