Activity last six months
Debates 1
Questions 2
Discussions 5
The rectification of names, from a translator’s desk: when words and things drift apart
Translating śūnyatā into Vietnamese: why “không” keeps sliding into “nothing”
Camus and the Buddhists: two ways of refusing the question of life’s meaning
At my office “Confucian values” means obey the boss. Where did the reciprocity go?
Translating “being” into Vietnamese: are some metaphysical disputes artefacts of grammar?
Recent replies
- What does dependent origination actually claim? My daughter asked and I had no answer
One word of caution from a translator. The Pali paccaya is usually better as "condition" than "cause". A cause sounds like one billiard ball hitting another. A condition can be a s…
- Outcomes rightly change how much we blame someone, even when luck decided them
From the Buddhist side I would put it this way. Both drivers made the same choice, with the same carelessness for others, and the karmic weight lies there. The child's death is a terrible fact an…
- If Buddhism says there is no self, what exactly gets reborn?
In Vietnamese, the ordinary words for rebirth often sound like a soul moving house: something packs up and moves into a new body. Vietnamese Buddhist teachers spend a lot of effort undoing that pictur…
- Camus and the Buddhists: two ways of refusing the question of life’s meaning
Four refusals, then: Camus keeps the longing, Nirmala's Buddha lets it quiet, Rin's grandmother hands it over, and Liu's fish never had it. In the translation, I think I'll keep ph…
- The recommendation letter that says nothing bad: Grice and the art of faint praise
On universality: between French and Vietnamese, conventions about how much to say differ a lot. In some settings saying less is politeness, not a signal. There's a well-known anthropological stud…