Found in Translation

Whe n Me aning Morphs in Translation
The Hebrew phrase tohu va vohu (
) in Genesis 1:2 originally meant formless (tohu) and
empty or void (vohu), in reference to the state of things before creation. These terms also appear in
Isaiah 34 :11 and Jeremiah 4 :23. However, the phrase eventually migrated into other languages and
took on new meanings. For example, in French today, the term tohu-bohu means chaos or confusion.
Tohuwabohu in German has the same meaning, as does tohuvabohu in Estonian and Hungarian.
Indeed, the phrase has evolved to mean chaos in modern Hebrew as well, even though the original
intended meaning was clearly different. Later scholars who translated this term tried to emulate
some of its original Hebrew flavor by employing rhyme, such as Irrsal und Wirrsal (in a 1954
German translation by Buber and Rosenzweig) or by using alliteration, such as welter and waste (in
a recent English translation by Robert Alter). In other words, in the process of moving across
languages, the meaning of tohu va vohu was transformed from “emptiness and nothingness” to
“chaos,” which many would say are complete opposites.
Scripture Translation: No Holy Book Required
It’s not surprising that religious translation in the Western world tends to focus

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primarily on Christian translation, as exemplified by St. Jerome. But what
about other religions? Do religions other than the Abrahamic “book” religions
—Judaism, Christianity, and Islam—lack scriptures to translate? Far from it.
Take Buddhism, practiced today by approximately half a billion people
throughout the world. Buddhism has a large multilingual following with a long
history of translation that has contributed greatly to its success as a major
world religion.
If not for its translations, the vast majority of Buddhist scriptures would
have been lost when India’s Muslim rulers destroyed many of the original
Sanskrit writings in the late twelfth century. Fortunately, by that time, Buddhist
monks in Tibet and China had completed major translation projects into the
classical forms of Tibetan and Chinese. However, today those texts are
understandable to only a select few. As a result, less than 5 percent of the
Tibetan texts and only 15 percent of the Chinese texts have ever been translated
into modern languages.
An ambitious new undertaking may rise to the challenge, known as the
84000 project (84000 is an auspicious number in Buddhism, symbolizing the
infinity and vastness of Buddhist teachings). The project’s ambition is to
translate all Buddhist scriptures from Tibetan and classical Chinese into
modern languages, primarily English, within the next hundred years—a long-
term goal indeed. At this point, only about 4 percent of the first of many stages
is complete.
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It is interesting that these texts all stem from only one school of Buddhism,
the Mahayana school, which already has significantly more translated material
in Western languages because it has attracted the most religious interest in the
West. Theravada Buddhism, the form of Buddhism followed in most of
Southeast Asia, has seen significantly less translation effort. The sheer size of
the task—many individual Buddhist texts are longer than the Bible—makes it
too daunting to find anyone ready to commit to such a Herculean undertaking.
Buddhism expert Kate Crosby describes one reason for this slow pace of
translation: After learning the minimum of four languages necessary to read
the largest Buddhist canons, textual scholars often try to master up to five other
regional languages to adequately access other Buddhist scholarship. By the
time they’ve learned those languages to a sufficiently high degree, Crosby
complains, their brains are simply too worn out to produce useful work.
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Another explanation for the story of the missing Theravada translations lies
in Western stereotypes of Buddhism, which long held that the Theravada form
of Buddhism was similar to the no-pomp-and-circumstance Protestantism,
while Mahayana Buddhism had more in common with the mystical and

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mysterious Catholicism. As a result, adherents simply didn’t translate
scriptures unless they matched their preferred and socially accepted version of
Buddhism. One kind of writing that fell under this kind of censorship included
sexually explicit texts, used to describe the penalty monks had to undergo for
sex-related sins. Scholars have written much about the censorship of
translators and translations, but this provides a telling example of translators
acting as their own censors.
Given all these problems with the translation of Buddhist texts, perhaps it’s
not surprising that in many monasteries in China, monks still chant Buddhist
texts in Sanskrit or P li by relying on phonetic transliteration with Chinese
characters, thus making any understanding of the text impossible. It’s a
remarkable similarity to the use of Latin liturgy in many Catholic churches
well into the 1960s. And it’s a compelling argument for the importance of
translation in ensuring Buddhism’s continuing survival.