Study Of Characters And Words Of Buddhist Stone Carvings Of The Jin And Tang Dynasties

The so-called Buddhist stone carving is a generic term for stone carvings which generally refer to building Buddhist statues,towers,temples,making religious texts,or preface,merit inscriptions,Buddhist stone pillars,cliff inscriptions left by or doing other kinds of merit,holding vegetarian ceremonies,rituals and other religious activities,and tower inscriptions,epitaphs that records monks’ life stories after their death.As we know,the Buddhist stone carvings have a broad as well as a narrow definition,and the carvings we will talk about here are in a narrow sense,the Buddhist stone carvings with inscriptions in particular.This study will mainly talk about Buddhist statue inscriptions,statue tablet inscriptions,monk tower inscriptions and monk epitaphs,and also includes some temple tablets and “carving classic” materials,but stone pillars and stone classics which are left for later studies,will not be taken into account.Jin and Tang Dynasty were the most rapid,prosperous and even peak periods for the spread and development of Chinese Buddhism.Various categories of Buddhist stone carvings appeared and became more and more perfect during this period and Buddhist statue inscriptions,statue tablets inscriptions,monk tower inscriptions and monk epitaphs appeared in large numbers and developed most prosperously during this period.Therefore,this research chooses Buddhist stone carvings of Jin and Tang Dynasty as objects of the study and on the basis of a comprehensive investigation,collection and collation of these carvings,launch a thorough research of language and characters of these carvings.At present,researches on the language and characters of Buddhist stone carving of this period are still rare,so it is worthwhile for researchers to pay more attention and conduct a comprehensive and in-depth study.This study mainly makes a combination of the handed down literature and unearthed documents,and on the basis of a comprehensive investigation,collection and collation of Buddhist stone carvings in Jin and Tang Dynasty,systematically sorts out and researches words and characters of Buddhist stone carvings of this period,particularly some distinctive words and characters usage,and tries to reveal the main features and appearance of carving words and characters of this period and wish to provide some reference for the study of words and characters of Buddhist stone carvings of this period,and even provide reference for the related research of the development history of Chinese characters and history of Chinese vocabulary.The thesis is divided into five chapters: introduction,the collation and research of Buddhist stone carvings of Jin and Tang Dynasty,the study of words of Buddhist stone carvings,the study of characters of Buddhist stone carvings and the research value of Buddhist stone carvings.Chapter one is a introduction,which talks about the outline of Buddhist stone carvings materials,mainly focusing on the development history,structures,contents and classifications of Buddhist statue inscriptions,statue tablet inscriptions and tower inscriptions and the differences and similarities between Buddhist statue inscriptions and statue tablet inscriptions to try to clarify the relationship between them.This chapter also introduces the research history and current situation of the above Buddhist stone carving materials and the significance,ideas and methods of this research.Chapter two is the collation and research of Buddhist stone carvings,mainly about the comprehensive investigation,scientific arrangement and related research of the Buddhist stone carving materials of this period and focuses on the following contents: special text form of Buddhist stone carvings,rubbings conjugation of Buddhist stone carvings,detection forgeries of Buddhist stone carving rubbings,rubbing dating of Buddhist stone carvings,removing duplicates of Buddhist stone inscription rubbings,and supplementary annotations and examples of Buddhist stone carving inscriptions.Chapter three is the study of characters of Buddhist stone carvings,which mainly focus on the use of Buddhist stone carving characters,ancient characters,variant characters,homographs,phonetic loan characters and difficult characters.The structure analysis and origin of Xiaozhuan characters and Liguding characters of Buddhist stone carvings are discussed in the section of ancient characters;in the section of variant characters,variant characters of Buddhist stone carving characters are divided into eleven categories: simplification,multiplying,error and mix,variation,generalization,change,displacement,mark,variation because of different ideas and methods of word-formation,variation because of mark transcription,character integration,and all of them are discussed in detail;types and reasons causing homographs are fully discussed,which is divided into six situations: simplification,multiplying,error and mix,error and change,generalization,displacement;in the section of phonetic loan characters,according to materials’ own actual situation and usage status,mainly investigates the phonetic loan situation of same sound and similar sound of Buddhist stone carvings and points out several problems need to be paid more attention in the study of phonetic loan characters of Buddhist stone carvings and correct the previous errors;in the section of difficult characters,40 difficult characters are worked out and most of them are not recognized or misunderstand by previous scholars.Chapter four is the words study of Buddhist stone carvings,mainly about the studies and explanations of characteristic words of the Buddhist stone carvings inscriptions one by one.According to the themes and meanings,this chapter put emphasis on studies of appellations words,association words,office words,Buddhism words,allusion words,statue vow words,and difficult words and divided into six sections.The research value of Buddhist stone carvings will be summarized in chapter five,and mainly focuses on philology,glossary and lexicography research value of Buddhist stone carvings.