Martin Goodson
An Interview with Randolph Whitfield: Translating the Core Texts from the Zen Canon.
For many years, Randolph Whitfield has laboured to render a seminal Zen text into the English language. He joins Zen teacher Martin Goodson to discuss the text’s history, it’s implications for the practice and the deeper mysteries of Zen hidden within.
Randolph Whitfield has been a lifelong Zen Buddhist practitioner, studying under Master Daiyu Myokyo in London and Soko Morinaga Roshi in Kyoto.
He originally studied classical guitar and piano at London’s Trinity College of Music and then later studied classical Chinese at Leiden University.
In recent years he undertook a Herculean task to translate the source texts for many of the later Zen Koan Collections - The Records of the Transmission of the Lamp, an early Medieval Chan/Zen text written in China.
In this interview Randolph and Martin discuss all things to do with translating ancient Zen texts into English. Why these texts are so important and influential to the development of Zen, plus something of the underlying Mahayana philosophy present in this text which purports to give histories of the Zen lineage from the time of Gautama Buddha through the Indian patriarchs to the Chinese patriarchs at the time of composition.
Toward the end they discuss and additional translation project by Randolph, the Records of the Ancestral Mirror where they examine what these texts tell us about the nature of consciousness itself.
