Talk:Awakening of Faith in the Mahayana

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The trouble with "awakening"

大乘起信論 translates literally as "Mahayana production of faith treatise".

The first two characters (shangsheng) are a common Chinese translation of Mahayana. The final character (lun) is also the Chinese term used in the title of many Buddhist, Confucian, etc. texts, typically translated into English as "treatise", "discourse", or "record". I see no problem translating 信 as "faith".

That leaves 起 (qi), which is certainly different from 佛 (jue, enlightenment or awakening). (It is also not the same as the qi in qigong.) Qi might be more accurately translated as "arising" or "production".

Evidently, the popular English-speaking imagination as well as the scholarly consensus likes the cadence and prosody of "awakening of faith". All the English translations use that phrase. Should Wikipedia change it in the name of accuracy, or leave it in the name of not advancing idiosyncratic theories? My suggestion is to leave the name of the article and its aliases to use the phrase "awakening of faith" and to go over the word-by-word translation in the article itself.

--Munge 07:18, 30 Jan 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Merging

I am not ready to take that task right now, but this article should be merged somehow with Awakening of Mahayana Faith. Luis Dantas 10:24, 31 Jan 2005 (UTC)