| The mysterious seal character is a special kind of Taoist writing,which is mainly based on the characteristics of the seal style of Chinese characters,and also adopts the characteristics of the official script,regular script,and cursive script.The research object of this article is the mysterious seal character of a single word included in the“Orthodox Dao Zang” of the Ming Dynasty.There are mainly “Lingbao Wu Pian Zhen Wen”,“Lingbao Zi Ran Yu Zi”,“San Bu Ba Jing Tian Wen”and “Wu Ya Yu Wen”with 1088-character mysterious seal character recorded in the four sutras.The thesis is divided into four chapters:Chapter One “Introduction” first gives an overview of the mysterious seal character,and then discusses the research status of the mysterious seal character,the research background and significance,as well as the source and research methods of the corpus,focusing on sorting out the research objects.Chapter Two “The Glyph Variation of the mysterious seal character in the Early Lingbao Taoism classics” takes the mysterious seal character that retains the characteristics of Chinese characters and is similar to the shape of Chinese characters as the analysis object.Comparing the shape of the mysterious seal character with Chinese characters from the three different structural components of curved strokes,parts,and whole characters,the transformation and variation of the mysterious seal character has random elements,but some of the fonts still follow Chinese characters.It reflects the influence of different scripts on it,and it is a special kind of script that Taoists transform and mutate the shape of Chinese characters based on the shape of it.It is concluded that the mysterious seal character is mainly based on curved stroke of seal script,combining multiple fonts and glyphs,which can be complex or simplified,with both complex and simplified characters,and has more variants.Chapter Three “The Glyph comparison of mysterious seal character in the Early Lingbao Scriptures” from the two levels of synchronic and diachronic,the characters are similarly compared within the mysterious seal character.The four mysterious seal character can be regarded as different glyph systems with connected glyphs.“ Lingbao Wu Pian Zhen Wen” and “Lingbao Zi Ran Yu Zi ”have two mysterious seal characters in their respective scriptures in general and stable writing,maintaining good integrity and stability internally,this also reflects the sacredness and authority of the mysterious seal character within the religion,and it also proves that the mysterious seal character preserved in the Taoist Temple is likely to preserve the original appearance to a great extent.The different forms of the mysterious seal character in the same interpretation show the tendency of the mysterious seal character to gradually be ignored and highlight its religious symbolism in a religious context.It is a manifestation of the different development stages of the mysterious seal character.Chapter Four “The Reasons for the Variation of the mysterious seal character in the Early Lingbao Scripture” explains the form of the mysterious seal character from three aspects: the promotion of the symbolic function of Chinese characters,the drive of the Taoist literary view of the “The God-given Book of Heaven” and the contradiction and unified development of the dual attributes of the rationality as a literal symbol and the non-rational nature of the religious symbol.Through the research of mysterious seal character in this paper,it can be seen that the secret seal text itself is the result of a combination of multiple factors.Taoist thought influences the Taoist concept of writing,so ordinary characters are transformed to form the mysterious seal character that are difficult to identify.The mysterious seal character is influenced by the culture of Chinese characters.It can be seen that the mysterious seal character is a special text variant produced by Chinese characters to meet the needs of religious and cultural context.The characters of the mysterious seal character have stability and variability,reflecting the unique concept of Taoism classics. |
