Frank Lee Woodward, erudite Pali
scholar and translator
Rohan L. Jayetilleke
During the British rulership of
Sri Lanka, there were many civil servants from England who arrived to serve in
the British establishment. Some of them, besides their official duties, were
keenly engrossed in
the study and research on
Theravada Buddhism, and wrote numerous works, which remain as benchmarks on
Buddhism, even to date.
Frank Lee Woodward, born in
England (1871-1952) and trained as a schoolmaster arrived in Sri Lanka and
assumed duties as the Principal of Mahinda
College,
Galle. Within ten years of his
arrival he perfected his knowledge of Pali, so much so that stanzas of the
Anguttara Nikaya were rendered by him into English. Woodward was a serious
student of Buddhism and Pali and took meaningful steps to popularise Buddhism
with translations of the sections of the Tipitaka. He collaborated with Mrs.
Rhys Davids, (the wife of the founder of the Pali Text Society), com- mencing
in 1915 and continued his association with the Pali Text Society.
Woodward wading through the
entire Tipitaka, made critical edi- tions of a volume in Pali text and rendered
them into English. As regards his scholarship the most eloquent tribute came
from Mrs. Rhys Davids who recorded as follows; “In the dark days following the
completion of Part One, the translation of the Samyutta Nikaya during the World
War years, and when others were blocking the way F. L. Woodward wrote from
Tasmania (Australia) his home, offering services, with purity, disinterested kindness
of heart. He consented to write us a draft translation of Part two. Joyous and
swift in his wisdom, like Sariputta’s, in a few months the typescript was
done, completed even with footnotes. We cannot sufficiently thank him for his
brotherly hand that has helped us to keep walking. Not many would have spent
well-earned leisure hours in rendering service from across the world like
that”.
In 1927 Mrs Davids commenting on
Woodward’s translation of fur- ther parts of Samyutta Nikaya noted; “I did it
both accurate and alive. Great is our debt to the labourer’s gift, genial,
patient, accurate, trust- worthy, who has placed here within our reach, more
knowledge of the world movement, concerning which many knowing very little have
written much.”
“Woodward’s’ some sayings of the
Buddha”, according to the Pali Canon, first published in 1925, endeared him to
the Buddhists world over and naturally and genuinely gained a place of honour
and wide acceptance, as a translator very faithful in rendering every word in
Pali to English, with no change in the meaning to be conveyed to the reader.
This was a rare and signal
achievement as there was an economic depression in the wake of the cessation of
the World War I. This was a time when soup queues were lengthening in England
and everybody was in the quest of food for survival after the divesting war.
Six million people had lost their lives in the war and Englishmen accounted
nearly half of it.
During these days of bread and
butter survival there was only a handful of dedicated workers. The high quality
of Woodward’s work,” Some Sayings of the Buddha according to the Pali Canon”
was soon recognized by the Oxford University Press, London, which republished
it in 1942, 1945 and 1949. All editions carried an introduction by Sir
Francis Yiunghusband of Tibetan fame. Woodward’s Preface just ran into four
paragraphs manifesting his self-effacing character.
The rendering of the stanzas in
the Anguttara Nikaya into English was of the highest order. The stanzas were
included in the translation of the Anguttara Nikaya by Edmund Roland
Jayetilleke Gooneratne, who along with Louise Corneille Wijesinha, being
inspired by the translations of Buddhist Scriptures into English and their
language Pali, were led to take the oriental path, to give up their adherence
to Christianity and to espouse Buddhism. They then put their shoulders to
promote the Buddhist Theosophical Society too.
Edmund Rowland Jayetilleke Gooneratne was the First Mudliyar of the
Governor’s Gate and was a resident at Atapattu Walauwa, Walawwatte, Galle, a
scholar and an Orientalist. The English rendering of the Anguttara Nikaya by
Woodward was included in the Gooneratne’s translation of the Anguttara Nikaya
and published by the Pali Text Society in 1913.
In 1915 Woodward began the
translation of the Dhammapada which was published under the title ‘The Buddha’s
Path of Virtue’. He too was the editor of the magazine ‘The Buddhist’
inaugurated by the Buddhist Theosophical Society in 1890 and later taken over
by the YMBA. Colombo. When Woodward came out with his work, Some Sayings of the
Buddha according to the Pali Canon,’ there were popular works in circulation by
other writers such as Light of Asia by Sir Edwin Arnold, Buddhist Catechism,
The Gospel of the Buddha, Buddhism in Translations.
Woodward’s ‘Some Sayings of the
Buddha according to the Pali Canon’ eclipsed, as his work was most faithful to
Theravada Buddhism as recorded in the Pali Canon. The other works were osten-
sibly an amalgam of Theravada and Mahayana traditions.
Still another work ‘Buddhism in
Translations’ by Henry Clarke Warren though containing authentic extracts from
the Pali canon and the relevant Pali literature, it was a massive volume of
over 500 pages. The work of Woodward was not large and faithfully based on the
Pali Canon. Christmas Humphreys, who was a live wire in the Buddhist movement
in England observed, “It has lived in the pockets of thousands of English
Buddhists from that day (i.e. 1925) to this (i.e. 1973).
This magnum opus of an anthology
of Frank Lee Woodward was more readable, in that it had a technique of
preserving the spirit of the original Pali, in a very lucid, direct and dynamic
English rendition.
Even in log sentences Woodward
had his own prose style as is mir- rored in the following extract from the
Samyutta Nikaya translation: “Non monks, if a long does not ground on this bank
or the further bank, does not sink in mid-stream, does not stick fast on a
shoal, does not fall into human and non-human hand, is not caught in an eddy,
does not fall inwardly, that log, monks, will float down to ocean, will slide
down to ocean, will bend towards ocean. And why? Because, monks, Ganges’ stream
flows down to ocean, slides down to ocean, bends waves of ocean”.
In revising his edition for the
World classics Series Woodward, replaced the words “brother” and “sister” with
“monk” and “nun” and “Thatagatha” with “Way-Farer”. In this work chapters like,
‘The Tongue,’ The Stabilizer of societies, Charity, Happiness in the World,
advice mainly to the laity, are even relevant to modern conspicuous consumption
and open-market riddled modern times. The other chapters on the life of the
Buddha, of the teaching of Buddha and the evolution of the Sangha manifest an
effort to educate facts and the way of life the Buddha advocated.
Although at the time there were
several anthologies, like Dwight Goddard’s,
‘A Buddhist Bible’
(1938), Clarence Hamilton’s ‘Buddhism-a Religion
of Infinite Compassion’
(1952) Edward Conze’s ‘Buddhist
Texts Through the Ages’ (1954), E. A. Burtts’ ‘The Teaching
of the Compassionate
Buddha’ (1952), Christmas Humphrey’s, ‘The Wisdom of the
Buddha’ (1960), all these works were an amalgam of Pali, Sanskrit, Chinese, Tibetan, Japanese versions of Buddhism, more towards Mahayana and Woodward’s works were most
outstanding, as they were faithful to the Pali Canon. As regards Pali it has a
unique feature, which has not been revealed to the student as well as to the
general readers. Bhikkhu Nanamoli (Englishman - Osbert Moore, graduate of Exter
College, Oxford, who came to Sri Lanka in 1948 and was ordained by the founder
of the Island Hermitage, Dodanduwa, German national Ven. Nyanatiloka (a
violin-virtuso) in 1949 under the name Nanamoli) in his preface to his work,
‘The Life of the Buddha’ (published by Buddhist Publication Society, Kandy, Sri
Lanka, (1972) says, “Pali is a language reserved entirely to one subject,
namely, the Buddha’s teaching. With that it is unlike Buddhist Sanskrit or
Church latin; a fact that lends it a pecu- liar clarity of its own without a
counterpart in Europe. It is one of the Indo-European group and is closely
allied to Sanskrit, though of a different flavour. The style in the Suttas
(Discourses) has an economic simplicity, coupled with a richness of idioms.
Woodward, as principal of
Mahinda College, Galle, with his own resources had erected a building for the
school. He had a plaque as regards the donor as ‘Vanapala’. It was later known
‘Vanapala’ was translated from of his name in Sinhala word for Wood.
-------------------------
Woodward, Frank Lee (1871–1952)
by Nigel Heyward
* This article was published in
Australian Dictionary of Biography, Volume 12, (MUP), 1990
Frank Lee Woodward (1871-1952),
headmaster and Buddhist scholar, was born on 13 April 1871 at Saham Toney,
Norfolk, England, third son of William Woodward, a country parson, and his wife
Elizabeth Mary Ann, née Lee. Educated by his father, Frank entered Christ's
Hospital (the Bluecoat School), London. After winning distinction as a
classical scholar, sportsman and organist at Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge
(B.A., 1893; M.A., 1902), he taught in several English public schools and
regarded his profession as 'the noblest of them all', as 'a means of learning'
and as 'a means of service'.
While at Stamford School,
Lincolnshire, Woodward began studying Western and Eastern philosophy. In 1902
he joined the Theosophical Society, 'the most important event' in his life.
Inspired to accept Buddha's teachings, he became a friend of Colonel H. S.
Olcott, co-founder and president of the society and a pioneer of Buddhist
education in Ceylon (Sri Lanka). In 1903 Woodward was invited to become
principal of Mahinda Buddhist College, Galle, on the south-western coast of the
island.
There Woodward set 'a very high
tone'. A strict disciplinarian, he knew every pupil in the school, each of whom
he nicknamed after a character in Shakespeare's plays. He lived frugally, like
a Buddhist monk, and was respected for his experience, academic ability and
lack of ostentation. The school grew rapidly and had to be relocated. He
contributed generously from his monetary inheritance, and designed, supervised
and assisted with new buildings which included a science laboratory. The
teaching of the Buddha dharma and Sinhalese language and history were important
in the school: Woodward had Sinhalese accepted as a subject for the Cambridge
local examinations. He advised the director of education in Ceylon and was
actively associated with the movement for establishing a university.
By 1919 he was looking for peace
and seclusion in which to continue his translations of the Buddhist scriptures
for the Pali Text Society. Woodward settled near Launceston, Tasmania, and
about 1927 bought a house in a neglected orchard in the Rowella district on the
western bank of the Tamar River. A vegetarian, a mystic and a man of whimsy, he
practised yoga, wore a turban and lived alone, surrounded by Buddhist
scriptures on thousands of palm-leaves. Maintaining an extensive
correspondence, he recorded the scores in every match played by the Bluecoat
School's Old Blues Rugby XV.
Among scholars, Woodward is
revered for translating eighteen of the forty-two volumes of the Pali texts
into English and for compiling the vast concordance of the Pali canon which
occupied the last fifteen years of his life. At the popular level, his volume,
Some Sayings of the Buddha (Oxford, 1925, 1939), has contributed to a wider
understanding of Buddhism. Reduced to near poverty, Woodward died on 27 May
1952 at Beaconsfield Hospital, West Tamar, and was buried in Carr Villa
cemetery, Launceston. A former associate Sir Ponnambalam Arunachalam viewed him
as a great apostle of Buddhism who had 'combined in a rare degree ... the active
spirit of the West with the mysticism of the East'.
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