There is no possibility of meeting Nanduttarā here, because she’s absent
February 1, 2021 4:39 PM   Subscribe

“The First Free Women” as literary fraud
The publisher’s blurb on the back cover begins, “Composed around the Buddha’s lifetime, the Therigatha (Poems of the Elder Buddhist Nuns) contains poems by the first Buddhist women. Here you’ll find princesses and courtesans, tired wives of arranged marriages and the desperately in love, those born with limitless wealth and those born with nothing at all. Their voices are all here.” There’s just one problem. Despite the book’s marketing, the Theris cannot be met in these pages. There are no “female voices” for us to hear. That’s because this book is not a translation of the Therigatha. It’s not even a “free translation” of the Therigatha. It’s a collection of original poems written by a contemporary American man.

Post by Bodhipaksa of the blog Fake Buddhist Quotes. Includes links to further discussion of the issues with the translation by Bhikkhu Akaliko and by Ayya Sudhamma, founder and abbess of Charlotte Buddhist Vihara, who brought this issue to light in a discussion forum post on Sutta Central
posted by Lexica (20 comments total) 32 users marked this as a favorite
 
OMG, this is infuriating on so many levels, especially because this is exactly the kind of book I would have picked up and absorbed without knowing the backstory. Thank you for sharing this.

I (a white American woman who grew up Christian) used to attend Buddhist meditation groups and classes, but slowly got turned off because so many of the white male "teachers" in the groups seemed to have no actual expertise, and no accountability or connection to any faith tradition, even if (especially if!) actual Buddhist temples with culturally Buddhist folks studying original texts were down the block. It was this sort of hodge-podge of lifted quotes and pop psychology with no historical context or academic study and seemed ripe for fraudsters and abusers (previously: Noah Levine). The times I have really benefited from Buddhist study and practice has been studying with groups of people who grew up culturally Buddhist.

I am sure there are many well-meaning and wonderful convert Buddhist teachers and groups and I don't mean to say they are all like this. But to have such a major U.S. publisher of Buddhist publications give credibility to this book, and promote it under the categories of "Introductions to Buddhism, Women in Buddhism, Feminine Spirituality"... ugh.
posted by rogerroger at 5:05 PM on February 1, 2021 [10 favorites]


"Whichever course
You plot in life
It does not matter.
But you think it does."
--Robert Frost
posted by muddgirl at 5:30 PM on February 1, 2021 [15 favorites]


"But if they were to change their policy and market the book in an honest way (tentative title, “Mansplaining the Early Buddhist Nuns”) it probably wouldn’t sell very well."
I hope there is enough pressure to get Shambala to pull the book. I've many friends who might feel they are learning something from a book like this, when the actual close translations (from the blog link) have much different meanings, better aligned with actual practice.
posted by winesong at 5:42 PM on February 1, 2021 [2 favorites]


"Place in microwave for two minutes" - Buddha
posted by firstdaffodils at 5:44 PM on February 1, 2021 [14 favorites]


I’ve always had suspicions concerning translations found in what are essentially pop spirituality books. My suspicions aren’t based on any hard evidence, they are just a feeling. Seeing these “translations” in the first link above made me cringe. This isn’t early Pali Buddhist writing, it’s just modern crap. How it got published is beyond me. So what would be the actual author’s motivation to do this? Clearly it wasn’t to provide some insight into early Buddhist spiritual practice and belief. What was Shambala’s (now a very ironic name) motivation to publish this? Probably it’s all about money. Spirituality and money have a very troubled history together across many religious traditions. That and abuse.
posted by njohnson23 at 7:40 PM on February 1, 2021 [1 favorite]


My suspicions aren’t based on any hard evidence, they are just a feeling.

You're right to trust that feeling. Draping platitudes in aboriginal or foreign trappings to give them an air of exotic universality is a longstanding tradition of Western religious evangelism. The "two wolves" story, for example, turns out to be an artifact of colonialism. The "camel's nose in the tent" faux-parable was originally penned by a Baptist pastor in an anonymous religious tract titled "Sin is a Bad Master"; it was first published in 1858 by the unimaginatively-named Religious Tract Society.

There are plenty of examples of this kind of misrepresentation out there, and you don't need to have seen much of the world, in my opinion, to start feeling suspicious when the stories you're hearing about some new-to-you cultural or spiritual outlook sort of sound and smell a lot like the stories you already know.
posted by mhoye at 8:59 PM on February 1, 2021 [11 favorites]


"camel's nose in the tent" Sounds like a double entendre of the mystical kind.

'Spirituality' and money have long had a trashy love affair. It is a popular item for the very affluent, when they've run the course of items to buy.

"There are plenty of examples like this and you don't need to have seen much of the world, in my opinion, to start feeling suspicious when the stories you're hearing about some new-to-you cultural or spiritual outlook sort of look a lot like the stories you already know." Yes, some platitudes are timeless (perhaps they stop being platitudes-), truly nearly everything has been created before.

Many people buy stories that mend their emotional/psych needs. This is where a great beast of data swapping and sniffing may rear it's sullen head. So, step lightly.
posted by firstdaffodils at 9:05 PM on February 1, 2021 [1 favorite]


I do want to call attention to this line of Vihara's though: "My expectation of a translation is that if all copies of the text were lost except this translation, the text would be saved by it."

What an outstanding way to express that idea.
posted by mhoye at 9:06 PM on February 1, 2021 [14 favorites]


Quoted in the second piece, the author is just so smack-on-the-nose a self-centered dude who fundamentally can't imagine why anything like the erasure of these women or the misrepresentation of scriptures should get in the way of his joy, since he means well.
I was very uncomfortable knowing I was a man trying to interpret these poems by our female ancestors. I was even more uncomfortable when I saw that the poems were coming out as adaptations or interpretations. I imagined that many people would find that offensive, very presumptuous of me. This was a daily battle for me.
and
There was a lot of doubt, you know, and I was like, well, what business do I have doing something like this? You know, and it’s, you know, I shouldn’t be doing it anyway. And like, what am I doing? It did take on a life of its own but people are, anyways, people are going to have feelings about it one way or the other, not everyone’s going to like that I did this or the way in which I did it. I have friends who were pretty hardcore monastics and some of them are going to think what I did wasn’t good. but at this point, I’m okay with that. It was definitely the coolest thing that I’ve been part of in my life and the thing I most had the most joy from. So yeah. You know, I wouldn’t take it back now…
posted by away for regrooving at 9:33 PM on February 1, 2021 [5 favorites]


people are going to have feelings about it one way or the other

That is some 20th century western yogic BS, and I would know, I am Californian. Equally applicable to supporting a sexually harassing guru or cutting in line at Starbucks.
posted by muddgirl at 9:59 PM on February 1, 2021 [7 favorites]


In an interview, Weingast says, “I had no training in this, and I wasn’t telling people what I was doing because the whole thing was so weird. But something allowed me to say: let’s see where this goes. I was in over my head, not properly trained to do this, but that allowed it to turn into whatever it wanted. I didn’t know what I was doing. I was certain of that. And I really think that’s the best…”

In his understanding, it’s good idea not to know what you’re doing. This allows for more creativity.
This is so typical of a certain kind of arrogant pseudo-intellectual. He wasn't qualified to do the thing he was doing, and somehow "that's the best." Ridiculous, even incoherent, on the face of it. But attractive to lazy people who want to be recognized as intellectuals without bothering to do the work of learning from others who have come before them so they don't repeat their mistakes. I think a certain type of "spiritual" mindset encourages this, but you see it everywhere. One other example that comes to mind is Sam Harris's book on morality, where he deliberately decided not to read or learn any ethics before writing it. We need to stop rewarding people for this type of thinking. Lack of training, lack of expertise, lack of experience, lack of knowledge, these aren't good things that help you be more "pure," they just make you less aware of what a bad job you're doing.
posted by biogeo at 11:02 PM on February 1, 2021 [16 favorites]


On a side note, Therigatha: Poems of the First Buddhist Women is available in actual translation from the Murty Classical Library of India, published by harvard University Press.
posted by JohnFromGR at 6:36 AM on February 2, 2021 [13 favorites]


" Lack of training, lack of expertise, lack of experience, lack of knowledge, these aren't good things that help you be more "pure," they just make you less aware of what a bad job you're doing." It would be critical if people just invested effort before embarking a project.

When you create work (especially creative work), it sends a message expressing, "this is what I feel should be brought into the world, and how." It's also a potential critique on many other artists, the creator is also stating, "this is how I define work."

If a person does this without thought to current work, or previous efforts, well, it shows.
posted by firstdaffodils at 6:40 AM on February 2, 2021


Shambhala Press, the publishers, responded reasonably well (...ok maybe to bare minimum standards?) to the open letter by the Fake Buddha Quotes people who wrote the first article.
> ...While the book has been widely praised across the spectrum of Buddhist teachers, including many monastics, lay figures, and teachers, we have recently been made aware of concerns about our positioning of this book. We are thankful for this feedback and are taking steps to remedy this.

> To that end, we are in the process of adjusting our online descriptions so that there can be no ambiguity around the question of translation...
The online description now omits any implication of "you will hear the women's voices here" and instead says stuff like "... Matty Weingast has reimagined this ancient collection and created a contemporary and radical adaptation..."
posted by MiraK at 8:02 AM on February 2, 2021


I read Red Thread Zen over the summer and this incident sort of hits home harder as a result:

There's the very up-front problematic bits, amply spelled out, and there's also the sense that perhaps Matty Weingast thought he was actually pushing back against "the bloodless and socially disengaged form of 'Buddhism' that is generally being gestated in the West, one that shades too readily into the blandest of bland self–help."

I think he was taking a bigger swing and hence achieved a much bigger miss.

Having done development editing in a publishing house, and having worked with acquisitions editors as a writer and editor, I wonder what the whole story is here, as a matter of (former) professional curiosity. I've worked with AEs who felt more like an internally-facing marketing arm with misaligned incentives, and I've worked on projects (secular press Dummy/Idiot-style books about Jesus and the Bible) where the staff was pretty hands off with the authors because they brought an audience and had lined up institutional authority to support their particular theological or interpretive bent. For hourly-rate, contracted editorial staff, a lot of stuff becomes harder to challenge in those conditions. I was bored and doing it for extra money when I fought a pair of boneheads in the Moody Bible College orbit over their constant use of the phrase "the Jews" in a series of passive-aggressive queries and responses that played out in comments in a Word 2003 doc being passed around over several months. It was like arguing with a reddit troll by telegram. I should look at later editions and see if a more amenable editor caved and put all the anti-semitism back in.
posted by mph at 8:27 AM on February 2, 2021


I'm irritated by this book's 'translation project' (???). The project of rendering Buddhist texts into English is still quite recent. Consider the BDK Tripitaka Project by comparison.

Shambhala also saying "oh but a lot of people with Buddhist bona fides liked this book" in the response letter seems really tacky to me. People liking a text doesn't mean a text is a well-executed translation. I can't say I'm surprised, but I wish people would do better.
posted by nixon's meatloaf at 9:37 AM on February 2, 2021 [1 favorite]


An ongoing problem:
The phenomenon of original poetry passed off as translation and artfully described as a “rendering” also applies to Thomas Byrom’s “Dhammapada,” which is more Byrom than it is Buddha, and which is responsible for a good many of the Fake Buddha Quotes found on this site.
posted by spamandkimchi at 11:28 AM on February 2, 2021 [2 favorites]




I happened upon a review for a new book this morning, Be the Refuge: Raising the voices of Asian American Buddhists by Chenxing Han. It may be of interest to others who visited this thread:

Despite the fact that two thirds of U.S. Buddhists identify as Asian American, mainstream perceptions about what it means to be Buddhist in America often whitewash and invisibilize the diverse, inclusive, and intersectional communities that lie at the heart of American Buddhism.

Be the Refuge is both critique and celebration, calling out the erasure of Asian American Buddhists while uplifting the complexity and nuance of their authentic stories and vital, thriving communities.

posted by rogerroger at 11:28 AM on February 3, 2021 [2 favorites]


Thank you, Cadge, for the link to the Lithub article. While the original link was thorough, the Lithub piece was a lot deeper and more useful.
posted by mph at 5:14 PM on February 4, 2021


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