A Study Of Definite Questions In Zen Quotations In Tang And Song Dynasty

Zen, one of Chinese Buddhist sects, flourished in Tang and Song Dynasty. The record of its followers' words and behavior is called Zen Quotation. Comparing with other documents at the same times, Zen Quotation has two notable characteristics: first, lots of dialogues in quotations, which were among Buddhist monks or between monks and their pupils, directly recorded the situations of teaching face to face. Thus quotation is more colloquial than other books; Second, the trials of strength among Buddhist monks and the illumination that Buddhist monks gave to their pupils are by the way of questions and answers, so the interrogative sentences, quantity or kind, are very abundant. Making research on these sentences can help us master its developing and alteration more clearly. Limited by the length of thesis, here only discuss one of these interrogative sentence patterns-definite questions.This paper gives an briefly introduction to the definite questions in Zen Quotations in Tang and Song Dynasty on the base of three Zen Quotations ZuTangJi, JingDeChuanDengLu and GuZunSuYuLu, which have important value of historical materials and succeed one by one in time of compilation. The preface narrates present condition of this task, the researching sense and the affection of the modal terms in the interrogative pronoun definite questions. The ending sums up the applying state of definite questions in the Zen Quotations in Tang and Song Dynasty. The main part of this thesis is divided into sevenchapters, respectively talking over the definite question of the interrogative modal terms, interrogative pronoun "he", interrogative pronoun "na", interrogative pronoun "shui", interrogative pronoun "shenme", interrogative pronoun "zheng" "zuo" and "zen",interrogative pronoun "ji" and "duoshao".