Studia Koszalińsko-Kołobrzeskie

In this article, we have proposed an alternative, interreligious translation and commentary on Ecclesiastes 1:1–11 from the perspective of Buddhist philosophy. When translating and commenting on Ecclesiastes 1:1–11, we did not base ourselves on the philosophy of one particular branch of Buddhism. Reference was made to ideas that are present in both Theravada Buddhism and Mahayana, bearing in mind that in individual branches of this religion they have specific accents and sometimes play a slightly different role. The proposed translation leads to two important conclusions related to the process of interreligious dialogue. First, in literary works representing different religious and cultural systems, one can find ideas that are similar to each other. On the one hand, it facilitates the translation process, because we introduce some similar concepts in place of others. However, we must remember that even these seemingly similar ideas function in completely different social, historical, cultural and religious contexts. In the case of Ecclesiastes 1:1–11, such a concept that immediately evokes certain associations with Buddhist philosophy is the Kohelet hăbel/hebel (“evanescence”, “vanity”), which we decided to render by two similar concepts, i.e. the Sanskrit term śūnyatā (“emptiness”) and the Pali dukkha (“something unsatisfactory”, “suffering”). Secondly, the challenge for this kind of translation and commentary is to find adequate ideas that perform an analogous function in the two juxtaposed religious systems, but at the same time they may radicaliy differ from each other. In this case, the translator must find and grasp the specificity of various religious concepts and their place in a given system, and then find structural equivalents in the source text and doctrine from the perspective of which he interprets this text. In Ecclesiastes 1:1–11, an example of this type of phenomenon were those fragments in which eschatological threads appear. Ecclesiastes is a representative of the traditional Semitic idea, which limits authentic human life to the temporal world only. After death, the shadow of man is in the abyss called Sheol, where he only vegetates. Buddhism, on the other hand, teaches about the endless cycle of successive lives. Of course, Buddhism, based on the doctrine of non-self (anātman, Pali anattā), rejects the concept of an immortal, wandering soul or self.