| The Dongba characters created by the ancestors of Naxi are one of the four kinds of characters originated in China. Dongba characters could reflect a complete development course of characters transiting from pictographic writing to classical ideographic and phonetic characters. As a character-system having both characteristics of picture and pictographic writing, it becomes a unique pictographic system which is still preserved and used by the people. The Dongba ancient manuscripts recorded in Dongba characters are regarded as an encyclopedia of the Naxi's traditional society and have been included in the list of World Memory Heritage by the UNESCO in2003.After more than100years of research on Dongba characters, great achievements have been made not only in basic works, such as literature collecting, sorting out, publishing and tool books compiling, but also in other research fields, such as general philology or comparative philology. Dongba character study has become a new and hot subject in philology field. However, there also exist some bottleneck problems that need us to break through. From the perspective of research methodologies, in the past, outsider-scholars mainly focused on the research of the shapes of characters; their materials mainly came from dictionaries and Dongba characters were studied as died characters. Their research was lack of field work in Naxi area and lack of linguistic research; local scholars focused on the translation of manuscripts and depended too much on the Dongba priests while translating materials. Their research was lack of philology.theories and methodologies. From the perspective of research breadth, the former research did not cover the whole Naxi area, especially Baidi of Sanba township, Shangri-la County, a sacred place of Dongba religion and birthplace of Dongba culture. The research on the Dongba characters and literature of this area is very rare or even blank.This essay takes Bowan village of Baidi, a village where Dongba culture is better preserved and the characteristics of the characters is distinctive, as a investigation site and did a comprehensive survey and research on the Naxi language, Dongba characters, Dongba literatures and social history and culture there. The purpose is through the research on formation, structure, system and nature of characters of this village to build a reference system of the origin of Dongba characters, deeply explore the internal cause of formation and development of Dongba characters and promote the research on Dongba characters from its origin. Through the research on cultural background and present situation of Dongba literatures and Dongba characters of the village to provide materials and references for those related disciples, such as Sino-Tibetan linguistics, general philology study, comparative philology study, ethnic ancient literature sorting out, ethnic ancient characters and dictionary compiling, anthropology, ethnography etc.Judging from the perspective of archaeology material, ethnic history, folk oral history, traditional social organization, inheritance and preservation situation of Donbga culture, Bowan village of Baidi could be regarded as not only one of the most ancient village in Naxi areas, but also one of the places where the original Dongba culture have been preserved best.This essay has done a comprehensive survey on phonetic system of Naxi language in Bowan village, including the combination relation of consonant, vowel and tone of voice and basic words and finds out that the Naxi language of Bowan village not only preserves some voices and vocabularies of ancient Naxi language but also has its own distinctive local dialect characteristics.This essay makes an analysis on existing literatures of Bowan village from their material forms, classification, preservation and circulation situation and catalogued236books (objects). The content of cataloguing includes manuscripts, binding, specifications, text, functions and main contents etc. Through doing a research by classification methodologies on those existing Dongba manuscripts, the author states that while doing classification on Dongba literatures, those literatures for the purpose of religious application should be separated from others. The literatures for the purpose of religious application refer to those scriptures neither belong to religious scriptures, nor belong to literatures for the purpose of folk application, such as dance diagram, painting diagram, ritual rules, postscripts, divination chart, calendar, incarnation slab, Mandala diagram etc. Regarding to classification of Dongba literatures, there are rationality in any standard for classification, but also limitations, therefore, we should do a multi-standard classification on Dongba literature from varied perspectives, including its materials, ritual, usage, habit in Naxi folk, content, cultural connotations, ages, characters, circulations etc.This essay translated14types of typical Dongba literatures from Bowan village, including fragments of two types of religious scriptures, four types of literatures for the purpose of religious application, six types of literatures for the purpose of folk application, two types of other ethnic people's literatures. The translation for each type of literature include a brief introduction to the literature, original picture, word meaning, phonetic symbols for the whole paragraphs and the sentence meaning etc. Each Dongba character is followed with its phonetic and meaning, some even followed with an analysis on its character shape and meaning. For those phonetic loan characters, the author gives its meaning and pronunciation.The formation of character system is a long process. The origin of Dongba characters might be a few symbols or pictures and the formation of the system is a result from different historical periods' supplement and development. Baidi has a very close relation with the origin and development of Dongba characters. Before the Naxi Dongba religion has tremendous scripture literatures, they should, as many other popular religions in the southwest China, depend much on the oral scriptures. There is much possibility that Dongba characters started to be used in Baidi to record literatures, therefore, Baidi becomes the center of the formation of original Dongba manuscripts recorded in Dongba characters and the place becomes a sacred place for Dongba priests to worship, pilgrimage and learn.After doing an analysis on those Dongba characters used in literatures collected from Bowan village, the author finds out the following characteristics:high degree of drawing-like;big numbers of pictographs; wide range; and low level of abstraction. Within character formation, there are mainly pictographs, indicative characters and associative compounds, but rare pictophonetic characters. Some are abstractive symbols. Phonetic loan characters are used in a large number, especially those literatures, such as land contracts, inside which the relation between words and expressions are very tight, the use rate of phonetic loan characters is much higher than those religious texts that do not record all the language words. At same time, there are also drawings (none-characters)used to express the meaning. Judging from the perspective of language recording, this system could totally record the language, but the relation of characters and words are divided into three types, they are:there are characters but no words; there are words but no characters; there are characters and words. The relation between characters and words in religious text and calendar is not tight, but the relation between characters and words in those Tibetan pronounced Naxi Dongba manuscripts or literatures used in the folk are very tight.This essay did a primary survey on the primitive record methods of Bowan village, such as the ownership, direction, position, forbidden signs and communication modes etc. and finds out that in1950s, the people in Bowan village used both primitive record method and Dongba characters. Judging from the circulation situation of Dongba characters and the use of other ethnic groups' characters, Baidi has never stopped its contact with outside, it has been keeping its influence to the Dongba culture in other areas of Naxi. At present, Dongba culture is in a weak position in Naxi areas, and the Dongba culture of Baidi has been constantly marginalized. The position as a sacred place of Dongba religion becomes a history. The value of Dongba characters and inheritance situation are uncoupled from each other. The power of inheritance is weak. Dongba character inheritance work of Bowan village is not optimistic.
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