Russian language as a means of interpreting Buddhist cultural heritage: creating target-orientated vocabulary

Abstract

Russian Buddhist scholars face the daunting task of translating into Russian the main works of Buddhist heritage currently preserved in the languages of India (P ali, Sanskrit, Prakrit, the hybrid Sanskrit), in Chinese, Tibetan, Japanese, Korean, Mongolian and other languages of East and South Asia. Scholars of no country have so far coped with this task. With regard to the Russian Foederation, Buddhism is the historical religion of several peoples who live there and occupies the minds of literally millions of Russian speakers. Regardless of the fact, that translation of the Buddhist heritage into Russian has been conducted for the last 200 years, one can say that the scholars who deal with this task are still only going through a stage of preparation. Nevertheless, the task of translating into Russian main works of Buddhist heritage was set at the Conference of Buddhist Text Translators, which was held at the Institute of Oriental Studies of the Russian Academy of Sciences (Moscow) in November 2018 during the celebration of the 200th anniversary of the Institute (November 6–9, 2018).