The Research On The Literary Value Of Ramayana From DunHuang Documents

Ancient Tibetan documents uncovered in MuGao caves are records of history, politics, economy, religion, medicine and literary works in ancient times. They are materials that are of crucial importance in researches on historic culture in the period of Tibetan Kingdoms. Additionally, all those records that are about literature is one of the valuable resources for doing studies on history of Tibetan literature, nature of Tibetan literature in old times and its characteristics. "Ramayana", the main theme of this paper, is a work that developed and formed during the eighth and ninth centuries when Tibetan Kingdom is in its most developed era. This work is not only special in its words and syntax that were adopted to tell the story, but also outstanding and distinguished from the Indian version of "Ramayana". As such, this work not only plays a crucial role in shaping Tibetan styled literature, but also has a far-reaching impact on words and stories that appear in current literature. The outline of this paper is:firstly, it talks about the main body with "Ramayana" and its historic background as the starting point. Second part is demonstrating the literary value of "Ramayana" and its characteristics. At the beginning, it proves whether this very "Ramayana" was translated from Sanskrit. Following are the thoughts and analysis on artistic style, wording, main themes that were contained in the stories with the help of powerful theories. Lastly, this paper makes a comparison of "Ramayana" from Dunhuang and another version of Ramayana by a Tibetan author called XiangXiong QueHang ZhiBa, and tries to find out the differences and similarities existing in words and figures that were portrayed in the stories.