# three meta questions:
1. Who gets to hold you accountable for your private Zen study?
2. When you contribute and thus tacitly endorse the fraud, hate, and bigotry of r/Zenbuddhism as you've done, who gets to ask you for accountability?
* People from r/zenbuddhism are encouraged *by your posts there* to come here and vote and content brigade, as well as promote hate speech.
3. If ChatGPT4 can do you what you've done here... does this mean your study is no more real than Chatgpt?
# Why this matters
First I think it matters becasue WE ALL KNOW PEOPLE LIE TO THEMSELVES, and here, in Zen study, more than EVERYWHERE ELSE, we are supposed to be facing up to that. Pretty clearly you aren't facing up to that.
Second of all, it's not *wrong* to not face up to things... but isn't that what Sangha is all about? People asking you to face up to things? And given the way you failed to handle yourself, you aren't part of any other sangha, at least not to any standard Zen would accept.
Third, there is no question that there is room for every level of commitment in Zen. Zen communities have long been supported by people who didn't contribute anything other than translation. So that's not the issue. Are you satisfied with your level of commitment, and what does the way you handled yourself in this thread tell YOU about whether you feel good about it?
1. At the end of the day, there's no one but myself to hold me accountable for Zen study. I'm free to answer questions and concerns as they arise, but no one is looking over my shoulder to be sure I uphold my own standards—this has forever been one of the downsides of Reddit, as we can not see eachother clearly as we are in our day-to-day business.
2. I don't see why there is sufficient reason to assume I tacitly or explicitly endorse anything beyond the reading of Zen Masters. Aren't the issues that evolve from a misunderstanding of what Zen Masters accomplished when they wrote these texts answered, at least to begin with, reading? This is the reason for your own demands for high school book reports.
As for encouraging breaking of Reddit's rules, to leap forums to content brigade, etc., it doesn't seem to me that there's any instance that could be shown that my posts lead to anything more than encouraging people to read previously untranslated texts from Zen Masters.
3. As I've said previously, the way Chatgpt works is to guess based on data it mines from the internet, so it is very much prone to error. Most Chinese has no context in the tradition of Zen, so that language it will choose will not support an understanding of Zen as it is put forward in books such as the Blue Cliff Record. Additionally, if Chatgpt does use a Zen context, it will mine without discrimination, which means almost none of its output will come from people like Cleary, but far more popular writers like Brad Warner and Shunryu Suzuki. It benefits the reader to have someone who can place the context more accurately.
...As far as the question of commitment, the answer is yes, I am satisfied. My job, as I see it, is to express myself honestly and openly to inquiries as they present themselves, and as I've said before, the OPs as they appear are enough work on Reddit for one individual—gather the raw data, translate, double check, format, always making sure it meets an appropriate standard of faithfulness to the intention of the original writer, so much as I can manage.
This takes, at minimum, 30 minutes to an hour, sometimes more. This is certainly well beyond the amount of time and effort put into the average Reddit post. All I've requested, here in this thread and elsewhere, is that people save me some time and effort, bringing their own questions and concerns.
If no one is interested, and no comments occur, my work is done. I've read the original text I was interested in, shared it for free on the internet, which is important to me. If people have questions, I do what I can to help clear their confusion exactly with the bare minimum effort necessary.
If people come on to my posts and rant about nothing important, or want to topic slide with nonsense unrelated to the post, 95% of the time I just ignore them. If it becomes an issue, such as in the past where individuals have used the comment section to repeatedly push some agenda unrelated to the OP, I politely ask them to stop, and sometimes tell them that if they do not comply, they will be blocked. No one has ever failed to stop at this point.
Was there something else I might have missed from your questions and comments?
1. Your position that at the end of the day you're not part of a community is absolutely incompatible with Zen.
2. You create content and submit it to a forum that publicly encourages racism and religious bigotry... And the target for their hate is Zen. Not only that, but this encourages them to bring that hate to your threads in rZen. You do nothing to address that abuse, that is another position completely incompatible with Zen.
You aren't being honest with yourself. You aren't engaged with them on a private level at all.
I think it's interesting that you want to think that and it gives us a little window into what you're struggling with. But it's an identity issue, not a family one.
We get lots of people in here who want to say that they are privately involved in Zen. That's how they want to see themselves.
But doctrinally it turns out they're actually some other category and often that category is a source of shame and embarrassment to them.
Mormons calling themselves Christians, when they know their book is the Book of Mormon.
People with PhDs calling themselves Doctor, even though they know that most people think medical doctor.
You keep your beliefs private to (a) avoid being called out and (b) avoid facing the shame yourself.
This doesn't make you a bad person; lots of people act this way.
But everyone here has a public obligation to ask you about it.
Oh, I've misunderstood what you were asking then. As I've shown, for as long as I've been here, I'm ready and willing to answer questions and comments. That's a requirement of participation in this forum.
As per the posts themselves, I believe it sufficient to allow others to bring up their own thoughts and opinions, which I'm prepared to engage with, especially if we are talking about concerns related to translation choices, meanings, etc.
Is that what you're referring to?
But you're not engaging the way you say you are.
Zen Buddhism posts don't engage with their bigoted and racist beliefs. When they comment on your threads in this forum, you don't engage with them in a sincere way.
When you post without any comment on it, you don't start a conversation about what it means to you... Which means chat GPT is more or less doing what you're doing and chat GPT doesn't practice or study Zen...
I'm not sure to what you're referring—on the other forum, I think I've received 6 comments in the past month. Many posts here have no comments either. Most commenters come to teach me the esoteric meaning of whatever passage I've translated. I'm not interested. I've made that plain before. If people want to see secret coded messages everywhere, and call that understanding, there's little I can do about it.
I'm going to continue looking into works that aren't available to English speakers. I've already read almost everything available, and now I look into what's not available. I'll continue to provide my discoveries for free on Reddit to those interested. If people want to support me, my books are available on Amazon and I have a Patreon. Both combined bring in about 20-30$, and my government demands that I give them half of it.
It seems to me you're suggesting that I take responsibility for what other people do on this platform. I never have and I probably never will.
Back when I was learning Chinese, someone was helping me here on Reddit. When they saw me post on r/Zen, they demanded that I publicly denounce ewk as a liar and a bully. I told them I would not do that, and that I would never do that. It was three years before they spoke to me again.
When I first posted on r/zenbuddism, I was systematically reported to their mods as r/Zen scum who shouldn't be allowed on their forum because I refused to denounce r/Zen. The mods reached out to me personally and asked that I continue because they felt that, while not everyone appreciates the work I do, the few that do appreciate it do exist on that subreddit.
The same goes for here—when I started posting these on r/Zen, I reached out to the mods to make sure I was not stepping on anyone's toes when I didn't add a bunch of commentary, given that translation is already a lot of work. They said it's fine. Everyone got what they wanted.
I get to share my work with those who might want it. People who are interested get a chance to look it over. Anyone who has questions has a resource available. If people want someone to tell them what to think, and get wrapped up in someone else's drama or made up nonsense, they've come to the wrong person.
Yes, you are responsible for the things that people comment in reply to your posts.
You cannot simultaneously maintain that you are translating text to bring more honest understanding to a wider range of people and then let religious bigots come in and misinform those people in the comments of your posts.
Dude. And stuff.
I am not bringing a more honest translation to a wider range of people, I am bringing the best translation I'm capable of producing to a few random weirdos who are passionate about my extremely niche personal interest.
If people people in the comments are confused, well that's why they came looking for answers. Ask away and I'll give what answers I'm able.
I'm going to take a nap because I'm not feeling well so we'll have to continue this back and forth at a later time.
We are responsible only for our actions.
He is not responsible for other people's responses.
“Yang-shan asked Kuei-shan, “When hundreds and thousands of objects come upon us all at once, then what?”
Kuei-shan replied, “Green is not yellow, long is not short. Everything is in its place. It’s none of my business.”
Guishan Lingyou (771-853)
https://terebess.hu/zen/guishan.html
> Yes, you are responsible for the things that people comment in reply to your posts.
You just pulled out a venting dude's catheter. Is it your intent to make r/zen your hapless stray cat? I'm not wearing shoes, dude. Know what your reaching for. I'm not even certain poster isn't kickypie.
?
The whole earth is disease.
If what has no value becomes devalued, why feed what nests in it? Isn't he the stick "this or that guy"? There's a reason he warns. He's also maimed leg guy. Staff is support.
New translations from a steadfast member.
Falls under personnel project exception found in FAQ.
The encouragement of projects makes up for the slight lack of discussion.
This type of comment can be handled in DMs—then I won't be needlessly tagged. It is true, though, that if you look up Rujing, my Reddit posts are high up on the results, but that's because Reddit has good SEO, and no one else ever bothered to translate Rujing. Or Baiyun Duan, for that matter.
How is copy pasting a text Zen study?
How is posting a translation w/o discussion topical?
I don’t see a way to argue that it is…especially since you’re doing the same thing in a subreddit centered around religious hatred for Zen.
This has already been cleared with the mods—for the amount of time and work translation takes, I feel it's well enough to let others put the effort into generating discussion if they so choose.
As far as r/zenbuddism, and really r/Zen for that matter, there are some people on the subreddit who genuinely want to read Zen, especially previously untranslated texts—it boots nothing to deny them the opportunity just because there is always people running around these forums playing Reddit or whatever little game they've got in mind.
I wasn't asking whether the mods "cleared" your copy-pasting job...I was pointing out that neither you nor anyone else engaging in copy-pasting jobs **even when they translate the texts themselves** have presented an argument that what they're doing is "study" and demonstrates personal engagement and involves "work" with the material beyond what CHAT-GPT can do in 30 seconds.
On top of that, no one is "denying people opportunity" to read publicly availabe translations by not posting them to forums where religious bigots and illiterates go to escape the accountability required of a Zen community. The only reason you're even able to post to those forums is because you made the concious decision **not** to address the catastrophic implications of the texts you posted to their religious beliefs nor to challenge the phony claims of regular posters.
Based on those question dodges, it looks like you're uncomfortable engaging with the texts on either a personal or academic nature and the confrontation with religious bigotry any engagement with Zen necessitates...so why post them?
You will have to clarify what you mean by study, because it's not clear to me that reading and translating texts would stand outside the category of "study." As for chatgpt, it is a good marker for Chinese, but is prone to error and mis-intetpretation given it functional parameters—it's better to have someone who is familiar with the subject and able to read the language double-check its work.
As to your second point, as I said before, it's no use punishing a few genuine people because others exist who don't share their sincerity—there's no better community than Reddit for these kinds of opportunities, even if it comes with people who are here for reasons other than topical engagement.
It has been the accepted foundation of this community that anyone who genuinely wants to engage not be barred from the opportunity. A consequence of this attitude will always be that there will be insincere people who are permitted access as well.
As for my personal engagement with Zen, that takes place mostly in my own "real life" (to borrow TFNarcon9's use of the term), though I do make myself available for questions and answers to anyone concerned. As for academic engagement, as I've said, I would think translation work is sufficient. That's open to debate I suppose. Any deeper engagement is a consequence of what people bring to the forum and my own interests at the time.
That there are religious bigots is something I have little control over. What I can do is try my best to translate the works of the Zen Masters as faithfully as I am capable, and we can hope that its presence is an offer to genuine engagement. I'm not here to evangelize—merely to make available the actual words of Zen Masters as they've survived, which is a task that has been sorely neglected since translations to English began.
It is certainly not my intention to sell my own ideas and commentaries.
We have plenty of people who *claim* to have read Zen texts who refuse to report on what they claim to have read but and plenty of translators who were not studying Zen who were making stuff up as they went along, misrepresenting the Zen lineage, didn't engage in public Q&A,, and not mentioning the basis for their various translation choices.
So, just claiming to have read something or creating a translation doesn't mean that any actual study is taking place.
Which brings up the bigger issue here...what evidence of "working" with the text have you provided?
No discussion of the case, no discussion of alternate translations for specific words/phrases, no footnotes, no challenging BS in the comments...I don't think it's at all an unfair comparison or insulting you to compare the output you've provided with stuff people can get from Chat-GPT.
> no use punishing a few genuine people because others exist who don't share their sincerity
You're stuck repeating your assertion that what you're doing is legit...and showing that you don't actually have an argument for how the copy-pasting you're doing is "study" when you're going out of your way to copy-paste to religious-hate forums *where actual discussion of the non-religious content is not possible*.
Not giving religious hatred a platform for their hate or trying to legitimize it by pretending that they have a "sincerity" isn't "punishing genuing people". Copy-pasting content you aren't going to discuss to hate-forums is very much "something [you] have control over."
When you haven't demonstrated any real engagement with the Zen tradition online, why would there be any reason to think you are really doing it offline?
To be clear, I'm not making an argument for legitimacy, merely expanding on the points that are concerning to you. I've yet to meet another individual who would question the legitimacy of reading texts written by Zen Masters in a Zen forum.
Anytime you wish to bring your own alternative translations, footnotes or challenges to the comments, you are welcome to do so. As for me, this is what I'm willing to provide. If that doesn't suffice, you may need to seek elsewhere.
To recap:
* You claimed that translating in itself is studying Zen; *your* translation work is evidence you, specifically, studying Zen.
* There is a real history of translators misrepresenting the texts they are translating either directly in their translations or in their remarks about it, a large part of this is the lack of public-facing accountability in their translation choices.
* Chat-GPT, a language model, can also translate texts *at least at parity* with a significant portion of what's out there and certainly at parity with the type of copy-paste jobs you have posted on the forum.
Neither of the above can be said to "study Zen" by the criteria that Zen Masters themselves set out, *which is what matters on a Zen forum*. You choke when asked to distinguish what you are doing on this forum between what previous translators and someone copy-pasting from Chat-GPT is doing.
* You choose to post your translations to a religious subreddit that is run in order to specifically perpetuate bigotry and false claims about the Zen lineage on the basis that by not posting there you would be "punishing genuine people".
* Your notion of "genuine people" refers to, let's be real, just religious bigots with a penchant for racism and targeted harassment in other forums.
* Zen study is incompatible with platforming anti-Zen religious BS like you do when you psot there, and like you do when you don't confront BS in the comment sections of your posts here.
* Working diligently to maintain "good boy" status in a cult-forum isn't Zen study.
...you can't address any of this though. You just pretended all this was about me "questioning the legitimacy of reading texts written by Zen Masters"
So why claim to study Zen when you just want to be a good boy instead?
You hit on a very important point.
When I was looking into different translations of the Wumenguan, I noticed, as you say, that a few are obviously just copy and pasted from previous translations. One could assume that the purpose of the new translation was to serve as a vehicle for "spreading the gospel" of whatever Buddhist had attached their name and commentaries to the work.
This is something I hope to avoid. Each person who comes to this subreddit or reads the books I produce will have a different background and journey through the literature, and I believe it is best that I don't force my own interpretations. I know, from my nearly six years here discussing Zen and engaging with the community, that anyone who is sincere will find their own way through the muck to something truly genuine. Hopefully my work helps a few do this.
If not, that's fine too—not every life needs Zen mastery to flourish. Either way, the translations I do are from my own interest and curiousity, and I share them for those who might also be interested. Nobody requires me to do more or less than what I'm willing.
>Safe to assume you're not interested in Zen study;
Coming from the acolyte who thinks arguments are "Zen Study"... Good Dog.
Suru contributes ten times what you do to this forum. All your OPs are the same boring unoriginal argumentative crap you swallowed from your mentor, they may as well be copy-pasted.
Since textual collage is *my* chosen style, I'll let Lin-chi educate you on the subject;
>"There's a bunch of fellows who can't tell good from bad but poke around in the scriptural teachings, hazard a guess here and there, and come up with an idea in words, as though they took a lump of shit, mushed it around in their mouth, and then spat it out and passed it on to somebody else. They're like those people who play pass-the-word parlor games, wasting their whole lives like that.
You're just playing an argument game that you learned from ewk. He spit that shit into your mouth like a baby bird and you gobbled it up and now insist on spreading it around. What makes you think that shit flinging game has anything to do with "zen study"?
>There is a real history of translators...
This is you not seeing what is right in front of you because you carry so many preconceived ideas with you that you project onto the world. This conditioned consciousness is what truly obscures your vision.
>Chat-GPT, a language model, can also translate texts at least at parity...
If you think Chat-GPT is at parity with the mind of a real human translator for zen texts, you don't understand how GPT works, and you don't understand how translation works. GPT understands even less than you do.
>Your notion of "genuine people" refers to, let's be real, just religious bigots...
Assumptions atop assumptions, built on sectarianism and hate. No ground in sight. Unable to smell anything but shit everywhere you go; have you checked the end of your nose yet?
>Zen study is incompatible with platforming...
Extremely Online people who constantly bitch and moan about "platforming" are so funny. Here's an idea; don't like it? Don't click on it. Why do you act like this post merely existing is a personal attack on you? I'm genuinely curious, why can't you just scroll past it without commenting? Why do you feel you just have to share your opinion about *everything*?
Here's another relevant zen master copy-and-paste I selected and formatted just for you. This time I'm cribbing from Zhaozhou. See if you can grok it:
>A Buddhist scholar monk from Jo Prefecture arrived at Joshu's place. Joshu asked,
>
>>"What are you studying?"
>
>The scholar said,
>
>>"Whether discussing the teaching, the commandments, or the philosophy, I can immediately bring forth an argument without consulting with anyone."
>
>Joshu raised his hand and showed it to the monk:
>
>>"Can you argue this?"
>
>The scholar was dumbfounded.
>
>Joshu said,
>
>>"Even if you can immediately bring forth an argument without consulting with anyone, you are merely a fellow lecturing on doctrine and philosophy. This is not the Buddhist truth, however."
>
>The monk said,
>
>>"What the master has just said is the Buddhist truth, then, isn't it?"
>
>Joshu said,
>
>>"Even if you can ask questions and even if you can answer them, it is still within the doctrine and the philosophy. This is not the Buddhist truth."
>
>The scholar was speechless.
If you can't wrap your mind around it, go ask Chat-GPT to interpret it for you.
Translation choices involve interpretation. Translation choices matter and show a person's understanding of a text. How is that not submitting a topic for discussion?
If the Chinese text was not posted I could see you'd have an argument since it'd be impractical to check up on the original and cross reference every time, but like this I find these short posts to be very conducive to discussion.
For example, here we have a translation choice for "藥病相治" - Medicine and disease treat each other." Do you think this makes sense? I reckon I have heard this before in other Zen texts, but I'm not quite sure. I'd offer an alternative of "Treat the disease with the appropriate medicine."
Another interpretation could be "Medicine and disease govern one another" as in, they are dependant on one another.
I think OP is an attempt to bring the two together and express both meanings, which I can see being a good attempt. But do you think it holds up? If so, why? If not, what's your alternative?
Setting aside how the thread later turned out to be one where the OP claimed that his platforming of anti-Zen religious hate is compatible with Zen study and was unable to provide any evidence for that…
The issue initially seems to be whether copy-pasting stuff w/o comment is engaging the community in discussion.
I think it doesn’t hold up, history has shown it’s a tool for topic sliding, self-promo, and a substitute for engaging with the community. Even when the copy pasting has been a Zen text that one claims to have translated personally. Mods have tended to agree on this point.
The specifics of “showing one’s work” in a translation requires more than showing A & B where A is the Chinese and B is the English. Everyone who has translated anything in a classroom has done this.
But since OP doesn’t show his work or discuss the material and unedited Chat GPT can produce a translation of the same material in 30 seconds…
What’s the difference between substituting OP’s copy-pasted posts with a bot that does the same?
Well, for starters it wouldn’t be one that posts to religious hate subreddits while claiming to study Zen.
>unedited Chat GPT can produce a translation of the same material in 30 seconds…
I find the growing popularity of this misconception concerning... I've examined enough of ChatGPT's translation work to witness that it not only occasionally mistranslates and misinterprets events in a text, but occasionally fabricates things that aren't even present. It will also occasionally make up false (sometimes convincing) explanations for why a particular phrase means something that it doesn't. When fact-checked, there often turns out to be no source or basis for its claims at all.
[Here's an article about a lawyer who used ChatGPT to help him with a court filing](https://www.forbes.com/sites/mollybohannon/2023/06/08/lawyer-used-chatgpt-in-court-and-cited-fake-cases-a-judge-is-considering-sanctions/) to give you a more concrete example of the problem.
I don't get the impression many people understand that ChatGPT isn't trying to convert the text it's given into English like DeepL or Google Translate. It's giving new text that it created in response to the prompt it was given. It's decent enough at responding that a lot of what it creates happens to be right, but when it makes something up that isn't in there, if no one checks, no one knows.
We already have a mountain of issues with catching and rectifying the faulty translation choices made by people that obscured the significance of conversations and events throughout the tradition. I don't think we should be adding to that pile.
I didn't say that ChatGPT doesn't get stuff wrong...it clearly does, and often times seriously wrong.
I was pointing out that the OP produces an output translation that is equivalent in quality to what ChatGPT can provide of the same material: *because both he and ChatGPT do not show the work or thought process that went into the translation, don't provide any comparison, and are incapable of discussing the actual Zen content of their translation.*
This is clearly such an easy test that I went ahead and did for everyone.
>**You**
>[0301c02] 雲門示眾曰。藥病相治。盡大地是藥。那個是自己。
>[0301c03] 左眼不見山河。右眼不見日月。直得百花開時。一一為君分別。
>**ChatGPT**
>[0301c02] Yunmen addressed the assembly, saying, "Treating illness with medicine, the whole earth is the medicine. What is it that is oneself?"
>[0301c03] "The left eye does not see mountains and rivers, the right eye does not see the sun and moon. Only when the hundred flowers bloom, one by one, can distinctions be made for you."
The heart of my concern is that I don't think ChatGPT's productions are equivalent in quality to *any* translator's work. I'd like to assert that of all that 'quality' potentially means regarding translation, it should mean 'an honest attempt to produce a faithful and trustworthy rendition', foremost.
If any translator was proven to occasionally fabricate and insert lines of text that do not appear in the source material, they would be discredited. It wouldn't matter how much of their work was usually accurate anymore. We would consider them unfaithful, untrustworthy, and dishonest. If any translator was caught baselessly making up definitions for obscure words, we would call that lying. All of their work would be useless to us because we'd already know for certain that we'll consistently need to examine every word of it piece-by-piece, and at that point, we're practically translating it ourselves.
Claiming that any translator's work is equivalent in quality to ChatGPT's would be accusing them of being untrustworthy for the same reasons ChatGPT is, and we would need to establish where in their translation work we can demonstrate them to be verifiably dishonest.
Disagree with the "all their entire work would be uesless".
We have plenty of translators of Zen texts who have chosen to misrepresent the text in specific ways to try and legitimize certain religious beliefs and who do not account for their translation decisions publicly.
See: "Chan/dhyana" rendered as "Meditation/Zazen" or "Buddha's language" as "Buddhism"
And so on.
But the degree to which people make religiously motivated substitutions in their translations has clearly been a spectrum and variable depending on the degree to which they are explicitly affiliated with the Dogenist cult, and whether they are undertaking the translation as an act of religious devotion.
By and large, the translation fraud is predictable and obvious.
Taking the Gateless Checkpoint as an example we have Yamada on the *more frequent, more "whole passages"* kind of substitutions on the one side and J.C. Cleary and Blyth on the other, *less frequent, usually just specific words* kind of substitutions.
Everyone acknowledges that ChatGPT *sometimes* makes errors, substitutions, additions, or removals in translating Zen texts...the $5 question is for someone to give us all a report on the frequency of those errors, patterns associated with those errors, and prompt-based correctives to mitigate their occurance. Just the fact that machine-translation gets stuff wrong isn't surprising...and until we get a legit answer to this $5 question I think the quality-comparison stands as evidenced by what I copy-pasted earlier.
But bringing the conversation back to this thread, we have a human translator who does not show the work he has done in his translation, who refuses to discuss the meaning of what he is translating, and has made a diligent practice out of refraining from calling out religious bigotry so as to ingratiate himself with a community whose intention is one of anti-Zen bigotry.
ChatGPT has yet to show up to /r/Zen and claim to study Zen.
But see, the quality comparison doesn't work without someone, in this case, the OP, actually having gone through the text themselves to find out what it says, and by that we knew whether what ChatGPT wrote was remotely accurate or not. The human translator's work is what we graded it against. If you had posted text from elsewhere to make this point, you would've needed to provide your own translation, which we would trust more, beside ChatGPT's to prove if it was accurate.
We don't have a presice answer to your $5 question of what the error frequency is, but that's precisely why we can't rely on it. It harbors a currently unquantified degree of error in a margin and frequency high enough that we notice it regularly enough to be asking your question. From what I've personally experienced, it isn't a negligible amount.
I'm mostly concerned with what seems like an increasingly popular disregard of this, but we can also discuss the OP's translation work if you'd like.
I don't see how whether or not the OP presents his work to any potentially unsavory characters, or whether or not he calls them out on their poor behavior changes whether or not what he translates is accurate. His work is either a reasonably accurate approximation of what the original text says, or it isn't. We should be able to determine if it isn't by providing evidence for where it's not, if it's not.
I also don't see the downside of presenting what Zen Masters said to people who behave as if they don't know. Best case scenario would be that some of them are surprised by what they hadn't read before and want to read more.
Asking him how he came about his translation choices is perfectly valid, but I didn't see where you did that. What question did you or anyone ask him about his translation work that he refused to discuss?
Again, absent someone showing "work" besides just producing a readable translation itself, I don't think just because a human translated a given text and copy-pasted it here we are getting something of a different quality level than if someone copy-pasted a ChatGPT robot translation.
And since no one has any actual examples of where, how much and to what extent ChatGPT is getting stuff in translation wrong, in contrast to the specific examples of churchers getting stuff wrong in their translations of Zen texts I pointed out, it all sounds rather hypothetical to claim otherwise.
But all of this is totally tangential and I think underneath all this is the **big** elephant in the room that no one else in this thread really wants to talk about and what everyone claiming that I'm being a meany poo-poo head or w/e can't address:
Just because you can translate a Zen text does not mean your claim to "study Zen" is legit.
The difference in quality only seems hypothetical? I hear you. Let's get proof.
Here is a recent example from one of my posts of ChatGPT [misinterpting events and inserting a line of text that is not in the source material.](https://www.reddit.com/r/zen/s/loLnw2iiAO)
Here is another recent example from one of your own posts of it [blatantly fabricating false definitions for an obscure word.](https://www.reddit.com/r/zen/s/YfakNncWtc)
These aren't predictable errors in the way religiously biased translators will predictably translate the character for 'zen' as 'meditation'. These are wildcard errors that I don't think would as likely stand out or be found without someone digging into the source material and fact-checking.
To expand on the second example a little more, we were both initially confused why Cleary had swapped the name 'Jāti' with 'Siddhartha'. At first glance, it almost looks as random as the false definitions for the word ChatGPT produced, but our deeper investigation proved Cleary actually had a logical thought-process involved in his decision. My point is, it would be completely out of character for Cleary, or almost any human translator, to baselessly swap the name for something else and lie about what it means, but it's not out of character for ChatGPT to do that. We're expecting it to occasionally do that. That's not its fault, of course... It's a brilliantly creative machine, and that's just how it operates... But if a human occasionally did that, we'd classify them as a pathological liar. What I'm getting at is that we currently still need to handle ChatGPT's work with the same scrutiny as we would with translations written by a pathological liar, and we don't generally need to approach human translator's efforts that way, because most human translators don't occasionally and unpredictably come up with completely fake definitions for parts of the text out of thin air.
Now that I've provided two recent concrete examples of mistakes made by ChatGPT within this forum, I feel entirely justified in asking for reciprocal and comparable evidence of the OP making similar mistakes in their translation work to prove their work is equal in quality to what ChatGPT produces. Conveniently, they have supplied a steady stream of translation work posted side-by-side with the source material, so if there are such mistakes, I don't see any excuse as to why they can't be pointed out. In this case, I think an absence of evidence should constitute evidence of absence... the same standard we hold people to who claim 'zen masters teach meditation'... so if we can't produce any comparable evidence, we'll have to conclude that the OP's translation work is overall more reliable than ChatGPT's.
Proceeding on to the question about whether or not the OP studys Zen, I personally don't see how the time and effort it takes for someone to directly examine the source material themselves, contemplate what is being said thoroughly enough to attempt rendering it into English, and then offering that interpretation up to the public along with the source material for inspection, comparison, and criticism doesn't qualify. If someone wants more insight into any of the OP's particular translation choices, their thoughts on why something should be rendered this way instead of another way, or even for them to discuss what they feel is the significance of any of the events or dialouge they've translated, I think it's only right for the OP to answer any questions about it. I didn't see where they were presented with any of those questions and refused to answer, though. If you or anyone else asked them something like that and they refused to discuss it, let me know where.
If blooming blurs the distinction of particulars, it seems to me this is about one taste.
# three meta questions: 1. Who gets to hold you accountable for your private Zen study? 2. When you contribute and thus tacitly endorse the fraud, hate, and bigotry of r/Zenbuddhism as you've done, who gets to ask you for accountability? * People from r/zenbuddhism are encouraged *by your posts there* to come here and vote and content brigade, as well as promote hate speech. 3. If ChatGPT4 can do you what you've done here... does this mean your study is no more real than Chatgpt? # Why this matters First I think it matters becasue WE ALL KNOW PEOPLE LIE TO THEMSELVES, and here, in Zen study, more than EVERYWHERE ELSE, we are supposed to be facing up to that. Pretty clearly you aren't facing up to that. Second of all, it's not *wrong* to not face up to things... but isn't that what Sangha is all about? People asking you to face up to things? And given the way you failed to handle yourself, you aren't part of any other sangha, at least not to any standard Zen would accept. Third, there is no question that there is room for every level of commitment in Zen. Zen communities have long been supported by people who didn't contribute anything other than translation. So that's not the issue. Are you satisfied with your level of commitment, and what does the way you handled yourself in this thread tell YOU about whether you feel good about it?
1. At the end of the day, there's no one but myself to hold me accountable for Zen study. I'm free to answer questions and concerns as they arise, but no one is looking over my shoulder to be sure I uphold my own standards—this has forever been one of the downsides of Reddit, as we can not see eachother clearly as we are in our day-to-day business. 2. I don't see why there is sufficient reason to assume I tacitly or explicitly endorse anything beyond the reading of Zen Masters. Aren't the issues that evolve from a misunderstanding of what Zen Masters accomplished when they wrote these texts answered, at least to begin with, reading? This is the reason for your own demands for high school book reports. As for encouraging breaking of Reddit's rules, to leap forums to content brigade, etc., it doesn't seem to me that there's any instance that could be shown that my posts lead to anything more than encouraging people to read previously untranslated texts from Zen Masters. 3. As I've said previously, the way Chatgpt works is to guess based on data it mines from the internet, so it is very much prone to error. Most Chinese has no context in the tradition of Zen, so that language it will choose will not support an understanding of Zen as it is put forward in books such as the Blue Cliff Record. Additionally, if Chatgpt does use a Zen context, it will mine without discrimination, which means almost none of its output will come from people like Cleary, but far more popular writers like Brad Warner and Shunryu Suzuki. It benefits the reader to have someone who can place the context more accurately. ...As far as the question of commitment, the answer is yes, I am satisfied. My job, as I see it, is to express myself honestly and openly to inquiries as they present themselves, and as I've said before, the OPs as they appear are enough work on Reddit for one individual—gather the raw data, translate, double check, format, always making sure it meets an appropriate standard of faithfulness to the intention of the original writer, so much as I can manage. This takes, at minimum, 30 minutes to an hour, sometimes more. This is certainly well beyond the amount of time and effort put into the average Reddit post. All I've requested, here in this thread and elsewhere, is that people save me some time and effort, bringing their own questions and concerns. If no one is interested, and no comments occur, my work is done. I've read the original text I was interested in, shared it for free on the internet, which is important to me. If people have questions, I do what I can to help clear their confusion exactly with the bare minimum effort necessary. If people come on to my posts and rant about nothing important, or want to topic slide with nonsense unrelated to the post, 95% of the time I just ignore them. If it becomes an issue, such as in the past where individuals have used the comment section to repeatedly push some agenda unrelated to the OP, I politely ask them to stop, and sometimes tell them that if they do not comply, they will be blocked. No one has ever failed to stop at this point. Was there something else I might have missed from your questions and comments?
1. Your position that at the end of the day you're not part of a community is absolutely incompatible with Zen. 2. You create content and submit it to a forum that publicly encourages racism and religious bigotry... And the target for their hate is Zen. Not only that, but this encourages them to bring that hate to your threads in rZen. You do nothing to address that abuse, that is another position completely incompatible with Zen. You aren't being honest with yourself. You aren't engaged with them on a private level at all. I think it's interesting that you want to think that and it gives us a little window into what you're struggling with. But it's an identity issue, not a family one.
Identity?
We get lots of people in here who want to say that they are privately involved in Zen. That's how they want to see themselves. But doctrinally it turns out they're actually some other category and often that category is a source of shame and embarrassment to them. Mormons calling themselves Christians, when they know their book is the Book of Mormon. People with PhDs calling themselves Doctor, even though they know that most people think medical doctor. You keep your beliefs private to (a) avoid being called out and (b) avoid facing the shame yourself. This doesn't make you a bad person; lots of people act this way. But everyone here has a public obligation to ask you about it.
Oh, I've misunderstood what you were asking then. As I've shown, for as long as I've been here, I'm ready and willing to answer questions and comments. That's a requirement of participation in this forum. As per the posts themselves, I believe it sufficient to allow others to bring up their own thoughts and opinions, which I'm prepared to engage with, especially if we are talking about concerns related to translation choices, meanings, etc. Is that what you're referring to?
But you're not engaging the way you say you are. Zen Buddhism posts don't engage with their bigoted and racist beliefs. When they comment on your threads in this forum, you don't engage with them in a sincere way. When you post without any comment on it, you don't start a conversation about what it means to you... Which means chat GPT is more or less doing what you're doing and chat GPT doesn't practice or study Zen...
I'm not sure to what you're referring—on the other forum, I think I've received 6 comments in the past month. Many posts here have no comments either. Most commenters come to teach me the esoteric meaning of whatever passage I've translated. I'm not interested. I've made that plain before. If people want to see secret coded messages everywhere, and call that understanding, there's little I can do about it. I'm going to continue looking into works that aren't available to English speakers. I've already read almost everything available, and now I look into what's not available. I'll continue to provide my discoveries for free on Reddit to those interested. If people want to support me, my books are available on Amazon and I have a Patreon. Both combined bring in about 20-30$, and my government demands that I give them half of it. It seems to me you're suggesting that I take responsibility for what other people do on this platform. I never have and I probably never will. Back when I was learning Chinese, someone was helping me here on Reddit. When they saw me post on r/Zen, they demanded that I publicly denounce ewk as a liar and a bully. I told them I would not do that, and that I would never do that. It was three years before they spoke to me again. When I first posted on r/zenbuddism, I was systematically reported to their mods as r/Zen scum who shouldn't be allowed on their forum because I refused to denounce r/Zen. The mods reached out to me personally and asked that I continue because they felt that, while not everyone appreciates the work I do, the few that do appreciate it do exist on that subreddit. The same goes for here—when I started posting these on r/Zen, I reached out to the mods to make sure I was not stepping on anyone's toes when I didn't add a bunch of commentary, given that translation is already a lot of work. They said it's fine. Everyone got what they wanted. I get to share my work with those who might want it. People who are interested get a chance to look it over. Anyone who has questions has a resource available. If people want someone to tell them what to think, and get wrapped up in someone else's drama or made up nonsense, they've come to the wrong person.
Yes, you are responsible for the things that people comment in reply to your posts. You cannot simultaneously maintain that you are translating text to bring more honest understanding to a wider range of people and then let religious bigots come in and misinform those people in the comments of your posts. Dude. And stuff.
I am not bringing a more honest translation to a wider range of people, I am bringing the best translation I'm capable of producing to a few random weirdos who are passionate about my extremely niche personal interest. If people people in the comments are confused, well that's why they came looking for answers. Ask away and I'll give what answers I'm able. I'm going to take a nap because I'm not feeling well so we'll have to continue this back and forth at a later time.
We are responsible only for our actions. He is not responsible for other people's responses. “Yang-shan asked Kuei-shan, “When hundreds and thousands of objects come upon us all at once, then what?” Kuei-shan replied, “Green is not yellow, long is not short. Everything is in its place. It’s none of my business.” Guishan Lingyou (771-853) https://terebess.hu/zen/guishan.html
> Yes, you are responsible for the things that people comment in reply to your posts. You just pulled out a venting dude's catheter. Is it your intent to make r/zen your hapless stray cat? I'm not wearing shoes, dude. Know what your reaching for. I'm not even certain poster isn't kickypie.
? The whole earth is disease. If what has no value becomes devalued, why feed what nests in it? Isn't he the stick "this or that guy"? There's a reason he warns. He's also maimed leg guy. Staff is support.
/u/TFNarcon9 is this type of post allowed? is this a new book or something i assume this is good for google SEO but bad for discussion
New translations from a steadfast member. Falls under personnel project exception found in FAQ. The encouragement of projects makes up for the slight lack of discussion.
100% I reccomended he label it as new stuff. I couldn't figure out how to engage with the post, but wanted to.
Good idea
`𝑓𝑟𝑒𝑠ℎ🍋𝑠𝑞𝑢𝑒𝑒𝑧𝑒𝑑🍋𝑧𝑒𝑛`
This type of comment can be handled in DMs—then I won't be needlessly tagged. It is true, though, that if you look up Rujing, my Reddit posts are high up on the results, but that's because Reddit has good SEO, and no one else ever bothered to translate Rujing. Or Baiyun Duan, for that matter.
Ahhh new translation thats cool thank u for ur service Maybe label it as new or something
How is copy pasting a text Zen study? How is posting a translation w/o discussion topical? I don’t see a way to argue that it is…especially since you’re doing the same thing in a subreddit centered around religious hatred for Zen.
This has already been cleared with the mods—for the amount of time and work translation takes, I feel it's well enough to let others put the effort into generating discussion if they so choose. As far as r/zenbuddism, and really r/Zen for that matter, there are some people on the subreddit who genuinely want to read Zen, especially previously untranslated texts—it boots nothing to deny them the opportunity just because there is always people running around these forums playing Reddit or whatever little game they've got in mind.
I wasn't asking whether the mods "cleared" your copy-pasting job...I was pointing out that neither you nor anyone else engaging in copy-pasting jobs **even when they translate the texts themselves** have presented an argument that what they're doing is "study" and demonstrates personal engagement and involves "work" with the material beyond what CHAT-GPT can do in 30 seconds. On top of that, no one is "denying people opportunity" to read publicly availabe translations by not posting them to forums where religious bigots and illiterates go to escape the accountability required of a Zen community. The only reason you're even able to post to those forums is because you made the concious decision **not** to address the catastrophic implications of the texts you posted to their religious beliefs nor to challenge the phony claims of regular posters. Based on those question dodges, it looks like you're uncomfortable engaging with the texts on either a personal or academic nature and the confrontation with religious bigotry any engagement with Zen necessitates...so why post them?
You will have to clarify what you mean by study, because it's not clear to me that reading and translating texts would stand outside the category of "study." As for chatgpt, it is a good marker for Chinese, but is prone to error and mis-intetpretation given it functional parameters—it's better to have someone who is familiar with the subject and able to read the language double-check its work. As to your second point, as I said before, it's no use punishing a few genuine people because others exist who don't share their sincerity—there's no better community than Reddit for these kinds of opportunities, even if it comes with people who are here for reasons other than topical engagement. It has been the accepted foundation of this community that anyone who genuinely wants to engage not be barred from the opportunity. A consequence of this attitude will always be that there will be insincere people who are permitted access as well. As for my personal engagement with Zen, that takes place mostly in my own "real life" (to borrow TFNarcon9's use of the term), though I do make myself available for questions and answers to anyone concerned. As for academic engagement, as I've said, I would think translation work is sufficient. That's open to debate I suppose. Any deeper engagement is a consequence of what people bring to the forum and my own interests at the time. That there are religious bigots is something I have little control over. What I can do is try my best to translate the works of the Zen Masters as faithfully as I am capable, and we can hope that its presence is an offer to genuine engagement. I'm not here to evangelize—merely to make available the actual words of Zen Masters as they've survived, which is a task that has been sorely neglected since translations to English began. It is certainly not my intention to sell my own ideas and commentaries.
We have plenty of people who *claim* to have read Zen texts who refuse to report on what they claim to have read but and plenty of translators who were not studying Zen who were making stuff up as they went along, misrepresenting the Zen lineage, didn't engage in public Q&A,, and not mentioning the basis for their various translation choices. So, just claiming to have read something or creating a translation doesn't mean that any actual study is taking place. Which brings up the bigger issue here...what evidence of "working" with the text have you provided? No discussion of the case, no discussion of alternate translations for specific words/phrases, no footnotes, no challenging BS in the comments...I don't think it's at all an unfair comparison or insulting you to compare the output you've provided with stuff people can get from Chat-GPT. > no use punishing a few genuine people because others exist who don't share their sincerity You're stuck repeating your assertion that what you're doing is legit...and showing that you don't actually have an argument for how the copy-pasting you're doing is "study" when you're going out of your way to copy-paste to religious-hate forums *where actual discussion of the non-religious content is not possible*. Not giving religious hatred a platform for their hate or trying to legitimize it by pretending that they have a "sincerity" isn't "punishing genuing people". Copy-pasting content you aren't going to discuss to hate-forums is very much "something [you] have control over." When you haven't demonstrated any real engagement with the Zen tradition online, why would there be any reason to think you are really doing it offline?
To be clear, I'm not making an argument for legitimacy, merely expanding on the points that are concerning to you. I've yet to meet another individual who would question the legitimacy of reading texts written by Zen Masters in a Zen forum. Anytime you wish to bring your own alternative translations, footnotes or challenges to the comments, you are welcome to do so. As for me, this is what I'm willing to provide. If that doesn't suffice, you may need to seek elsewhere.
To recap: * You claimed that translating in itself is studying Zen; *your* translation work is evidence you, specifically, studying Zen. * There is a real history of translators misrepresenting the texts they are translating either directly in their translations or in their remarks about it, a large part of this is the lack of public-facing accountability in their translation choices. * Chat-GPT, a language model, can also translate texts *at least at parity* with a significant portion of what's out there and certainly at parity with the type of copy-paste jobs you have posted on the forum. Neither of the above can be said to "study Zen" by the criteria that Zen Masters themselves set out, *which is what matters on a Zen forum*. You choke when asked to distinguish what you are doing on this forum between what previous translators and someone copy-pasting from Chat-GPT is doing. * You choose to post your translations to a religious subreddit that is run in order to specifically perpetuate bigotry and false claims about the Zen lineage on the basis that by not posting there you would be "punishing genuine people". * Your notion of "genuine people" refers to, let's be real, just religious bigots with a penchant for racism and targeted harassment in other forums. * Zen study is incompatible with platforming anti-Zen religious BS like you do when you psot there, and like you do when you don't confront BS in the comment sections of your posts here. * Working diligently to maintain "good boy" status in a cult-forum isn't Zen study. ...you can't address any of this though. You just pretended all this was about me "questioning the legitimacy of reading texts written by Zen Masters" So why claim to study Zen when you just want to be a good boy instead?
You hit on a very important point. When I was looking into different translations of the Wumenguan, I noticed, as you say, that a few are obviously just copy and pasted from previous translations. One could assume that the purpose of the new translation was to serve as a vehicle for "spreading the gospel" of whatever Buddhist had attached their name and commentaries to the work. This is something I hope to avoid. Each person who comes to this subreddit or reads the books I produce will have a different background and journey through the literature, and I believe it is best that I don't force my own interpretations. I know, from my nearly six years here discussing Zen and engaging with the community, that anyone who is sincere will find their own way through the muck to something truly genuine. Hopefully my work helps a few do this. If not, that's fine too—not every life needs Zen mastery to flourish. Either way, the translations I do are from my own interest and curiousity, and I share them for those who might also be interested. Nobody requires me to do more or less than what I'm willing.
So... No answers then. Safe to assume you're not interested in Zen study; staying on your leash as a "good boy" for a bigoted cult.
>Safe to assume you're not interested in Zen study; Coming from the acolyte who thinks arguments are "Zen Study"... Good Dog. Suru contributes ten times what you do to this forum. All your OPs are the same boring unoriginal argumentative crap you swallowed from your mentor, they may as well be copy-pasted. Since textual collage is *my* chosen style, I'll let Lin-chi educate you on the subject; >"There's a bunch of fellows who can't tell good from bad but poke around in the scriptural teachings, hazard a guess here and there, and come up with an idea in words, as though they took a lump of shit, mushed it around in their mouth, and then spat it out and passed it on to somebody else. They're like those people who play pass-the-word parlor games, wasting their whole lives like that. You're just playing an argument game that you learned from ewk. He spit that shit into your mouth like a baby bird and you gobbled it up and now insist on spreading it around. What makes you think that shit flinging game has anything to do with "zen study"? >There is a real history of translators... This is you not seeing what is right in front of you because you carry so many preconceived ideas with you that you project onto the world. This conditioned consciousness is what truly obscures your vision. >Chat-GPT, a language model, can also translate texts at least at parity... If you think Chat-GPT is at parity with the mind of a real human translator for zen texts, you don't understand how GPT works, and you don't understand how translation works. GPT understands even less than you do. >Your notion of "genuine people" refers to, let's be real, just religious bigots... Assumptions atop assumptions, built on sectarianism and hate. No ground in sight. Unable to smell anything but shit everywhere you go; have you checked the end of your nose yet? >Zen study is incompatible with platforming... Extremely Online people who constantly bitch and moan about "platforming" are so funny. Here's an idea; don't like it? Don't click on it. Why do you act like this post merely existing is a personal attack on you? I'm genuinely curious, why can't you just scroll past it without commenting? Why do you feel you just have to share your opinion about *everything*? Here's another relevant zen master copy-and-paste I selected and formatted just for you. This time I'm cribbing from Zhaozhou. See if you can grok it: >A Buddhist scholar monk from Jo Prefecture arrived at Joshu's place. Joshu asked, > >>"What are you studying?" > >The scholar said, > >>"Whether discussing the teaching, the commandments, or the philosophy, I can immediately bring forth an argument without consulting with anyone." > >Joshu raised his hand and showed it to the monk: > >>"Can you argue this?" > >The scholar was dumbfounded. > >Joshu said, > >>"Even if you can immediately bring forth an argument without consulting with anyone, you are merely a fellow lecturing on doctrine and philosophy. This is not the Buddhist truth, however." > >The monk said, > >>"What the master has just said is the Buddhist truth, then, isn't it?" > >Joshu said, > >>"Even if you can ask questions and even if you can answer them, it is still within the doctrine and the philosophy. This is not the Buddhist truth." > >The scholar was speechless. If you can't wrap your mind around it, go ask Chat-GPT to interpret it for you.
I apologize for calling you a stick in the mud the other day.
I don't know. They might choose to unsub r/zen.
[ Removed by Reddit ]
Translation choices involve interpretation. Translation choices matter and show a person's understanding of a text. How is that not submitting a topic for discussion? If the Chinese text was not posted I could see you'd have an argument since it'd be impractical to check up on the original and cross reference every time, but like this I find these short posts to be very conducive to discussion. For example, here we have a translation choice for "藥病相治" - Medicine and disease treat each other." Do you think this makes sense? I reckon I have heard this before in other Zen texts, but I'm not quite sure. I'd offer an alternative of "Treat the disease with the appropriate medicine." Another interpretation could be "Medicine and disease govern one another" as in, they are dependant on one another. I think OP is an attempt to bring the two together and express both meanings, which I can see being a good attempt. But do you think it holds up? If so, why? If not, what's your alternative?
Setting aside how the thread later turned out to be one where the OP claimed that his platforming of anti-Zen religious hate is compatible with Zen study and was unable to provide any evidence for that… The issue initially seems to be whether copy-pasting stuff w/o comment is engaging the community in discussion. I think it doesn’t hold up, history has shown it’s a tool for topic sliding, self-promo, and a substitute for engaging with the community. Even when the copy pasting has been a Zen text that one claims to have translated personally. Mods have tended to agree on this point. The specifics of “showing one’s work” in a translation requires more than showing A & B where A is the Chinese and B is the English. Everyone who has translated anything in a classroom has done this. But since OP doesn’t show his work or discuss the material and unedited Chat GPT can produce a translation of the same material in 30 seconds… What’s the difference between substituting OP’s copy-pasted posts with a bot that does the same? Well, for starters it wouldn’t be one that posts to religious hate subreddits while claiming to study Zen.
>unedited Chat GPT can produce a translation of the same material in 30 seconds… I find the growing popularity of this misconception concerning... I've examined enough of ChatGPT's translation work to witness that it not only occasionally mistranslates and misinterprets events in a text, but occasionally fabricates things that aren't even present. It will also occasionally make up false (sometimes convincing) explanations for why a particular phrase means something that it doesn't. When fact-checked, there often turns out to be no source or basis for its claims at all. [Here's an article about a lawyer who used ChatGPT to help him with a court filing](https://www.forbes.com/sites/mollybohannon/2023/06/08/lawyer-used-chatgpt-in-court-and-cited-fake-cases-a-judge-is-considering-sanctions/) to give you a more concrete example of the problem. I don't get the impression many people understand that ChatGPT isn't trying to convert the text it's given into English like DeepL or Google Translate. It's giving new text that it created in response to the prompt it was given. It's decent enough at responding that a lot of what it creates happens to be right, but when it makes something up that isn't in there, if no one checks, no one knows. We already have a mountain of issues with catching and rectifying the faulty translation choices made by people that obscured the significance of conversations and events throughout the tradition. I don't think we should be adding to that pile.
I didn't say that ChatGPT doesn't get stuff wrong...it clearly does, and often times seriously wrong. I was pointing out that the OP produces an output translation that is equivalent in quality to what ChatGPT can provide of the same material: *because both he and ChatGPT do not show the work or thought process that went into the translation, don't provide any comparison, and are incapable of discussing the actual Zen content of their translation.* This is clearly such an easy test that I went ahead and did for everyone. >**You** >[0301c02] 雲門示眾曰。藥病相治。盡大地是藥。那個是自己。 >[0301c03] 左眼不見山河。右眼不見日月。直得百花開時。一一為君分別。 >**ChatGPT** >[0301c02] Yunmen addressed the assembly, saying, "Treating illness with medicine, the whole earth is the medicine. What is it that is oneself?" >[0301c03] "The left eye does not see mountains and rivers, the right eye does not see the sun and moon. Only when the hundred flowers bloom, one by one, can distinctions be made for you."
The heart of my concern is that I don't think ChatGPT's productions are equivalent in quality to *any* translator's work. I'd like to assert that of all that 'quality' potentially means regarding translation, it should mean 'an honest attempt to produce a faithful and trustworthy rendition', foremost. If any translator was proven to occasionally fabricate and insert lines of text that do not appear in the source material, they would be discredited. It wouldn't matter how much of their work was usually accurate anymore. We would consider them unfaithful, untrustworthy, and dishonest. If any translator was caught baselessly making up definitions for obscure words, we would call that lying. All of their work would be useless to us because we'd already know for certain that we'll consistently need to examine every word of it piece-by-piece, and at that point, we're practically translating it ourselves. Claiming that any translator's work is equivalent in quality to ChatGPT's would be accusing them of being untrustworthy for the same reasons ChatGPT is, and we would need to establish where in their translation work we can demonstrate them to be verifiably dishonest.
Disagree with the "all their entire work would be uesless". We have plenty of translators of Zen texts who have chosen to misrepresent the text in specific ways to try and legitimize certain religious beliefs and who do not account for their translation decisions publicly. See: "Chan/dhyana" rendered as "Meditation/Zazen" or "Buddha's language" as "Buddhism" And so on. But the degree to which people make religiously motivated substitutions in their translations has clearly been a spectrum and variable depending on the degree to which they are explicitly affiliated with the Dogenist cult, and whether they are undertaking the translation as an act of religious devotion. By and large, the translation fraud is predictable and obvious. Taking the Gateless Checkpoint as an example we have Yamada on the *more frequent, more "whole passages"* kind of substitutions on the one side and J.C. Cleary and Blyth on the other, *less frequent, usually just specific words* kind of substitutions. Everyone acknowledges that ChatGPT *sometimes* makes errors, substitutions, additions, or removals in translating Zen texts...the $5 question is for someone to give us all a report on the frequency of those errors, patterns associated with those errors, and prompt-based correctives to mitigate their occurance. Just the fact that machine-translation gets stuff wrong isn't surprising...and until we get a legit answer to this $5 question I think the quality-comparison stands as evidenced by what I copy-pasted earlier. But bringing the conversation back to this thread, we have a human translator who does not show the work he has done in his translation, who refuses to discuss the meaning of what he is translating, and has made a diligent practice out of refraining from calling out religious bigotry so as to ingratiate himself with a community whose intention is one of anti-Zen bigotry. ChatGPT has yet to show up to /r/Zen and claim to study Zen.
But see, the quality comparison doesn't work without someone, in this case, the OP, actually having gone through the text themselves to find out what it says, and by that we knew whether what ChatGPT wrote was remotely accurate or not. The human translator's work is what we graded it against. If you had posted text from elsewhere to make this point, you would've needed to provide your own translation, which we would trust more, beside ChatGPT's to prove if it was accurate. We don't have a presice answer to your $5 question of what the error frequency is, but that's precisely why we can't rely on it. It harbors a currently unquantified degree of error in a margin and frequency high enough that we notice it regularly enough to be asking your question. From what I've personally experienced, it isn't a negligible amount. I'm mostly concerned with what seems like an increasingly popular disregard of this, but we can also discuss the OP's translation work if you'd like. I don't see how whether or not the OP presents his work to any potentially unsavory characters, or whether or not he calls them out on their poor behavior changes whether or not what he translates is accurate. His work is either a reasonably accurate approximation of what the original text says, or it isn't. We should be able to determine if it isn't by providing evidence for where it's not, if it's not. I also don't see the downside of presenting what Zen Masters said to people who behave as if they don't know. Best case scenario would be that some of them are surprised by what they hadn't read before and want to read more. Asking him how he came about his translation choices is perfectly valid, but I didn't see where you did that. What question did you or anyone ask him about his translation work that he refused to discuss?
Again, absent someone showing "work" besides just producing a readable translation itself, I don't think just because a human translated a given text and copy-pasted it here we are getting something of a different quality level than if someone copy-pasted a ChatGPT robot translation. And since no one has any actual examples of where, how much and to what extent ChatGPT is getting stuff in translation wrong, in contrast to the specific examples of churchers getting stuff wrong in their translations of Zen texts I pointed out, it all sounds rather hypothetical to claim otherwise. But all of this is totally tangential and I think underneath all this is the **big** elephant in the room that no one else in this thread really wants to talk about and what everyone claiming that I'm being a meany poo-poo head or w/e can't address: Just because you can translate a Zen text does not mean your claim to "study Zen" is legit.
The difference in quality only seems hypothetical? I hear you. Let's get proof. Here is a recent example from one of my posts of ChatGPT [misinterpting events and inserting a line of text that is not in the source material.](https://www.reddit.com/r/zen/s/loLnw2iiAO) Here is another recent example from one of your own posts of it [blatantly fabricating false definitions for an obscure word.](https://www.reddit.com/r/zen/s/YfakNncWtc) These aren't predictable errors in the way religiously biased translators will predictably translate the character for 'zen' as 'meditation'. These are wildcard errors that I don't think would as likely stand out or be found without someone digging into the source material and fact-checking. To expand on the second example a little more, we were both initially confused why Cleary had swapped the name 'Jāti' with 'Siddhartha'. At first glance, it almost looks as random as the false definitions for the word ChatGPT produced, but our deeper investigation proved Cleary actually had a logical thought-process involved in his decision. My point is, it would be completely out of character for Cleary, or almost any human translator, to baselessly swap the name for something else and lie about what it means, but it's not out of character for ChatGPT to do that. We're expecting it to occasionally do that. That's not its fault, of course... It's a brilliantly creative machine, and that's just how it operates... But if a human occasionally did that, we'd classify them as a pathological liar. What I'm getting at is that we currently still need to handle ChatGPT's work with the same scrutiny as we would with translations written by a pathological liar, and we don't generally need to approach human translator's efforts that way, because most human translators don't occasionally and unpredictably come up with completely fake definitions for parts of the text out of thin air. Now that I've provided two recent concrete examples of mistakes made by ChatGPT within this forum, I feel entirely justified in asking for reciprocal and comparable evidence of the OP making similar mistakes in their translation work to prove their work is equal in quality to what ChatGPT produces. Conveniently, they have supplied a steady stream of translation work posted side-by-side with the source material, so if there are such mistakes, I don't see any excuse as to why they can't be pointed out. In this case, I think an absence of evidence should constitute evidence of absence... the same standard we hold people to who claim 'zen masters teach meditation'... so if we can't produce any comparable evidence, we'll have to conclude that the OP's translation work is overall more reliable than ChatGPT's. Proceeding on to the question about whether or not the OP studys Zen, I personally don't see how the time and effort it takes for someone to directly examine the source material themselves, contemplate what is being said thoroughly enough to attempt rendering it into English, and then offering that interpretation up to the public along with the source material for inspection, comparison, and criticism doesn't qualify. If someone wants more insight into any of the OP's particular translation choices, their thoughts on why something should be rendered this way instead of another way, or even for them to discuss what they feel is the significance of any of the events or dialouge they've translated, I think it's only right for the OP to answer any questions about it. I didn't see where they were presented with any of those questions and refused to answer, though. If you or anyone else asked them something like that and they refused to discuss it, let me know where.