Dragon King's Other Daughter and New Romlang

[qiihoskeh]

Having mentioned¹ that I've long wanted (since 1986) to write a story called "The Dragon King's Other Daughter", I decided to look at my notes on it. I found the disk with all my story notes and load the files onto the current computer. Then I saw that I didn't have any notes for this story, so I guess I'll have to write some.

The background comes from the Lotus Sutra, chapter 12 (Devadatta), where the Dragon King's 8 year old daughter appears. This story (assuming I'm able to write it!) will be about her younger sister who's not very interested in enlightenment; it was inspired by an actual dragon-cat named Byakuren (White Lotus).


In other news, I've been working on pinning down and documenting the details of another Latin-derived conlang. The process has been going very smoothly, not like my usual muddled efforts. I won't have much to say about that language here.

---

(1) in a comment somewhere in fairmer's journal

Comments

Romlang and Lotus Sutra

[qiihoskeh]

Conlang: It really makes a difference working from a standard language model -- all the terminology etc. is already there.

The definitive version of the Lotus Sutra is the T'ien-T'ai version of Kumarajiva's translation into Classical Chinese (ca. 400CE) from an unknown, but probably Sanskrit, oral version. Although there are other Chinese, Tibetan, and Sanskrit versions, most modern translations are based more or less on this version, and it's the one that's actually recited by practitioners (albeit mostly in Sino-Japanese).
Now you were probably asking about English translations :). In this case it's hard to say. I've read 2 of these. The Burton Watson translation has the most grammatical English and IIRC the only one currently in print. I've also read the Threefold Lotus Sutra, which includes 2 other shorter sutras. I'm not sure what's online -- I may attempt googling later.
I should warn you that the dragon king's daughter appears in the last half of a fairly short chapter, so there's not much to read there, story-wise. But I'd be interested in your reaction.