Buddhist Hybrid English is a term coined by Paul J. Griffiths

Paul J. Griffiths

Paul J. Griffiths is the Warren Professor of Catholic Thought at Duke University.Griffiths has previously held appointments at the University of Notre Dame, University of Illinois at Chicago and the University of Chicago...

 as an analogy to Buddhist Hybrid Sanskrit

Buddhist Hybrid Sanskrit

Buddhist Hybrid Sanskrit is a modern linguistic category applied to the language used in a class of Indian Buddhist texts, such as the Perfection of Wisdom sutras. BHS is classified as a Middle Indic language...

 to designate the often incomprehensible result of attempts to faithfully translate Buddhist texts into English. This effort often involves the creation of entirely new English phrases for Sanskrit

Sanskrit

Sanskrit , is a historical Indo-Aryan language and the primary liturgical language of Hinduism, Jainism and Buddhism.Buddhism: besides Pali, see Buddhist Hybrid Sanskrit Today, it is listed as one of the 22 scheduled languages of India and is an official language of the state of Uttarakhand...

, Tibetan

Standard Tibetan

Standard Tibetan is the most widely used spoken form of the Tibetan languages. It is based on the speech of Lhasa, an Ü-Tsang dialect belonging to the Central Tibetan languages. For this reason, Standard Tibetan is often called Central Tibetan...

, Chinese

Standard Mandarin

Standard Chinese or Modern Standard Chinese, also known as Mandarin or Putonghua, is the official language of the People's Republic of China and Republic of China , and is one of the four official languages of Singapore....

, or Japanese

Japanese language

is a language spoken by over 130 million people in Japan and in Japanese emigrant communities. It is a member of the Japonic language family, which has a number of proposed relationships with other languages, none of which has gained wide acceptance among historical linguists .Japanese is an...

 phrases, the use of English words in uncharacteristic ways, and heavy reliance on calque

Calque

In linguistics, a calque or loan translation is a word or phrase borrowed from another language by literal, word-for-word or root-for-root translation.-Calque:...

s.

An example Buddhist Hybrid English phrase is "own-being" to translate Sanskrit svabhāva in contexts where it is used as a technical philosophical term, equivalent to English essence.