Preaching to the converted: D.T. Suzuki's Zen Buddhism as a case study of a microsociological model of translation

Abstract

Microsociology is the study of human behavior at the level of small social groups. One of its major themes is how social actors in a small social group setting will create their own group-specific value systems expressed through corresponding, group-specific signifiers. As such, microsociology offers a framework for analyzing how translators, as social actors, make the particular translation choices they do. In this paper I discuss one prominent microsociological model, that of Randall Collins. I ask how Collins complements but differs from Bourdieu, who has been influential in translation studies, and offer an example of how Collins's model can operate in translation studies with a case study of the Zen Buddhist English-language translation work of D.T. Suzuki (1870–1966). The study reveals how Suzuki's terminological choices and translation style were influenced by his social group – that is, by the network of contemporary intellectuals he associated with.

Keywords:

• translation of Buddhism
• D.T. Suzuki
• interaction ritual chains
• microsociology
• sociology of translation
• Randall Collins

Notes

1. Gideon Toury (1995/2000) makes similar points about the primacy of social norms in translation.

2. In Interaction Ritual Chains (2004, 184–9), Collins discusses various processes that can be studied to support this notion of a sociology of thinking: introspection; internalization (especially in childhood, as studied by Vygotsky among others); externalization (as in Goffman's study of inadvertent “response cries”); standard written formulations of intellectuals’ ideas; and variations in speeds and forms (e.g. image versus verbal) of thought in differing circumstances.

3. “Charged symbols” are not restricted to words; they can include patterns of textuality and rhetoric, or what Lefevere (1992, 26) would call “poetics” – which, he says, “can be said to consist of two components: one is an inventory of literary devices, genres, motifs, prototypical characters and situations, and symbols; the other a concept of what the role of literature is, or should be, in the social system as a whole”. Whilst Lefevere was referring to literature, this can be assumed to hold for other texts as well.

4. For example, an earlier translator of The Awakening of the Faith in the Mahayana Doctrine, Timothy Richard, translated the character for “Buddha” as “God” (see Ó Muireartaigh 2011).

5. “Soyen” was an alternative spelling for the name “Sōen”.

6. The same happened in reverse when Christian missionaries first entered Japan in the sixteenth century and Christian concepts were given Japanese Buddhist terms by Anjiro, the pioneering religious translator of that time. As Sangkeum Kim (2004, 81) writes, the “European-Christian terms were substituted by the Buddhist terms: Jôdo for paradise, tamashii for souls, tennin for angel, jikoku for hell, and Dainichi for God”.

7. This translation appears even in the movie The Last Samurai (2003):

 Nobutada: Please forgive, too many mind.

 Nathan Algren: Too many mind?

 Nobutada: Hai. Mind the sword, mind the people watch, mind the enemy, too many  mind … [pause] No-mind.

8. Suzuki elsewhere (2001, 89) states that munen and mushin are synonymous.

9. In Suzuki and Carus's Canon of Reason and Virtue, they comment that the “favorite phrase of Lao-tze's ethics, which furnishes a key to his mode of thought, reads wei wu wei, […] ‘act non-act’, and we have commonly translated the words by ‘act with non-assertion’” (Carus and Suzuki 1913/1991, 16).