Textual Research On Xixia Wen 's Great Prajna Paramita' S

The Great Prajna Sutra is the collection of classic Buddhism scripture, which contains various and rich Buddhist philosophy and plays an important role in Mahayana Budd-hism. Though it has the largest number of scriptures handed down from Xi Xia literature. There are few scholars who have ever sorted it out or done any research on it.This thesis is based on the first part of The Great Prajna Sutra. Tts complete content and comparative neat writing make it appropriate for research. The author will observe and study the size,translation, age, original material, transcription feature of The Great Prajna Sutra to widen people’s horizon about Xi Xia language. Meanwhile, This thesis aims to make a comprehensive esplanation and investigation to this Sutra, hoping to add some new materials for translation berween Chinese and Xi Xia language, to enrich people’s knowledge of Xi Xia language, such as, words phrases,grammar, etc. And to improve the acquaintance of translation features for literature translation. Finally, the author will also try to discuss the translation features for Buddhist terms and Xi Xia people’s understanding level for Buddhist scripture, which will supply the later researchers with reliable data.This thesis will be divided into four chapters:Chapter Ⅰ.Introduction.In this part,theauthor will briefly tell about the significance, current situation and scheme of the study. In addition, the Xi Xia as well as Chinese version of The Great Prajna Sutra will be separately introduced.Chapter Ⅱ. This is the major part of the thesis. In this part, the author will guide the readers to read The Great Prajna Sutra with necessary esplanations. The methord called three line translation will be used. That means, the first line is Xi Xia language, then the word to word translation, and the third is Chinese original passage. Finally, the annotations are attached behind. The Xi Xia passage is mainly based on the reseaich of Cijue Literature the sixteenth volume collected in Oriental Literature Institute of the Russian Academy of Science and published by Shanghai ancient books Publishing House. During the translation, the variant and erroneous words in original literature are corrected, but the missing, derivation words and wrong passage remain unchanged. The word to word translation part fully refers to the present academic research achievements. The Chinese version uses Taisho-pitaka by Xuan Zang.The last part annotation stresses on describing the differences between Chinese and Xi Xia language, the unusual usage of words and phrases, some special language phenomenons in Xi Xia language and Buddhism terms.Chapter Ⅲ. The research about the Great Prajna Sutra.The first part of the author will investigate the translation, calibration, circulation and transcription of this scripture. Also, the calibration age of this scripture, original passage and its circulation in and before Yuan Denasty will be discussed, At last, some mistakes like, in this scripture will be pointed out. In the second part, this chapter is a conclusion of translation featuresof this Sutra. Through the comparatin between Chinese and Xi Xia version in chapter II, the author finds the translation principle is "no translatin under five situations" which generally follows that of Chinese to Sanskrit translation. When dealing with details, the author is flexible enough to make the explanation fluent and easy for the readers to understand. The way of translation is a combination of the word to word method and paraphrase. Meanwhile, the author will point out some translation mistakes in this scripture. In the third part, the author will conclude some features of Buddism terms. Through comparasion.the author finds that transliteration as well as paraphrase is mainly used in translation. When it comes to the faithfulness to original of understanding, it refers more to the original Chinese passage, and less Xi Xia terms are appeared. While the translation terms, mainly descriptive and accessible are not so accurate owing to a lack of full understanding.Chapter Ⅳ.Conclusion. The author will draw a conclusion about the major achievements of this thesis.