|
|
For earlier Newsletters, see our Project Archive. News of the site. Please forgive our long delay in updating the site. The press of the academic year overtook us, and we were scrambling just to keep up with our work. For those of you visiting the site in vain search of our translation of the Soto School Scriptures for Daily Services and Practice, it has been removed, save for the Table of Contents and Griff's Introduction. For the time being, the full text will be available only in the elegant printed version, which can obtained from International Division, Administrative Headquarters of Soto Zen Buddhism, 5-2, Shiba, 2-chome, Minato-ku, Tokyo 105 Japan. Soto Zen groups may order free examination copies. We have put up on the site the first of our Shôbôgenzô translations now appearing in the Soto journal Dharma Eye: Carl's version of the "Mountains and Waters Sutra" (Sansui kyô), from Dharma Eye number 9. In the same issue, Carl's somewhat maudlin account of his history with this text. Next up will be Stanley Weinstein's translation of "Getting the Marrow by Doing Obeisance" (Raihai tokuzui), which is scheduled to appear in Dharma Eye number 10 this summer. Stanley has translated the longer version of the text, which contains a juicy criticism of Japanese Buddhist male chauvanism. Status report. The big news this year was the publication of the project's translation of Soto School Scriptures for Daily Services and Practice (Sôtôshû nikka gongyô seiten). Carl and especially Griff, who was in charge, spent many hours in Tokyo working with the press to prepare the copy; we hope we caught most of the problems, but do let us know if you find errors, and we'll try to correct them in the next printing. The primary purpose of the translation was to provide a standard liturgical text for use in those ceremonies where various Soto groups come together in a single setting. It will be interesting to see to what extent this version, developed by consensus of representatives from most of the American groups, comes to supersede the various English versions already in use in American Soto communities. As announced in our last report (Summer 2001), we held a translation workshop last summer at the Stanford Center for Buddhist Studies, attended by Carl, Griff, Stanley Weinstein, and William Bodiford. The group discussed progress to date, plans for future work, and recommendations to the Editorial Board. All of us agreed that it would be very helpful (and fun) if we could arrange to meet every year to go over the texts together. At the Board meeting, to be held in early July, we'll be discussing this idea, as well as our request for permission to put up some additional online translations, beyond those currently approved for the site. Meanwhile, we've continued our work on the texts. Griff is hoping to finish his translation of the Soto school ritual manual (Sôtôshû gyôji kihan) during the coming year, for publication by the Sotoshu in 2003. Carl, Stanley, and Will are plugging away on the Shôbôgenzô and will be presenting several new translations to the Board this summer. As the translations pile up, the work of editing them for eventual publication becomes an increasing part of our task. We would like to express our appreciation to the Stanford Center for Buddhist Studies for making money available this year for an editorial assistant, Stanford doctoral student Sarah Fremerman, to help Carl with the preparation of the manuscripts. This page. We'll try to update this editors' page every few months with news of the project. Earlier versions will go into our Archive directory. In between updates, we'll put notices of new developments on the home page. And you can receive e-mail notification of project news by joining our mailing list. Carl
Bielefeldt |