A Study On Languages And Literatures Of The Larger Sukhāvatīvyūha-sūtra

As one of the three classical sutras of the Pure Land,The Larger Sukhāvatívyūha-sūtra and all its translations are important corpus for the history of Chinese Lexicology.At first,five existing Chinese translations of The Larger Sukhāvatīvyūha-sūtra were clearly recorded in ancient Chinese Buddhist indexes that they have the same origin.they have similar lengths and contents which are real and comparable for our research.Secondly,the time of these five translations have passed over eight hundred years,three of them were translated in the Middle ages,two of them were translated in the period of Modern Chinese,they have special value for linguistic comparasion.Once more,based on the background that this sutra was handed down from India to the West Regions and then to China,we could use parallel texts in Sanskrit,Tibetan and languages of the Western Xia to do our research,this sutra has great value in linguistic comparison and language contact.However,compared with its position among sutras of the Pure Land School and its value on the history of Chinese Lexicology,the amount of studies on The Larger Sukhāvatívyūha-sūtra was quite small,contents of existing researches are short of systematicness,some new methods and theories still need to be utilized.Based on these considerations,this paper mainly devided into five chapters as follows.The first chapter would be the introduction,mainly introduce existing manuscripts and translations of The Larger Sukhāvatīvyūha-sūtra,submit previous researches and discuss some doubtful points we have seen,expound the aim which this paper want to achieve,and the method we use.The second chapter mainly examine differences on characters and words among different translations,to investigate they are results of translators’ personal styles or ages of words,and we could describe the track of lexicon development.The third chapter basically investigate new words and uncommon meanings among the five translations,finding which parts were influenced by origin languages such as Sanskrit or Ghandari,which were not.We select a common word she(摄)as an example to reveal a special phenomenon called semantic or functional transfer.As other new meanings which were not under the influence of semantic transfer,we would mainly describe two kinds of origin,one is extension,the other is combination.This chapter also discuss other ways which could influence words such as the change of sentimental color,meaning transfer and so on.The fourth chapter basically explore the value The Larger Sukhāvatīvyūha-sūtra has on research of history of Chinese lexicology,dictionary compilation and literatures emendation,explaining difficult words and phrases,revising Hanyu Da Cidian(汉语大词典),and consulting annotations.The fifth chapter mostly try to verify the real translator and periods of two of the translations in the Middle ages,confirm their relationships and the order in times,analyze the lexicon features separately.The last chapter is conclusion,summarize basic lexicon facts and features discussed in this paper,sum up deficiencies at the same time.This paper is aimed at analyzing the linguistic facts of The Larger Sukhāvatīvyūhasūtra’s five Chinese translations by combinating the way of comparing and extracting lexical standards,investigating differences among various lexical flats,depicting small changes which could reveal the development of words in different periods,discussing origins and reasons why new words or unusual meanings had been created,and trying to provide evidences for some sūtras’ real translators and translated periods from the lexicology view.