J.C. Cleary

(1947–2023)

aka Jonathan Christopher Cleary

J. C. Cleary holds a PhD in East Asian Languages and Civilizations from Harvard University. He is the translator or co-translator of numerous works from Zen's Chinese history, including The Blue Cliff Record.

CLEARY, Jonathan Christopher Of Arlington, MA, died, February 25, 2023, in Waltham, MA, from complications related to Parkinson's disease. The eldest of the three sons of Thomas Francis Cleary and Jane Klein Cleary, Chris was born in New Brunswick, NJ, on August 30, 1947. His early childhood years were spent in North Bellmore, Long Island, NY. The family moved to Summit, NJ, in 1954. Chris graduated from Summit High School in 1965, and from Harvard College in 1969. At the start of his undergraduate studies, he was on track to concentrate in mathematics and economics, but in 1967, when Harvard established the concentration in folklore and mythology - the first of its kind in the country, Chris changed fields and earned an AB, summa cum laude, in Folklore and Mythology and in Social Relations. He returned to Harvard University in 1980 for doctoral studies, and in 1985 received his PhD from the Department of East Asian Languages and Literatures. His lifelong fascination with languages began when, as a child, he entertained himself during Mass by comparing the facing pages of Latin and English in the Daily Roman Missal. He began looking at the structure of language and composed a grammar for a new language of his own creation, complete with declensions and verb forms and tenses. Throughout his life, and even after Parkinson's interfered with his own speech and robbed him of his ability to deliver the perfect quip, whenever he met someone whose native language was not one he had some knowledge of, his first questions were always about their grammar and idioms. But it was medieval Chinese that became his focus, and the early writings of Buddhist philosophers and teachers that captured his intellectual interest. As a 15-year-old, he began reading Aldous Huxley's works, which became the entry point to his eventual scholarly appreciation of Buddhism, especially Mahayana and Ch'an Buddhism. To be able to read the primary texts in their original language, he taught himself medieval Chinese, and thus began the years of his translation work. In 1977, he and his brother, Thomas F. Cleary, collaborated on their first translation and published "The Blue Cliff Record." Among his other translations of Chinese Zen are "Swampland Flowers," "A Tune beyond the Clouds," and "Zibo: The Last Great Zen Master of China." In more recent years, he translated the writings of some present-day Buddhist teachers, in particular the work of Wu Yao-tsung.