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Subject:Probing into Buddhism 靜探顯密
Posted By: Bill Mon, Aug 27, 2012
Hi, Mike: Nice to see your posts again. Long time no hear.
It is great that you did all the hard works in translating the seal scripts, otherwise it will take me a lot of time looking at the dictionary trying to translate them.
One has to understand that seal scripts are invented according to the interpretations of the calligrapher on any Chinese characters. Like Shou (longevity), there are many "100 Shou" seal scripts painting on which one hundred different seal scripts of the character Shou were being displayed. Therefore, any one of us who can write Chinese can invent our own seal scripts for any particular Chinese character and not a single one of them would be exactly alike. That is why some time it would be so very difficult to "translate" some of these seal scripts. Of course, there are certain rules one needs to follow in creating seal scripts especially their radicals, but after a while, if you bother to check on any seal scripts dictionaries you will find there would be tons of different varieties of seal scripts for each character that were collected from different calligraphers in different dynasties.
My translation for the four seal scripts on the large stamp
靜探顯密
Jing Tan Xian Mi
(top right; bottom right; top left; bottom left)
is:
"probing quietly into buddhism"
Jian means quiet, in this case it is used as an adverb, means quietly or slowly or doing something without people noticing it;
Tan is used as a verb here, in this case it can indeed mean investigate, but more in the sense of searching for something in order to learn, therefore I use the verb "probe", like probing inside your inner self or probe into some religions in order to learn more about them;
Now the next two characters would be indeed very difficult to translate without some researches.
Xian if using as a verb by itself can indeed mean reveal, display or show. The next word, Mi can mean secret if using as a noun. Unfortunately, in this case, both characters are used together as a compound noun xian mi 顯密.
Xian 顯 means 显教 xian jiao or 顯宗 xian zong, which is a branch of buddhism. Xian means apparent, open, therefore it means all the believers of this branch can learn everything regarding buddhism quite openly from others or from literature.
Mi 密 means mi zong 密宗, just like the work mi means secret, this type of buddhism must be passed from a teacher to a student in secret.
This type of buddhism may also be called Vajrayāna Buddhism
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vajrayana
However, since I do not know enough about buddhism, I could not be sure.
Very often, some may link mi zong with the buddhism in Tibet. However, you can actually find mi zong in different parts of the world including Japan, Korea, China, etc.
Also, the Tibetan buddhism allows the consumption (eating) of meat. In the Qing dynasty, many Qing emperors favored the Tibetan buddhism more than the Chinese buddhism probably because they themselves were not Han, but were originally coming from the outside of China.
In short, xian mi together would mean buddhism, whether it means specifically the Tibetan buddhism may require further researches.
This type of stamp with these four characters Jing tan xian mi seem to be found quite readily on eBay in the past.
In these two sites, you can seen similar stamp:
http://jd.mycollect.net/399844.html
http://bbs.artron.net/viewthread.php?tid=2642701
The difference between the two branches of buddhism is also discussed here:
http://xz.people.com.cn/BIG5/147280/154290/9268745.html
By Bill (the jadelover)
PS The fun of translating is that every time I would learn something new.
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seal script,, 
( China & Japan ) - adam - Aug 21, 2012 (06:01 AM) 
