The world in two words: binomials in two English translations of the "Lotus Sutra"

The Lotus Sutra (or Lotos Sutra) is a very important book for Buddhists because it claims to report the teachings of Buddha (Siddharta Gautama), the founder of Buddhism. It seems to go back to the 3rd century B.C., but English translations were only made from the late 19th century onwards, the two most recent ones by Watson (1993) and Reeves (2008). Judging from those two versions, the Lotus Sutra is not only a religious, but also a strongly rhetorical text, and binomials (word pairs) are one of the rhetorical figures that are frequently employed; a few examples are: births and deaths, clean and spotless, receive and retain. The binomials used by Watson and Reeves are in the focus of the present study. Among other things I give a brief defi nition of binomials (which can be extended into multinomials, such as birth, old age, sickness, and death) and provide a sketch of scholarship on binomials. I discuss their formal properties, e.g. their word-classes (mainly nouns, less frequently adjectives and verbs), the connection of their elements (mostly and, less frequently or), their basic structure as well as extended and reduced structures, and their morphological makeup. As far as their etymology is concerned, there are combinations of native words (births and deaths, body and mind), loan-words (causes and conditions, receive and retain), and combinations of loan-word plus native word (supreme and wonderful, soft and gentle). As far as meaning is concerned, there are three main groups, i.e. binomials that show synonymy (fine robes and superior garments, joy and delight) or antonymy (births and deaths, body and mind, good and bad); or various kinds of complementarity (leader and teacher, soft and gentle, etc.); I also discuss cultural aspects of binomials. Furthermore I look at the sequence of the elements and factors that determine or infl uence that sequence. The comparison of Watson and Reeves also shows that frequently one translator uses a binomial where the other does not, and even in passages where both have a binomial the wording is often different, but there are also some instances where both translators use the same binomial.