ལས་ཀྱ་རྣམ་པར་འགྱར་བ་ཞས་བྱ་བའ་ཆས་ཀྱ་གཞང notes.98

notes.98

98. Feer, in his French translation of Transformation of Karma, uses the Sanskrit reconstruction samyaggata to render Tibetan yang dag par gshegs pa, whereas the standardized rendering of Sanskrit tathāgata is de bzhin gshegs pa (Sakaki 3). Feer (1883, 257, n. 2) comments: “ ‘He who has come, once and for all,’ one of the epithets of the Buddha. I use the Sanskrit word which corresponds to the Tibetan term of our text. It seems to me preferable to a translation that could otherwise only be bizarre.” (“ ‘Celui qui est venu réellement, venu une fois pour toutes,’ une des épithétes du Buddha. J’emploie le mot sanskrit auquel correspond le terme tibétain de notre texte. Il me paraît préférable à une traduction qui ne pourrait être que bizarre.”). However, as far as we know, samyaggata is not usually used as an epithet of the Buddha in Indic Buddhist texts (in the Sanskrit and Pāli texts we have searched, samygaggata is exclusively an adjective). The Sanskrit adjective samyaggata (Pāli sammaggata) generally means “behaving properly,” or “(being) of correct or perfect conduct.” In our interest to preserve the text’s idiosyncratic character, we would have liked to adopt Feer’s very original choice of samyaggata for our translation. However, we chose Tathāgata instead, which is what one would expect in the Sanskrit original.