THE Platform Sutra of the Sixth Patriarch is one of the Translations from the Asian Classics by which the Committee on Asian Studies has sought to transmit to Western readers representative works of the major Asian traditions in thought and literature. These are works which in our judgment any eduated man should have read. Frequently, however, this reading has been denied him by the lack of suitable translations. All too often he has had to choose between excerpts in popular anthologies on the one hand, and heavily annotated translations intended primarily for the specialist on the other. Here we offer translations of whole works, based on scholarly studies, but written for the general reader rather than the specialist.
At first glance the Platform Sutra may seem a poor example of this policy. It has already been translated several times, and most of the earlier versions have done with far less scholarly apparatus than Dr. Yampolsky has felt it necessary to include here. If we have risked some misunderstanding on these accounts, there are, we hope, good reasons for it. The first is that this work is a basic one in its own tradition, the Ch’an or Zen traditition, and so basic a text deserves frequent retranslation because it needs constant reexamination. Second, among the many religious “scriptures” it is one of the most cryptic and elusive, since it springs from a tradition which was loath to commit itself to writing. And third, as a consequence of this, its understanding has depended very much on the reader’s familiarity with the context. Dr. Yampolsky’s handling of it goes much further, we believe, in providing the reader with the relevant context, and should help to clear up many misconceptions and confusions that have surrounded the book.
We do not feel it out of place, therefore, to includes a lengthy and detailed historial introduction which contains information hitherto unavailable even to scholars, and also a critical edition of the text. Some readers may choose to make less use of these than others, but their inclusion hardly renders the translation itself less readable, any more than similar scholarly apparatus has detracted from the widely used Edgerton translation of the Gita. At the same time it must be acknowledged that what Dr. Yampolsky has striven to provide is the historical context of the Platform Sutra insofar as it can be reconstructed from documentary sources, not the “living” context so important to the Zen believer. The latter derives from a teaching tradition that stresses practical training and the direct personal guidance of a master—not the kind of thing one would look for in a book.