The Samye Debate and the Imperial Translation Project
composition: contestedauthorship: traditional
A Tibetan court decides between Indian gradualist and Chinese sudden-enlightenment Buddhism, and commits the empire to translating the Indian canon on standardised terms.
- a doctrinal choice made by royal decision rather than by consensus
- competing Tibetan and Chinese accounts of the same event
- a standardised translation vocabulary imposed by the state
- Indian works preserved in Tibetan after the Sanskrit was lost
Tibetan sources describe a debate at Samye monastery between an Indian master arguing that awakening comes through graduated practice and a Chinese Chan teacher arguing it is immediate, decided by the king in favour of the Indian position; Chinese sources give a different outcome, and modern scholarship treats the debate as at least partly a later construction. What is not in doubt is the consequence: Tibet organised a state translation programme with a standardised Sanskrit-Tibetan glossary, which preserved many Indian Buddhist works whose originals were later lost.
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