|
Abstract The attributions of Chinese Buddhist texts to early translators in the Taishō Shinshū Daizōkyō (《大正新修大藏经》) and other widely used editions of the canon are often erroneous and should not be taken at face value. In the early 20th Century, Buddhist scholars in Japan began to study this issue systematically. Since the 1990s, as the early Buddhist texts have been widely used as an important material for the study of the medieval Chinese language, scholars in China have also actively engaged themselves in this research field. After nearly a century of exploration, as our understanding of the Chinese Buddhist texts is significantly enhanced, research perspectives and methods in this area have become increasingly refined and sophisticated, showing an overall trend of cross-referencing between linguistics, philology, and Buddhist studies.
There is a wealth of research on the attribution of early Buddhist translators. The linguistic styles and representative phrases of certain important early translators such as An Shigao, Lokak?ema, Zhi Qian, and Dharmarak?a have been summarized. The list of their “core texts” has been revised several times so that other less reliable texts attributed to these early translators can be graded according to the extent to which they deviate from the “core text”. The date and place of production of some anonymous or suspected forgery texts are also explored through their linguistic features. When we use early Chinese Buddhist translations as material for the study of the medieval Chinese language, due attention should be paid to these findings.
Recent researches have generally used both “external evidence” (i.e. evidence outside the text, including catalogues, prefaces, commentaries, biographies, quotations, etc.) and “internal evidence” (i.e. evidence from the text itself, including terminology, general vocabulary, grammatical and phonological phenomena, style of writing, etc.) to determine the date and translator of the early Buddhist text. As old translations or transliterations of terminologies are likely to be systematically replaced with new ones by later generations, recent studies have placed more emphasis on the evidence of general words and syntax. A comparative study of the text under examination with its contemporaneous “core texts” (both Buddhist and non-Buddhist) is a useful way of demonstrating whether its linguistic features are consistent with the period to which it claims to belong.
Reflections were also made on the limitations of identifying the translator and the period of production of a text by its linguistic features: even among the “core texts” of the same translator, there may be a certain amount of heterogeneity, which may be the result of changes in the translator’s style over time, or differences in the language of the scribes (bishou zhe 笔受者) within the translation team, etc. Therefore, when using linguistic features to identify the attribution of a translated text, judgements cannot be made on the basis of only a few phrases but must be examined thoroughly and cross-checked with evidences from different sources.
|
|
Published: 30 January 2023
|
|
|
|
