They also extensively and paintakingly consulted the other reference works that were available to them at the time, such as the lexicons by Eitel and Monier-Williams (see Soothill's Preface for a discussion of sources). Their renderings from these sources are accurate, insightful, and nuanced. This also allowed us to see clearly that both men held a very solid command of classical Chinese. This allowed us to add a good amount of information to the DDB from these sources that Soothill and Hodous-no doubt in the interest of economy-left out. Using modern computing technology in the process of adding this material to the DDB, we were able to benefit from the presence of digitized versions of the Fanyi mingyi ji and the Ding Fubao, which were checked (along with a wide range of other digitized resources) on the addition of each entry. Serious scrutiny has led me to the conclusion that the work is, at least in terms of its translations from Chinese sources, fairly sound. Very early in the age of attempts at mixed Chinese-Roman typesetting, and several decades before the advent of copy machines, these two men, working on different continents, sent their handwritten manuscript back and forth by ship over the Atlantic ocean no less than four times. I became, in the process of this task, quite likely the only other person besides Soothill, Hodous, and their editorial staff, to read the dictionary in its entirety, and as a result of this concentrated exposure to it, I was led, as a fellow lexicographer, to come away with an immense respect for efforts of its compilers. Obtaining a grant from the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science I spent, along with a number of assistants, two years in the task of digitizing this material and adding it to the DDB. I made the decision to digitize the dictionary upon finding out that it had fallen into the public domain, coupled with the realization that its content could do much to supplement that of my own long-term Buddhist lexicographical project, the Digital Dictionary of Buddhism. Most notably information on Indian and Central Asian place names, personal names, temple names and so forth, but also lots of information on hybrid Sanskrit and transliterations that one will not find in any other dictionary, East Asian or otherwise. This is an indication of an important fact about the dictionary: there is a large amount of information contained within it that can't readily be found elsewhere. There is also somewhat of a dearth of useful indexing.ĭespite these shortcomings, the fact is that just about every serious scholar of East Asian Buddhism has a copy of the Soothill/Hodous dictionary in her/his personal library (perhaps stashed somewhere next to a copy of Mathew's).
There is also the difficulty brought about by the usage of vertical bars to indicate the repetition of Chinese characters. Beyond this, the constraints imposed by the printing technology of the 1930's have always made the dictionary somewhat difficult to use, with many of the entries in the dictionary being embedded inside other entries.
The second reason for pushing graduate students away from this work is related to the necessity of getting them involved as quickly as possible in dealing with resources from the original Asian traditions-in this case, the original texts and secondary resources from China, Korea, Japan, and Vietnam. Beyond this, even concepts contained in the dictionary that were adequately understood were often expressed in archaic terms. It was a time in the history of the discipline when "Hīnayāna" was still considered to be something of a distinct historical Buddhist tradition. Thus the understanding of the philosophical terminology coming out of such systems as Mādhyamika and Yogācāra-which had only barely come to be understood in the West, tended to be simplistic, if not completely erroneous. Western language information on Buddhism available to its compilers was extremely limited, and even in East Asian there were few reliable and comprehensive lexicons available. First, the dictionary is an extremely dated work, having reached completion during the mid 1930's, several decades before a serious profession of Buddhology had formed itself in the West.
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Like all other graduate students for the past generation or so who chose to embark on a professional career in the study of East Asian Buddhism, I was, in my early days of study, strictly warned by my mentors against relying on the Soothill and Hodous' Dictionary of Chinese Buddhist Terms as a primary research tool.
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