Hermeneutyka buddyjska Ireneusza Kani

The article focuses on Ireneusz Kania’s translation work in relation to canonical texts of early Buddhism. Central to his work was the pursuit of truth about the world and humanity, the path to which, in his view, the teachings of Buddha pointed. The article outlines the basic assumptions underlying his approach to translation. These include, alongside drawing from the Western hermeneutics, convictions rooted in Buddhist teachings regarding the conventionality of language, translation as a path to unfolding wisdom, the inevitable transience of translations, and translations as a kind of Indra’s net, where successive versions are interconnected. In his opinion, translations, enabling exploration texts from different cultural and historical realities, can both inspire the quest for answers to fundamental questions and enable the recognition of one’s own intuitions and insights pertaining to the nature of reality.