Paper short abstract:

Translating the Christian doctrine into Asian languages involves collisions of different epistemic traditions. The paper, drawing from the comparative study of Japanese and Chinese adaptations of Luis Granada’s Introducción del Símbolo de la Fe, traces the epistemic hybridization in the two texts.

Paper long abstract:

When Catholic missionaries arrived in mission fields, one of their earliest and most important endeavors was translating and recompiling their doctrines into local languages. This process usually involved negotiations and collisions of different epistemic traditions. This paper explores how faith was rendered into foreign but familiar knowledge in the Japanese Christian text Fides no Qvio (1611) and the Gewu qiongli bianlan (1607), an incunabulum composed for the Chinese community in Manila by Dominican friar Thomas Mayor in the early 17th century. Both are believed to be based on Luis de Granada’s Introducción del Símbolo de la Fe. Granada offers in the original Spanish text a formula to contemplate the Creator's existence and power by observing the physical world composed of the four elements, the well-balanced natural world in which all creatures have their designated place, and the all-perfect human body. The adaptations of Granada’s original into Japanese and Chinese present the Christian faith, and at the same time a framework for understanding the physical aspect of the world based on Christian teachings.

Focusing on the translation of concepts originating in Europe, this paper traces the different approaches missionaries and their local partners applied in rendering them into Japanese and Chinese and analyzes the superimposition of distinctive epistemic traditions in the texts. The Japanese adaptation uses mostly transliterations for concepts like anima, the four bodily humors, and celestial spheres, whereas the Chinese text borrows terms that are deeply rooted in Chinese intellectual traditions. For example, two key concepts, anima and razón, are consistently rendered as shenhun 神魂 and liangzhi liangneng 良知良能 respectively, the latter taken from Mencius. However, there are also cases where multi-epistemic traditions are at play. For blood vessel, the Japanese text employs keiraku 経絡, meridians in traditional Chinese medicine, while the Chinese text uses xuejin 血筋, possibly a new coinage also rooted in a concept close to the meridians. The comparison of these two texts sheds light on the conceptual hybridization in each text and demonstrates how multi-layered epistemic traditions interact with each other in transcultural encounters.