Ten Thousand What?

In a recent article on the character 運 (Why does Japanese use the same character for “luck” and “carry”?), I quoted a famous sentence from Dōgen, the thirteenth-century Zen master, in his masterwork Shōbōgenzō (正法眼蔵, “Treasury of the True Dharma Eye”—and hold on to that word “Dharma”):

自己をはこびて万法を修証するを迷いとす、万法すすみて自己を修証するを悟りとす。

Jiko o hakobite manbō o shushō suru o mayoi to su, manbō susumite jiko o shushō suru o satori to su.

Instead of busily trying to figure out for yourself what everything is, try letting things move at their own pace; they will figure it out for you.

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Today I want to look at just one word of that sentence: 万法 (manbō), which I translated above as “everything.” This one little word turns out to contain a particularly basic lesson of translation. Translating may be fading as a human endeavor, but the problem it exists to solve—how to represent something said in one language, in one culture, in one era, to readers in a completely different language, culture, and era—is not going anywhere.

万法 has two characters, so the obvious first move is to split it apart, translate the halves, and paste the results back together. The first character, 万 (man) means ten thousand. The second, 法 (hō), stands for dharma—and what that means is a question we will be spending some time on below. Pasting the translations of the halves back together gives us “ten-thousand dharmas,” and translators have actually published versions along these lines. But splitting, translating, and pasting is usually not a good way to translate. As a general rule, we should no more render 万法 this way than we should translate “doghouse” into Japanese as いぬの家 (inu no ie), the dog’s house. (Hold on to that “usually”—it will matter at the end.)

Let’s look at 万. The official version was 萬 until the postwar character simplifications. That old form appears to be wearing the “grass crown” (kusa-kanmuri)—the little two-sprout radical that tops plant characters like 花 (hana, flower) and 茶 (cha, tea). But the grass is a complete red herring. 萬 actually began life as a picture of a scorpion, and what looks like sprouting grass is the scorpion’s pincers. The ancient Chinese word for scorpion happened to sound like the word for ten thousand, so the character was borrowed for the number—and never given back. The scorpion eventually had to be issued a replacement character of its own (蠆—the same scorpion with a “bug” 虫 stuck on the bottom—which you will be relieved to hear you never need to learn).

Oracle script version of 萬—a scorpion

Since “ten-thousand dharmas” sounds strange, translators—while sticking with the split-translate-paste approach—have tried upgrading the halves separately. For the first half, a standard move is “myriad,” giving “myriad dharmas.” Now, “myriad” is a perfectly good English word, but it is not something we would ever say in everyday writing or talking. When was the last time you used it? Part of the pull is tradition: Chinese thought loves the phrase 万物, “the ten thousand things,” and that phrase has been a fixture of English since the first translations of the Tao Te Ching—so “myriad things” arrives sounding suitably classical.

A quick tour of the published translations of this Dōgen phrase shows the whole landscape. Tanahashi goes with “myriad things.” Others keep “myriad dharmas.” One has just “things,” which is attractive in its own way. One has “millions of things and phenomena”—but aren’t things phenomena? Nishiyama and Stevens apply my Rule of Bad Translation #2, which is simply to ignore the word. And some arrive at “all things.”

Does it matter that nobody today says “myriad”? That depends on your philosophy of translation. Remember that many of the essays (“fascicles”) in Shōbōgenzō are said to have been delivered orally by Dōgen before the assembly of monks, with an assistant taking notes and producing the written version. Even Genjō Kōan (現成公案)—the fascicle our sentence comes from, and a title whose translation is a can of worms I will not open today—appears to have been written out by Dōgen himself for a lay student, and it is in the relatively everyday Japanese of his time rather than in the scholarly Chinese used for formal Buddhist treatises. If Dōgen chose ordinary language, then rendering him in arcane, Buddhist-sounding English is a decision to make him sound less like himself. It would be more appropriate to translate him into relatively everyday English—without bungling the meaning.

Under that philosophy, the ten thousand has to go. The number was never literal anyway—万 works the way “a million” works when you say you have a million things to do. Japanese itself takes the same approach with its native word for the number, yorozu: an old word for ten thousand whose counting sense has faded, leaving only “all kinds”—the yaoyorozu no kami (八百万の神), literally the “eight million gods,” are simply all the Shinto gods there are. So 万 here means something like “the whole vast collection of”. We could try “various dharmas” or “many dharmas,” but those sound as though there might be many dharmas yet not all of them. So we might try “all dharmas,” or “every dharma,” or, for emphasis, “each and every dharma.”

But whatever we do with the ten-thousand half, the dharma part sticks in our throat. What does dharma mean, anyway? You could go ask your local Hindu, Buddhist, or Zen teacher. Fair warning: I am not a scholar of Eastern religions and am probably not the right person to talk about dharma, but in the interest of analyzing translation techniques I will give it a shot.

The Japanese character 法 by itself obviously means law—it is the 法 of 法律 (hōritsu, statute, law) and of 憲法 (kenpō, constitution). Why are people translating “law” as “dharma”? 法 is the character the Chinese patriarchs assigned to the Sanskrit word dharma when the scriptures brought from India began to be translated into Chinese in the second century CE. There is certainly a sense in which dharma means “law.” The word itself derives from the ancient Sanskrit root dhṛ, to uphold, support, or bear; the noun built on it means “that which upholds or supports.” Believe it or not, it is related to the English word “firm.” The connection with law is that the dharma is what supports—undergirds—reality: the cosmic order, the natural way of things, and by extension the moral duties that keep human life aligned with that order. In Buddhism, the teachings of the Buddha are dharma in exactly this upholding sense: they support the path of liberation, which is why Buddhists speak of “the Dharma” with a capital D.

But then why would Dōgen be talking about ten thousand laws, or myriad laws, or each and every law?

The reason is that later Buddhist thinkers adopted the word to mean something quite different—at least to Western minds: elementary phenomena, the tiny building blocks of reality. Each individual ontological unit of our world “holds”—upholds—its own character, and so each one is a dharma. If it seems strange that some random phenomenon could be a law, consider that each thing could actually be a cluster of mini-laws—the little regularities that define and uphold its nature. The word dharma, in other words, is extraordinarily polysemous (has multiple meanings): it can mean the cosmic law, the Buddha’s teaching, one’s moral duty, or the smallest constituents of experience. In the context of this particular line of Dōgen’s, it is a fair assumption that it means the individual elements of reality. And that hands us plain English at last: “phenomena,” or even just “things.” Paste the halves back together one final time and we get “myriad phenomena,” or—real English, finally—“all things”, which is where several of the published translators landed.

In my own translation above I went one step further, to “everything.” But lately I have come to doubt even that—not because it is too plain, but because it is too big. It is hard to imagine that Dōgen is really talking about figuring out everything, or about everything in the universe moving ahead to figure it out for you. Whatever figuring out is going on in this sentence is surely confined to the things in your own temporal and spatial neighborhood—the things you actually meet. That pushes me toward “all kinds of things.” Earlier I complained that “various” and “many” sound as though they cover some things but not all of them; it turns out that incompleteness is true to the situation, and the objection dissolves. And notice how the idiom behaves: when you say all kinds of things, you sound expansive without claiming the universe—which is exactly the middle ground this sentence needs.

Notice, too, what “all kinds of things” is made of: 万 translated, 法 translated, and the results pasted back together—the very strategy I was warning you about at the beginning. Split-translate-paste is usually a bad idea, but it is not forbidden. It fails when it is applied mechanically, and it works when each half has been made to answer for the meaning of the whole sentence. In translation there are no rules that cannot be broken, only choices that have to be earned.

Homework: Split-translate-paste failed for “doghouse” but succeeded, in the end, for 万法. Find a compound word in any language you know where the strategy works, and one where it produces nonsense, and one where there’s a single word in the target language that encompasses both halves. What separates the three cases?

Many of the kanji in this article are linked to their page in Kanjiism, the AI-based app for learning kanji (free for casual users). Click on them to visit that page.