Relative clauses are commonly found in Sanskrit or Pāli Buddhist texts, but classic Chinese lacks the relative pronoun with which to correspond it. In this case, how the relative constructions in the Chinese Buddhist translations are constructed? This paper presents an analytical description of the post-head relative clauses in the Majjhima-Nikāya and its Chinese parallels. Due to the fact that Pāli and Chinese are two dissimilar languages, the paper probes into the subject from two aspects: (1) A syntactic and semantic feature analysis of the Pāli relative constructions based on the typological hypothesis; (2) A comparison of the Pāli relative constructions in various Chinese translations. The demonstrated examples not only reveal a word-order reproduction of Chinese Buddhist translations, i.e. a structure of “branching rightward”, but also show the function of a post-head relative clause, providing the supplementary or assertive information for a topic. Compared with the Pāli, a Chinese sentence contains limited constituents. Under the right-branching structure, the post-head relative clauses in the Chinese translations have a syntactic variation: there is a hinted interrogative sentence, “suo-yi zhe he” or “he yi gu.” This inserted sentence turns one relative construction into a discourse consisted of three segments, and shows the strategies of relativization in the Chinese translations.
