Problems of Ascription in the Corpus of Paramārtha: A Computational Philological Study

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Paramārtha (6th century) was one of the greatest translators of Buddhist scriptures into Chinese. The corpus of “translations” ascribed to him is of great significance for the history of Buddhist texts and doctrines both in India, and in China. However, this corpus is riddled with problems relating to the ascription and nature of the texts. The received corpus certainly contains several false ascriptions; other texts are in fact not translations at all, but rather, were composed in China; and, by analogy to other similar cases, it is possible that other texts, in fact by Paramārtha, are hidden in the modern canon under ascriptions to other translators. This project will systematically address these problems, using a suite of computational philological tools I have developed over the past decade, and associated philological methods, the worth of which has already been demonstrated in a series of publications. The project will produce three interrelated studies: (1) An analysis of traits of style (terminology, phraseology) distinctive of the corpus, and a critical reassessment of questions of ascription on that basis. (2) A finer analysis, within the corpus, for stylistic distinctions marking different types of texts, with the aim of clearly differentiating between translation and original passages, and pinpointing the provenance of the original passages. (3) A second finer analysis, again within the corpus, differentiating texts produced in different chronological phases of Paramārtha’s translation activity, and associated with the varying composition of his translation group over time. I here apply for funding to employ a doctoral researcher at 0.65 for three years to achieve this work.