60966709 buddhism and the rise of the written vernacular in east asia mair 1994[1]

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Bu ddhism and the Rise of the

Wri t ten Vernacular in East Asia:

T h e Making of N ational Languages

VICTOR H . MAIR

T H E AS T MAJORITY OF PREMODERN CHINESE L IT E R A T U R E , ce r t a in ly a l l o f t he mo s t

famous works o f t he c l a ss i ca l t rad i t i on , were composed in one fo rm o r ano the r o fLi terary S in i t ic (hereafter LS, wen-yen[-wen), a lso often som ewh at a mbig uou sly cal led

"Classical Chinese" or "Literary Chinese"). Beg innin g i n the medieval period, however,

an unde rcur rent of wri t ten Vern acular S in i t ic (hereafter VS, pui-baa[-wen)) s tar ted

t o d e v el o p . T h e w r i t t e n v e r n a c ul a r c a m e t o f u ll m a t u r i t y i n C h i n a o n l y w i t h t h e

M a y F o u r t h M o v e m e n t o f 1 9 1 9 , a ft e r t h e fi n a l c o ll a ps e d u r i n g t h e 1 9 1 1 revolut ion

o f t he dynas t i c , bu reauc ra t i c i n s t i t u t i ons t ha t had governed Ch i na fo r mo re than

tw o mi l l enn ia . I t mu s t b e po in t ed o u t t ha t t he d i f fe rence be tween wen-yen and pu i -

baa i s a t l eas t a s g rea t a s t ha t be tween La t in and I t a l i an o r be tween S ansk r i t and

H i n d i . I n m y e s t i m a t i o n , a t h o r o u g h l i n g ui s ti c a l a n al y si s w o u l d s h o w t h a t

unadu l t e ra t ed wen-yen a nd p u re pu i -baa a re ac tua lly fa r more d i s s im i l a r t h an a re

Lat in and I ta l ian o r Sanskri t and H in di . I n fact , I bel ieve tha t wen-])en a nd pui -baa

be long to who l ly d i f fe ren t ca t ego r i e s o f l anguage , t he fo rmer be ing a so r t o f

Victor H . Mair is Professor of Asian and M iddle Eastern Stud ies at the University of

Pennsylvania.

Research for the final version of this study, begun a half-dozen years ago, was carried

out at the National Huma nities Center duri ng the academic year 199 1-92. Wo rk at the

Center was supported by grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the

Andrew W . Mellon Foundation. I am grateful to all three of these organizations for pro-

viding me the ideal conditions to complete a number of projects. In addition, I would like

to thank the following individuals who read this work in one or more of its many previous

incarnations: John DeFrancis, Gari Ledyard, S. Robert Ramsey, James Unger, Jan Nattier,

Tsu-Lin Mei, Ludo Rocher, Oskar v. Hiniiber, T . Griffith Foulk, Stephen F. Teiser, Rich-

ard Mather, David Utz, and Linda Chance. While all of them offered helpful comments

and useful references, I alone am responsible for any errors of fact and interpretation that

remain. Th e l inguists, Chou Yu-kuang, Jerry N orman , W . South Coblin, and Takata To-

kio, provided assistance on technical questions, for which I am deeply thankful. Finally, I

appreciate the close, critical reading of three anonymous referees for this journal who made

several useful suggestions for improvement.

A monographic treatment of this subject, entitled The Conrept o "National Language"

in East Asia u nd Its Buddhist Beginnings, is fo rth com ing in Sino-Pkatonir Papers.

The Journal of Asian Studies 53, no . 3 (August 1994):707-75 1.

0 1994 by the Association for Asian Studies, Inc.



7 0 8 V IC TOR H . M A I R

demicryptography largely divorced from speech and the latter sharing a close

correspondence with spoken forms of living Sinitic. This difference is reflected in

the names for these two types of written Sinitic, wen-yen literally meaning "literary

language" and pai-hua me aning "unadorned speech. ".The problem is that stylists

in both the wen-yen and pai-hua traditions seldom, if ever, employed an unalloyed

form of these two types of written Sinitic. Thus, there are varying degrees of mixtures

that are loosely characterized as pan-wen-pan-pai (semiliterary-semivernacular).

Linguistic data indicate that LS and VS have been distinct systems as far back

as they can be traced. This is certainly true from the Warring States period (475-

249 B .c. E. ) on, but I suspect that eventually we wil l be able to demonstrate

conclusively that LS, starting with its earliest stage in the oracle shell and bone

inscriptions (around 12 00 B. c. E .), was always so drastically abbreviated and so replete

with obligatory nonvernacular conventions used only in writing that it never came

close to reflecting any contemporary living variety of Sinitic speech. Naturally, LS

must have been founded upon and continuously infused by some variety or varieties

of VS, just as w rit te n Sume rian (wh ich was likewise "unsayable") m us t have been

based upon a form of the living language of the people of ancient Sumer (cf. DeFrancis

198 9:78 -79). Yet the disparity between LS and VS is of a wholly different order

of magnitude than that between, say, wri t ten and spoken English or wri t ten and

spoken R ussian.

An analogy that may be used to illustrate the relationship between LS and VS

is that of the relationship between a. code or cipher and the natural language uponwhich it is based, although the difference is not so drastic as it normally is in the

latter case where intentional (though strictly principled and hence reversible for a

privileged receiver) scrambling may be involved. Or we may describe the radical

reduction of VS to LS as being somewhat similar to the making of shopping or

chore lists and the jotting down of lecture notes that include all sorts of abbreviations

and omit auxiliaries, prepositions, endings, and other morphemes that are not

absolutely essential. Apart from its being unnecessary for the writer to spell out

everything explicitly in detail, early scribes doubtless had added incentives to economize

on the time-consuming task of preparing the awkward materials they worked with-

clay on the one hand and bones and shells on the other-and to be as terse as

possible with the complicated, inefficient morphosyllabic symbols of their scripts.

After this sort of shorthand got started, it may have seemed the norm for writing.

Such drastically pared-down, unnatural (in terms of real [spoken) language) styles

would have been fostered and perpetuated by those elite ritual specialists who wished

to monopolize their exotic skill. In the case of Sinitic, once such an elliptical system

was established, it diverged more and more from the spoken language as the writing

remained largely fixed while speech changed over tim e (DeF rancis 1 99 1). The difference

between LS and VS is thus not just a matter of diachronic change, as between Old

English and Modern English or between Old Russian and Modern Russian. It is,

rather, a distinction between two separately structured linguistic media. As we shall

see below, LS and VS coexisted in China for thousands of years. Their maintenance

as competing systems was due to support from different social and political

constituencies.Going from LS to VS or in the other direction definitely requires a process of

decoding/encoding or translation; witness the burgeoning number of VS translations

of LS texts from all ages that are being produced in Taiwan and the People's Republic

of China. If LS and VS were merely two variants of the same language, there would

be no compelling need to translate the one into the other. The confused notion that



LS and VS are simply constituents of a single language is due to their frequent

borrowing from and mixing with each other. More of this is done by VS from LS(e .g ., ch'eng-yii ["set ph rases," com mo nly referred to loosely as "idioms") whose LSgrammar, syntax, and lexicon are noticeably distinct from the VS matrix in which

they are implanted) than by LS from VS, since writers of LS tend to be more conscious

of maintaining the integri ty and p urity of their highly mannered style, while writers

of VS often aspire to affect an LS aura without really mastering the entire artificial

language.In a st imulating art icle, "On Representing Abstractions in Archaic Chinese,"

Hen ry Ro sem ont, Jr. (19 74 ) basically concurs with these views on LS when he states

that it was not a spoken language but an exclusively written language and hence

that it cannot be classified as a natural language. Tsu-Lin Mei (1992a) takes the

contrary p osition th at the Analects, to a certain exten t, reflects spoken langu age.

H e sees the best evidence for this in fusion words (or what W .A .C .H . Dobson[197 4: 101-2) has called "allegro forms"). Since they can occur only in rapid sp eech,

he regards them as '$prima facie evidence that the Master did speak in a form pretty

close to what was recorded." Indeed, the Analects is more vernacular than the Tso

chuan [Tso's Chvonicle) in the sense that it uses more grammatical particles, requiresmore words to say the same th ing , e tc . , and that 'both are more vernacular tha ncontemporary bronze inscriptions. Nonetheless, I still maintain that all LS texts(inc lud ing t he Analects and Tso's Chronicle) are dram atically divorced from vernacular

speech and represent a separate system of linguistic and orthographic conventions

employed solely in writing. The clearest evidence for the separateness of the two

systems can be seen in the m uch higher degree of polysyllabicity of the vernacular,

starkly different gr amm atical structures and usages (see the discussion of shih belowfor one telling example; many others, such as distinctive demonstrative words, the

method for hand ling possessives and relative clauses, different approaches to measure

words [also called counters and classifiers), and verbal complements, might be

adduced), and the fact that the borrowing back and forth between the two systemsis so conspicuous. W e shall return to the alleged vernacularity of the Analects again

under the rubric of kuan-hua.

Early Written Vernacular in China

A curious phenomenon about the way the vernacular first comes to be writtendown in China is that the earliest instances of written VS occur almost exclusively,

certainly with absolute and unmistakable predominance, in Buddhist contexts. The

most conspicuous examples of this phenom enon are the T un -hu an g pien-wen(transformation texts: eighth to tenth centuries) that I have worked on for the past

two decades (Mair 198 3, 19 88 , 1 989 ; Ir iya 196 1, 198 5) and the recorded sayingsof Zen masters referred to as yi-lu that date from the period immediately following

(Maspero 191 4; Kao 194 8; Berling 1987). Equally str iking is the high proportion

of vernacular elements that are present in the earliest translations of Buddhist texts

into Sinit ic, start ing from the second century of the C omm on Era (c.E .) . This hasbeen demonstrated conclusively through the careful research of the eminent Dutch

Buddhologist, Erik Ziircher (197 7; 198 0; 19 91), and , following in his footsteps,

the young Chinese l inguist , Chu Ch' ing-chih (1990).Chu's study is based on a close reading of all the Chinese Buddhist texts of the

early medieval period, by which he intends the Eastern Han, Wei, Chin, and Northern



7 1 0 V ICTOR H . M A I R

and Southern Dynasties, f rom about 25-589 C .E . There is an enormous am oun t of

material to be covered-Buddhist scriptures of the early med ieval period alone am ou nt

to 9 60 t it les in 2 ,9 90 scrolls or fascicles composed of roughly 2 5, 00 0, 00 0 graphs,

surprisingly more than the secular native literature from the same period.

Chu r ichly and conclusively documents a highly signif icant phenomenon, that

medieval Buddhist texts are decidedly more vernacular and colloquial than theirnon-Budd hist coun terparts from th e same period. O ne of the mo st obvious aspects

of Chinese Buddhist texts in comparison with native works is that they contain far

more p olysyllabic words (particularly disyllabic words), b ut there are also noticeable

syntactic and grammatical differences (cf. Watters's excellent but little known work

of 1 88 9, esp. chapters 8 and 9 ["The Influence of Buddhism on the Chinese

Language")). Some of this influence was in direct response to the ling uist ic features

of the Indic (and perhaps Iranian and Tocharian) prototypes for the Chinese translations

of Buddhist texts. It is clear, however, that the implantation of Buddhism into the

Chinese sociolinguistic body also served to elicit in an active way vernacular, colloquial,

and dialectical elements that belonged properly to spoken Sinitic languages but that

had been rejected by the indigenous textual tradition as vulgarisms.

I shall give here only two exam ples in su pp ort of Chu 's thesis, the first gram matica l

and the second lexical. Shih as the copulative verb shows up in the earliest Buddhist

translations ( i .e . , star t ing from the second century c.E .) and is quite com mon in

medieval popular Buddhist literature. This is in complete contrast to its use as a

demonstrative in LS. Very early use of shih as the vernacular copulative has recently

been archaeologically confirmed by the discovery of an astronomical text in which

it repeatedly and unm istakably occurs in tha t capacity (cf. Tu an Li-fen 198 9). Since

this newly found text dates to well before the beginning of the Common Era (fromnear the beginning of the Western Han [ i .e. , the early part of the second century

B.c .E .) ) , copulat ive shih can hardly be at tr ibuted to the coming of Buddhism. I t

must, rather, be a feature of the vernacular language that was present very early,

perhaps from the start, but that was ignored by LS writers (cf. Cantonese hai, which

seems to represent another modern survival of the same vernacular element). This

distinctive characteristic of VS (A shzh B ["A is B")) which is so apparent even up

to the present day, is utterly different from LS, which lacks a copulative verb altog ether.

Instead, LS employs the nominative sentence structure A B yeh ("A [is) B"). It is

noteworthy that Ssu-ma Ch'ien's Recwds ofthe Grand Historian (Shih-chi) (c. 90 B.c.E.),

which of all LS texts dating to the period before the Common Era has a tendencyto admit a few discernable elements from VS, includes a number of instances in

which A shih B and A B yeh are combined, hence A shih B yeh. O hta (1958 : 189)

offers an astute analysis of this phenomenon.

The emergence of the largely polysyllabic VS lexicon is often erroneously explained

as the result of the combination of monosyllabic words from LS, as though VS were

somehow derived from LS or an attempt to make LS more explicit and understandable

when spoken. Conceptually this makes no sense whatsoever, since spoken languages

always precede the invention of their written forms. Historically, the alleged derivation

of VS from LS is also demonstrably false. In a fuller treatment, I could cite hundredsof instances that show that polysyllabic vocabulary has been a feature of VS from

the earliest times that can be attested, but here I shall refer only to one, namely

tao-la ("way, road"). Tao-lu is a venerable VS word still in use today that is found

in a wide variety of pre-Ch'in texts, including the Tso chaan (Tso's Chronicle) ( 4 6 3

B.c .E .) by T SOCh 'iu-m ing (cf . Mair 1990:22-23 for the phonology and philology

of this word). The fact that the word tao-la is usually reduced to just tao in LS texts



Figure1.

Medieval Vernacular Sinitic written in Tibetan transcription.Lines 130-68 of the "Long Scroll" from Tun -hua ng. Catalogue N o. C1 31

of the Oriental and India Office Collections of the India Office Library.

With the permission of the British Library.

shows that the relationship between LS and VS is exactly the opposite of that which

is comm only assum ed. T o w it, where we can test specific instances in the early

stages of the formation of LS, it seems to be the result of drastic truncation of VS,

including anaphora so extreme that it could not possibly be tolerated in intelligible



speech. Of course, once LS was securely established, it became possible to create

new polysy llabic (chiefly bisyllabic) words i n VS by joining tog eth er mon osyllabic

LS words. But this was a relatively late phenomenon and would have been possible

only for those few who were literate in LS. The mass.of the population would have

continued to use and create polysyllabic words as they always had from the beginnings

of the Sinitic language group, i.e., irrespective of the tetragraphic script.

What Ziircher and Chu have both shown clearly is that, from the very beginnings

of Buddhism in China, the translated texts of this new religion display a higher

degree of vernacular content than do non-Buddhist texts. No other texts from the

same period can begin to compare with the early Buddhist translations for the large

amount of vernacularisms they contain. Indeed, it is extremely rare in non-Buddhist

texts of the same age ever to find even a single unambiguously vernacular usage.

Nonetheless, it must be pointed out that, as the eminent Russian specialist on

Medieval Vernacular Sinitic, I. S . Gurevich (19 85) has shown, even the Tun-h uang

pien-wen can by no means be said to represent a pure form of VS, inasmuch as they

still contain a significant proportion of LS elements. This is probably due to the

nature of the sinographic script which is so perfectly well suited to LS but rather

inimical to a full representation of any VS language. It should also be mentioned

that, once Buddhists had paved the way for the use of a vernacularized written

m ed iu m , it was tentativ ely adopted-through emulation-for secular purposes by

others who were living in close association with them. Witness the occasional

transformation texts, stories, rhapsodies, cantos, and other genres on non-Buddhistsubjects that came to be writ ten down at Tun-huang. By the Sung period, i t had

become acceptable-among certain still mo stly non elite social classes-to em ploy

the written vernacular for historical medleys, love stories, and lyrics.

The evidence for the int imate relat ionship between Buddhism and the writ ten

vernacular in China is so irrefutable, yet so unexpected, that it demands an explanation.

Given that the connection is both obvious and uncontested, one m igh t imagine that

there would be an easily identifiable set of reasons for this phenomenon. Such,

unfortunately, is not the case. The situation is actually quite complex and it is

difficult to declare with assurance precisely w hat it was about B udd hism tha t proved

to be conducive to the adoption of the vernacular as an acceptable written medium.

This is all the more remarkable in light of the fact that Chinese literati had always

looked down upon any trace of the vernacular in writing as crude and vulgar (su).

Naturally, like all other vocal human beings, Chinese scholars themselves were forced

to use the vernacular in daily conversation, but committing it to writing was an

entirely separate matter. On the face of it , the adoption by Chinese Buddhists of

written vernacular and Buddhist Hybrid Sinitic (hereafter BHSi) as vehicles for the

expression of their faith seems improbable. One would have thought that they would

have chosen, instead, LS, since it was uniformly considered by the Chinese elite to

be more elegant. Surely straight wen-yen would have been more appropriate if one

were deliberately searching for a suitable sacred language in which to couch one's

scriptures in a new arena of evangelism. Hence, the blatant Buddhist preference for

pai-hu a o r wen-yen mixed wit h large ch un ks of pai-hzla vocabulary a nd s yntax is

puzzling from a conventional point of view.W it h t im e, s tyles of Buddhist wri t ing in China more nearly approxim ating LS

did develop, especially for those texts that were composed by native authors and

were not translated from non-Sinitic languages. To one degree or another, most

Buddhist texts that were translated from non-Sinitic languages, particularly those

done by non-Chinese individuals, display various types of grammatical and syntactical



discrepancies with LS. This is not, of course, to mention the large amounts of

translated and transcribed terminology that also stamp BHSi as different from LS.

In the next section, I would like to identify a number of factors peculiar to

Buddhism that possibly might have contributed to the acceptance of the vernacular

as a workable tool for written expression. Because of the tremendous complexity of

this issue, I will refrain from any simple, unidimensional explanation. Starting from

the most abstract and general aspects, I shall move to more concrete and specific

features that may have fostered the growth of the written vernacular in China.

Buddhism and Language

Budd hism, above all, is a sophisticated religion with an extensive body of doctrine.

Perhaps Buddhist teaching contains a core precept that is conducive to the vernacular,

a teaching for which there was no parallel in native Chinese traditions, such as

Confucianism and Taoism . On e that leaps to mi nd is the notion of @*a (fang-

pien, skillful means). According to this doctrine, believers should use whatever meansare appropriate to ensure the salvation of all sorts of living creatures. Updya was

not just a rarefied theory, but was actively applied in Buddhist preaching and teaching.

In C hina , for examp le, lectures for laymen (su-chiang) were delivered by em inen t

monks (kao-seng) and, upon occasion, by a few who were not so eminent. The notes

for some of their lectures have been preserved among the Tun-huang manuscripts

as sutra-lecture texts (chidng-ching-wen) and they are q uit e vernac ular in their orientation

(Mair 1986). O the r literary ramifications of the doctrine of updya are Buddhist parables,

apologues, and birth-tales k now n as avaddna, niddna, and jdtaka. These, to o, were

much-favored in China and popular with the masses. Vivid descriptions of Buddhist

storytelling and lecturing may be found in the Biographies o Eminent Monks (Kao-

seng chuan), travel records of foreigners in China (e.g., Ennin's Diary), classical fiction(ch'uan-ch'i), Tun-huang texts (e.g., the tale of Hui-yiian CS2144 in the British

Library]), anecdotal literature, and other sources.

Buddhism is not only a religion, however, for it also functions as an elaborate

philosophical system. Is there anything inherent in Buddhist thought that might

sanction the use of the vernacular? Here I am rather skeptical that we can find

much that will help us elucidate the mystery of the Chinese Buddhist predilection

for the vernacular. My suspicion about the applicability of philosophical premises

to our present quandary is based on the fundamental ineffability of Buddhahood

and other associated concepts, such as nirvana. Already in the Nikiiyas (the early

Pali texts) and the Agamas (a group of texts in the Sanskrit canon that correspond

to the PZli NikZyas), it is clear that ultimate religious goals are held to lie outside

the realm of discourse and, hence, discursive thought. The Suttanipdta informs us

that the Buddha is beyond the "paths of speech" and in the Thwagdthd he is described

as being inconceivable in visual or auditory images (Gomez 1987:446a). It is a

commonplace in MahZyZna texts that enlightenment is incompatible with words

and intellection. The usual formulation is "the way of language is cut off, the

wo rkin gs of the m in d are oblite rated " (yuen-yii tao tuan, hsin-hsing c h i mieh).

See, for example, ~ahdprajfidpdramitopadeia/Ta chih-tu lun (T25[1509].71c),

~vatamsakasittra/Hua-yenching (T9[ 278] . 4 24c ), and "Mahdiamathavipasjandya [?]/M o-

he chih-kuan (T46[1911].59b). Even the Zen masters, whose words are ironically

preserved in wri tten vernacular (perhaps one should say, especially the Z en ma sters),



insist on such no tions as "transmission from m ind to m ind " (i hsin chJzun hsin) and

"nonestablishment of written words" (pa li wen-tzzl), which disparage the efficacy

of language, especially in its written form, to convey essential truths.

Despite Buddhism's presumed philosophical derogation of language, no religion

can survive without sacred texts, and Buddhism definitely produced an abundance

of scripture (three huge baskets full!). What is unusual about the Buddhist canon,

however, is the pervasive pretense that it has an immediate oral basis. It is remarkable

how many works in the Buddhist Tripitaka begin with the formula evam

may2 Srutarn, Pali evam me sutam ("T hus have I he ard ," in Sini tic ju shih wo wen), or

words to that effect. The simulacrum is that of the eminent disciple Ananda

reciting the Buddha's words to the assembled faithful at Rajagrha after his death.

This formula not only stresses the presumed reliability of direct transmission, but

also reveals that the Buddhist siitras were orally conveyed to Ananda, and thence

to the rest of the community. This self-evident mark of oral transmission is like a

stamp that authenticates the text that follows. It distinguishes the doctrines of the

Buddha from those of teachers who were presumably heretical. Ultimately, then,

the entir e Bud dhis t canon-while it clearly represents a large and long scriptural

tradi tion wi th rules, com me ntari es, discourses, an d exegeses added later-is ostensibly

(one m ig ht alm ost say "aggressively") founded upon the spoken word (v. Hin iiber

1990:ch. 5). This is also reflected in the large number of East Asian sutras whose

full titles start with the expression Fo shuo ("spoken by the Buddha," from Sanskrit

buddhavacana or b~~d&bh+ita), even though it would have been impossible for theBuddha to utter all of the words in them, especially those that were originally

composed in China, Japan, and Korea! There is even an entire szitra (Pali sutta)

entitled the Itivuttahz, which means roughly "the speeches beginning with the words

'This was spoken (by the Lord).' " Th e equivalent Sinitic t itle is Ju shih yg ching

(SCtra Spoken Thus]. This is the fourth scripture in the Khuddaka-nikaya of the Pali

cano n. E ach section of th e siitr a begins V uttam hetam bhagavata vuttam arah ata 'ti

me satam (W Owen shih-tsun ying-Rung ts'eng ju sshh shuo ("T hu s d id I he ar t he wo rship ful

W orld -Ho nore d speak"]). Interspersed i n the text we find such expressions as iti

vuccati (jzl shih yen ("said thus!')). At the end of each section occurs the following

formula: Ayam pi attho vutto bhagavatZ iti me sutam ti (Wo wen shih-tsun shuo tz'u i("I heard the Wo rld-Ho nored explain this meaning"), translating the Sinitic text;

the Sanskrit has "I also heard . . ."). The oral affinities of early Buddhist religious

texts are underscored by the profession of bhanaka or dharma-bhanaka, whose duty

it was to declaim them aloud, apparently in a rather entertaining fashion (Hoffman

1990).With such tremendous emphasis on the presumed orality of the canon, there

might have been resistance to rendering it in stilted, "unsayable" LS. I am somewhat

dubious, however, that this is a sufficient explanation for the decision to employ

large amounts of vernacular in Chinese Buddhist texts. After all, the Analects (Lun-

yil are famous for the tzu yiieh ("the Master said"), which prefaces Confucius's every

utterance, but that did not deter their compilers from utilizing LS as the vehicle

for conveying his sagely wisdom.

Translation, Linguistics, and Psalmody

It would seem, instead, that the actual process of translation itself had a greater

impact on the quality of Chinese Buddhist written language than any ideas about



B U D D H I S M A N D T H E R IS E OF W R I T T E N V E R N A C U L A R 715

Figure 2 . Imperial Decree [of June 17 , 13891 to the Budd hist M onk

Irinjin Dzangbu (in Tibetan Rin-C'en bTsang-po). Hua-i i-yii [Sino-

Mongolian Translations), ed. by and Ma si ii h - ~ u h a m m ad (1389),o n i n ~ i

8a. Mongolian text transcribed in sinographs with interlinear phonological

notes between graphs and on the left, interlinear vernacular (Early

Mandarin) glosses on the right, and vernacular (Early Mandarin) translations

at the end of each sentence. Lewicki 1949: 183 ; Mostaert 1977: 17.

the nature of the canon. The entire enterprise of rendering the Buddhist scriptures

and literary texts into Sinitic was begun by foreigners, about a dozen of whom are

known for the period from the middle of the second century to the collapse of the

Eastern Han dynasty in 220 C . E . Am ong these individuals were the P arthian prince

An (for Arsacid) Shih-kao, wh o arrived in th e capital at Loyang in 14 8 and was

active until around 170; another Parthian, An Hsu an, who was active in Loyang

c. 180 ; the Yueh-chih (also transcribed as Ju-chih), presumably K ushan,

Lokaksema who worked in Loyang from c. 170-90; another Kushan, Chih Yao,

who was active late in the second century; and the Sogdian, K'ang Meng-hsiang,




who collaborated with the Indians Chu Ta-li (Mahiibala I?]) and Chu T'an-kuo

(Dharmaphala I?]) around the turn of the century. These men produced a large

amount of material in Sinitic. Applying the most stringent criteria, there are 29

different works in 70 fascicles that still survive, and hundreds of additional titles

are a ttr ibuted to them.

LS is an extremely difficult language to master, not just because of the sinographs

but also because it is so terribly allusive, requiring at least ten to fifteen years to

gain a modicum of proficiency. In contrast, the spoken Sinitic languages, in part

due to their lack of inflection, are relatively easy to acquire through immersion in

a Chinese environment, especially if one does not have any severe hangups about

the tones. Since these foreign translators usually came to China as adults and often,

according to their biographies, quickly plunged into the business of translation, it

would have been well-nigh impossible for them to command LS sufficiently well

to create passable translations in it. Therefore, it was inevitable that whatever

proficiency they acquired in writing Sinitic was bound to be highly contaminated

by vernacular elements. Even when the foreign translators relied on Chinese assistants

or collaborators to write out their drafts in sinographs, the necessary oral metaphrases

that they provided would have had a pronounced tendency to infiltrate the intended

LS product. The result, then, was the peculiar type of BHSi that is so conspicuous

in the earliest translations and, indeed, which exists to one degree or another as an

acceptable subcategory of LS throughout the history of Chinese Buddhism. This

would also have been the case wit.h the presumably better acculturated translatorssuch as the Tocharian D harmara ksa (active c. 265 -313 ), the so-called Bodhisattva

of Tun-huang, and Kumiirajiva (b. 344 or 350, d. 409 or 413), who was of Indian

(Kashmiri) and T ocharian (Kuch an) parentage. These famous pillars of Chinese

Buddhism produced an enormous number of Sinitic texts but, whenever precise

information concerning their modzls operundi is available, we fin d that-more often

than not-they worked in teams with Chinese collaborators, sometim es as many as

ten people for a single text, or that they simply dictated th eir translations to Chinese

scribes (Fuchs 1930).The famous late Ch'ing-early Republican "translator" of European and American

novels into Sinitic, Lin Shu (1852- 1924 ), was also dependent on oral VS interpretation

by others because he knew no Western languages. However, where he was content

to paraphrase loosely the secular novels that he rendered into LS, the early Buddhist

translators strove to make accurate renditions of the sacred texts with which they

were dealing, in spite of the vast dissimilarities between the Sinitic and Sanskritic

languages in which they were written.

The special quality of BHSi persists even when learned native Chinese such as

Hsuan-tsang (596-664 ) and I-ching (635-71 3) later become proficient in Sanskrit

by traveling to India and studying there for an extended period of time. The

translations they produced upon their return to China were still so heavily influenced

by Sanskrit grammar, syntax, and lexicon that they are noticeably distinct from

typical LS. I should note, furthermore, that individuals such as Hsuan-tsang and

I-ching who acquired the ability to read Sanskrit were extremely rare in China. The

majority of Chinese who claimed a knowledge of sacred Bud dhis t language(s) usuallywere familiar only with the Siddham script at best (van Gulik 1956). ' Often their

acquaintance with Indic languages was limited to syllabic transcriptions of very

'Siddham was derived from the Gupta form of the Sanskrit alphabet and was used inEast Asian countries for the writing of dharanl~r,mantras, and other (usually very brief)Buddhist texts.



B U D D H I S M A N D T H E R IS E OF W R I T T E N V E RN A C UL A R 717

short texts in sinographs. Systematic expositions of grammar do not seem to have

become available before about the eighteenth century, and even these were

disappo intingly obscure.

Regardless of how we classify BHSi, however, one thing is clear: the early

impetus for the translation of Buddhist texts into Sinitic came primarily from foreign

monks resident in China. Indeed, the church at Loyang initially seems to have

consisted solely of foreigners and it only gradually came to include a few Chinese

(Ziircher 19 90 ; Maspero 19 34 ). An othe r complicated facet of the early translations

is the fact that most of them were done not by Indians, but by Iranian- and Tocharian-

speaking individuals. This must have had a great impact on the development of

the Chinese Buddhist canon, yet, aside from a few articles by the distinguished

Sanskritist and Tocharian specialist Chi Hsien-lin ( 1947; 19 56; 1959; 1 990) on

very specific terms, this vital issue has scarcely been touched.

John Brough (196 1) has highlighted the impo rtance of the northwestern Priikrits(vernaculars) for the early Chinese Buddhist translations. In particular, he makes

the case that many of the early Chinese translations of Buddhist texts were done

from Priikrits such as Gandhiiri rather than from Sanskrit. There is also good evidence

from Chinese sources that the Sinitic translation of the S i t ~ a f the Wise and the

Foolish (Hsien-yii ching) was taken down orally in Khotan by eight monks from western

China and compiled by them after they had returned to Qoro (Turfan) (Takakusu

190 1; Pelliot 1929 ).

There must have been a flourishing vernacular Buddhist "literature" (if that is

what we may call it; I prefer to refer to nonwritten narrative and dramatic traditions

as "dicture") in the oral realm in Central Asia before Buddhism was transmittedto China. The paucity of written Buddhist texts in the indigenous languages of

Central Asia before the seventh century may be due to the perception of adherents

of the religion there that scripture should be reserved for the sacred language of

Sanskrit. Some evidence for the existence of Buddhist texts in the local languages

of Central Asia may be found in the rich tradition of Buddhist narrative art at sites

such as Kucha and Bezeklik, several examples of which have extensive narrative

inscriptions in Tocharian or other non-Sinitic, non-Indic Central Asian languages,

e . g . , the exquis ite Mahriprubh2sa uva&na from the Knights' Cave at Kirish (Along

the Ancient Silk Rozltes:105 6).

W e mu st also remember th at , u nder Indian tutelage, the Tibetans startedtranslating B uddhist texts into their own language by the seventh century. Bud dhist

Tibetan, while sticking closely to the Sanskrit, is as much Tibetan as the usually

quite loose BHSi translations are Sinitic. Furthermore, the Tibetans played a truly

major political role in Central Asia just at the time translations of Buddhist texts

into Khotanese, Sogdian, and o ther languages were becom ing popular (cf. Beckwith

1987). I suspect that the second vernacular revolution (from around the seventh

century), when Buddhist texts were appearing in the indigenous languages of Central

Asia, may be related to the wide-ranging activities of the Tibetans there beginning

about that time, just as the first "vernacular" revolution (from the second half of

the second century), when texts began to appear in BHSi, was most likely due to

the sponsorship of Kushan, Parthian, and other Central Asian peoples. The large

interval between the two revolutions (nearly half a millennium) would seem to indicate

that, while the idea of the translation of Indian Buddhist texts had already been

floated by the second half of the second century, sociopolitical circumstances apparently

did not permit its realization outside of China until the seventh or eighth century.

Hence, in striving to understand the timing of the first and second vernacular



revolutions, perhaps we should focus more on geopolitical conditions and less on

religious and linguistic criteria.

As a matter of fact, the first "vernacular" revolution was not really vernacular

in nature because BHSi is basically LS with some admixtures from VS. This may

explain why it was possible for Central Asian monks and missionaries to translate

Indian Buddhist texts into BHSi but not into their own vernaculars. In essence, by

rendering Sanskrit and Pali texts into BHSi, they were simply transferring scriptures

from one sacred language into another. Like LS, BHSi was not sayable (i.e., it was

nonvernacular) and hence ha d presented little dan ger of truly secularizing th e sacred

Indian texts. T he first vernacular Budd hist texts in Sinitic did no t appear until the

midd le of the ei gh th century (th e pien-wen [transformation texts)), after the vernacular

revolution had already taken place in Central Asian Buddhism. As we have seen

above, t he pien-wen themselves were far from bein g fully vernacu lar, tho ug h th ey

were decidedly more vernacular than the typical BHSi text, and incomparably more

so than all writing in LS.

Above all, it cannot be stressed often enough or strongly enough that our biggest

problem in reconstructing the history of Central Asian Buddhism (and virtually

everything else about Central Asia) is due to the lack of systematic, scientific

archaeological excavation in Sinkiang. Until the Chinese government authorizes and

supports more thorough investigations in this region, all that we say about its history

must be considered extremely tentative. The notion that Central Asian Buddhists

did not create texts in the ir own .languages before the sixth or seventh centu ry,whereas they did so for the Chinese from the second century, may be simply an

artifact of preservation or lack thereof (cf. Nattier 1990).

While the repercussions of the Buddhist translation enterprise for language usage

in China were undoubtedly enormous, more specific kinds of linguistic expertise

were also being transferred. It would not be an exaggeration to state that every

major advance in linguistics from the Han period until the advent of Jesuit-inspired

evide ntial learn ing (k'ao-cheng-hsiieh) in t he Ch 'ing period over 1 ,5 0 0 years later,

particularly in phonology, was depen dent upon or conditioned by Bu ddhism in one

way or another. Here we need mention only such momentous developments as the

creation of countertomy or cut-and-splice pseudospelling (fan-ch'ieh), generally

attributed for the last thousand and more years to the Buddhists, which for thefirst time enabled Chinese to indicate the pronunciation of unknown graphs fairly

unambiguously and analytically (Mair 1992a); the whole system of rhyme classification

(teng-yin) which laid the foundations of linguistic science in China that are still

operative today; and the thirty-six quasiletters (san-shih-lizl tzu-mu) of the late T'ang

monk Shou-wen, inspired by Sanskrit uyanjanam ("consonants"), which constituted

a sort of abortive alphabet (m ore accurately termed a "consonantary") for Sinitic (N i

1948:17). All of this unaccustomed atte ntion t o the sounds of spoken language, in

contrast to the traditional emphasis of Chinese scholars on the shapes of the written

graphs, must have contributed to the legitimation of the vernacular vis-A-vis LS.

While the nonphonological aspects of Indian linguistics were not so readily transferable

to China, Buddhists were vaguely aware of their importance as subsumed under the

general category of Sabda-uidya, accurately rendered in Sinitic as "voice-insight" (sheng-

ming), although the Sanskrit expression refers to grammar and philology as well as

phonology. The significance of iabda-vidya for the Indian tradition can be seen by

its inclusion am on g th e paEca uidya-sthandni (five types of know ledge , Sinitic wu-

ming), the othe r four being hetu-uidyz (logic, yin-ming), ad byatm a-uid y~ psychology,

nei-ming), yLzdhi-cikitsa-uidya (medicine, i-fang-ming), and iilpa-kamsth2na-uidy~ arts



B U D D H I S M A N D T H E R I SE O F W R I T T E N V E RN A C UL A R 7 19

and crafts, kung-ch'iao-ming). Yet we should remember that this kind of linguistic

knowledge was restricted to a relatively small group of specialists, so I suspect that

it was not the chief reason for the establishment of the written vernacular.

Probably mote important in raising the consciousness of some Chinese that the

simple sounds of language were just as essential as their elaborate and exalted sc ript,

if not more so, was the Buddhist penchant for psalmody. There was no precedentin the indigenous literary and religious traditions for the flood of sacred singing

and chanting that engulfed China with Buddhism. The Chinese were completely

unprepared for and utterly bedazzled by the meticulousness and seriousness with

which their Indo-Iranian teachers delivered their *brahma-pz(ha (hym ns, fan-pai),

gzthz (verses, chi), Sfoka (stanzas, shou-fu), songs of praise (sung), stotra (eulogies,

tsan), dh zr an i (mystical charm s and prayers, t'o-lo-ni), mantra (magical formulas and

incantations, man-t'e-lo), and so forth. DhZrani, for example, were thought to be

potent only if properly pronounced, hence they were transcribed in their entirety,

not translated. Even the mantic recitation of the Buddha's name (nien Fo) must have

impressed upon the masses the power of the spoken word, although most of the

other types of religious utterances listed above were principally the preserve of religious

experts. The very real consequences of Indian prosody, as introduced throughBuddhism, for even the most celebrated secular verse in China have now been

demonstrated by Mair an d Mei (1 99 1).

Social Values, Intellectual History,

and Religious Mission

So far we have been examining doctrinal, philosophical, intellectual, and technical

aspects of Buddhism that may have played a role in the growth of the written

vernacular. Perhaps we have overlooked certain social values of Buddhism that mighthave had an equal or even greater bearing on this question. W e m ust remember

that traditional Chinese society, according to Confucian orthodoxy and to a great

extent in actuality, was rigidly hierarchical from the family right up to the emperor.

The same, of course, was largely true of Hindu society. It is noteworthy that, both

in India and in China, at least in the early phases, Buddhism functioned (and perhaps

originated) as a means for the individual to escape from the normal societal bonds.

Leaving the home (Sanskrit pravrajya; Sinitic ch'u-chia) and becoming a monk

represented a profound break with the ordinary rules governing social and political

interc ourse . Even the elder (irestha; chang-che), th e householder (grhastha; su-jen), the

layman (upzsaka; chi-shih), and the lay woman (upzsikz; chin-shih-ni), who never

really qu it the fam ily, was enjoined to subscribe in his/ her daily life to an entirely

different set of precepts from those who were completely outside of the Buddhist

community. This constituted a dangerously subversive challenge to existing structures

and inst itutio ns, one that is measurable in economic (Gernet 1956 ) and demog raphic

(Hartwell and Hartw ell 1991a; 1991b) terms, not to mention other indicator^.^

Certainly the Chinese authorities were threatened by encroachments of Buddhist

' ~ c c o r d i n ~o the Hartwells, the Buddhist samgba was perhaps the most egalitarianinstitution in Sung society. See especially their interesting note and comments on the monkTsung-ku (database # 16548) who was the illiterate son of a Shao-wu (in northwest Fukien)farmer and became the founder of an important Zen temple. Among his friends and discipleswere members of some of the most distinguished families of the Sung period.



720 V I CTOR H . MA I R

ideo logy , o rgan iza t ions , a nd w ea l th , so muc h so tha t they per iod ica l ly launched

massive persecutions against the a l ien fai th-even af ter i t had, as i t were, been

domes t ica ted . For the i r pa r t , the m ore nar rowly doc t r ina i re Confucian l i te ra t i kep t

up a v igorous po lemica l a t tack a lmos t f rom the moment Buddhism se t foo t on

Chinese soil , so that there was frequent tension between church and court even

when the la t te r was no t burn ing the temples , mel t ing the s ta tues , conf isca t ing the

lands , and def rock ing the monks and nuns o f the fo rmer .

W e a re slowly ga in ing a be t te r p ic tu re o f the t rue compos i t ion o f the Budd his t

communi ty in China and a re f ind ing tha t i t inc luded a h igh p ropor t ion o f widows ,

o rphans , and o ther types o f ind iv iduals wh o d id no t f i t wi th in the usua l pa t te rn o f

societal re la t ionships. The composit ion of the Chinese samgha may be in te rp re ted

as having a bearing o n langua ge usage. LS was clearly identif ied w ith t he l i terat i

establis hm ent. T he vernacular , on th e othe r hand, served as a more easi ly acquired

tool for wri t te n expression of the dispossessed a nd those w ho lacked the o ppor tunity

or means for the long and tedious education necessary to master the literary language.

W it h these qua l i tie s of soc ia lly embedded B uddh ism in m in d , I view the wr i t ten

vernacular as a kind of demotic empowerment. Living in an age of massive

manipulat ion of language for sociopoli t ical ends, which I have often referred to as

"linguistic engineering," I think we can readily appreciate the dramatic consequences

of an assert ive wr it te n vernacular o pposin g i tself to a pr iv i leged, h ierat ic , c lassical

sc r ip t .

Dan ie l Gardner (1991) has recen t ly ca l led a t ten t ion to the impor tance o f the

written vernacular in Neo-Confucianism, both for the freer, more inquisitive approach

it permitted toward the classics and for a l lowing the extension of philosophical

discourse to a broader segment of the population. Considering the powerful influence

of Buddhism on the fo rmat ion o f Neo-Confuc ian tho ugh t and p rac tice , the adop t ion

of th e wri t ten vernacular as a legit im ate form of ser ious intel lectual d iscussion would

seem to be one more example of the radical restructuring of Confucianism brought

abou t by th is fo re ign re l ig ion (Anguraroh i ta 1989) .

Tsu-Lin Mei has writ ten a lengthy response ( 1 9 9 2 b ) t o Ga r d n e r t h a t h e d o e s

not plan t o publish . Some of th e major points he ra ises , and w hich he has authorized

me to p resen t he re , a re :

1. Whereas Gardner stresses the epistemological assumptions of Neo-Confucians

concerning the power of mind in every man to comprehend the truth expressed inplain colloquial style, Mei emphasizes the sociolinguistic and historical linguistic

background of the development of the written vernacular.

2 . In spite of its technical sounding name, yzi-lu is simply the "transcript" of

conversations involving two or more persons in colloquial Sinitic. Its use du ring

3~lthoughhose who wrote down early vernacular texts in China were necessarily dependentupon th e very script w hich lim ited their freedom of expression, they treated it rather casuallyby using the graphs more for phonetic purposes and less for logographic purposes than wascustomary in LS. This is evident, for example, in T'ang period transformation texts wherehomophonic borrowings and "mistakes" routinely occur.

The fundamental nature of the sinographs is still very much in dispute. A fewphilosophically/theoretically minded scholars continue to insist that the Chinese writingsystem is pictographic and ideographic, whereas most historically/empirically oriented linguistsconsider it to function fundamentally as a huge and phonetically imprecise m~rphos~llabarywith conspicuous logographic features (Hansen 1993 a, 199313; Unger 1993 ). One th ing issure, however, and that is the fact tha t Chinese characters-unlike the elements of a truesyllabary , conso nantar y, or alphab et which convey only phon etic information-carry bothsemantic and phonetic weight (albeit limited in both cases).



the Sung was not just lim ited to Zen (Ch 'an) Bud dhists and Neo-Confucians;

emissaries on foreign missions also used this form to transcribe what was said during

their diplomatic negotiations (e.g., Sbib pei yu-lu [Transcripts from a Nwtbem Mission)),

particularly with the Khitans and Jurchens. The rationale for using the vernacular

rather than the literary language was that the former medium was capable of recording

more accurately what was actually said during the negotiations which, after all,

touched upon sensitive matters of national security (Mei 1980).

3. Vernacular short stories and southe rn dramas (bsi-u~en) ontain ing co lloquial

dialogue also make their appearance around the same time (twelfth-thirteenth

centuries).

4. The question of timing cannot be limited to the yii-la, but must also be asked

about the colloquial diplomatic transcripts and the vernacular literary texts.

5 . The most natural context for understanding the origin of Sung colloquial andits use among different social classes is the rise and development of the written

vernacular during the late T'ang period. During the T'ang, the ability to compose

in the written vernacular was limited to persons (especially individuals with a Bu ddhist

disposition) not belonging to, or marginally belonging to, the elite. The turning

point seems to have come in the second half of the eleventh century, and especially

during the twelfth, when a substantial number of the bureaucratic elite acquired

the ability to write colloquial Chinese. The reason why Confucians did not turn

to the colloquial yC lu form prior to the second half of the eleventh century may

merely be that they and other members of the elite had not yet mastered the

written vernacular, which theretofore had developed in an essentially Buddhist

environment.

6. Another factor that has to be taken into account is the spread of literacy.

Obviously, the Neo-Confucians' efforts to disseminate their doctrines via the colloquial

yi-lu would have been in vain if a readership with an adequate degree of literacy

had not existed at tha t tim e. Victor Mair (1989: 135-39) has shown that low-level

literacy was already widespread in the late T'ang period. From previous studies,

we know that the invention of printing, the establishment of government schools

and private academies (attached to monasteries), and the civil service examinationsystem (particularly at its lowest levels) all promoted literacy. By the Su ng, th e

spread of literacy had become an East Asian phenomenon; the Tangut script and

the chzi' ntm script were both invented during this period in order to write the

vernacular languages of the Tanguts and the Vietnamese.

Combining the f indings of Gardner and Mei with the comprehens ive intel lectual

h i s to ry of the per iod , we may deduce tha t the g radual adopt ion of the vernacu lar

for l imi ted purposes dur ing the T 'ang and Sung was the r esu l t o f a compl ica ted

ad jus tment to the norms and va lues o f Buddhis t ideo logy . These norms and va lues

manifes ted themselves in diverse f ields of human endeavor ( l i terature, phi losophy,

government documents , commentar ies fo r non-S in i t i c ru le r s , e t c . ) , bu t a l l o f them

may be ana lyzed soc io l ingui s t i ca l ly as emanat ing f rom the fundamenta l ly demot ic

impulses of the rel igion.

An other reason for Bu ddh ism to choose the vernacular over the classical m ay

have been i ts s t rong m iss ionary zeal . For a rel igion th at wishes to move rapidly

into a new area, complex and hard-to-learn written languages like LS are a frustrating

obs tacle to r ap id d i s semina t ion of i t s doc t r ines . They are , fu r thermore , usua lly the

jealous possession of an entren ched bureaucrat ic o r pr ies tly el i te w ho w ould act ively

oppose the spread of potent ial ly subvers ive ideologies that are directed toward the

populace . On e of the major themes in Dav id Di r inger ' s wel l -known book Writing

i s th at "alphabe t fol lows rel igion." In par t icula r , h e shows the close connect ion



72 2 VICTOR H . M A I R

between the spread of Buddhism and the creation of written vernaculars from India

to Central, Inner, East, South, and Southeast Asia (1962:148). It would be revealing

to make a study of just how many languages in these areas received their first

written expression through the activities of Buddhist monks and other types of

proselytizers. I suspect that, before the coming of Christianity to this part of the

world, aside from a handful of sinographically inspired scripts (most of which are

now dead [Tangut, Khitan, Jurchen, Vietnamese, etc.) or dying [Yao, Women's

Script/Nii-shu, etc.)) (Zhou 1991 ; Sofranov 1991; Sino-Platonic Papers 3 1 [October

199 1):29 -33) , nearly all of the w ritt en vernaculars east of the Pamirs t o the Pacific

Ocean were a direct result of the Buddhist missionary enterprise. Thus, the two

great missionary religions, Christianity and Buddhism, together account for the

overwhelming majority of Central, Inner, East, South, and Southeast Asian languages

that have been comm itted to wr iting . T he other great religion of conversion, Islam,

and the older Semitic faiths account for most of the remainder. The role of Christian

missionaries during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in creating hundreds of

written vernaculars throughout the entire world is well known.

The Indian Background

The final characteristic of Buddhism that seems to have lent support for thewritten vernacular which I wish to examine is a matter of religious policy or practice.

As Buddhism swiftly expanded from its original base in Magadha (Riijagrha,

Piitaliputra) and gained converts even from among the Brahmans, the founder of

the religion was faced with the pressing issue of linguistic usage. Should a single

prestige dialect be designated to ensure respect for the B uddha's w ord? O r should

a plurality of language be permitted to enable the unimpeded spread of the dharma

among those who were not privy to the priestly tong ue? Judg ing from all accounts,

the Buddha made the wise decision to allow Buddhist practitioners to transmit his

teachings in their ow n respective languages.4

This scenario, at any rate, is repeatedly

maintained by most exta nt versions of the vinaya (monastic rules) and must represent

one of the earliest layers of Buddhist literature.

Since the story is well known, I will simply summarize it here. Two brahman

brothers convert to Buddhism and join the samgha. Having a background in Vedic

recitation, they are concerned that other monks of diverse backgrounds will corrupt

the Buddha's teachings by reciting them in substandard ways. They go to the Buddha

* ~ u eo the misleading , if not wholly erroneo us, comme ntary of Buddhaghosa (Cullavagga5 .33 ; Vinaya ii, 13 7, 1- 16), there has been a small amou nt of scholarly controversy overwhether the Buddha enjoined his followers to use his own native tongue or their own nativetongues in spreading the dharma (Brough 1780) . It would seem that the operative Pali wordsa&ya (or sak&ya = Sanskrit satkaya), under the given circumstances, is more apt to functionas a third-person reflexive pronoun than as a first-person reflexive. Furthermore, it has notpreviously been pointed out that the passage in question would seriously contradict itself ifwe accepted Buddhaghosa's explanation ("Lord, here monks of miscellaneous origin are

corrupting the Buddha's [i.e., your) words [by repeating them) in your own dialect"[!)).This simply does not make sense. Only when we understand sakaya as "their" is the entirepassage com prehens ible. Cf. Ed gerton (1 753 : 1-2) and Lin Li-kouang (1947:2 16-27) . Finally,no one seriously disputes the claim that the Buddha was in favor of the vernaculars at theexpense of the classical, priestly language. Of one thing we can be certain, linguistic diversitywas present in ancient Buddhism almost from the very beginning of the religion (Bechert1780: 15).



and propose that they standardize his word in chandus. Alt hou gh there are numerou s

interpretations of the word chandas, this presumably signifies mannered, metrical

verse and in this context probably just means "Veda," which is how the famous

grammarian, Panini (fifth or sixth century B .c.E .)uses it. In any event, the brahman

brothers are surely proposing an elite style of delivery for which their training suits

them. The Buddha will have none of it. Roundly rejecting them, he emphaticallyadvocates the propagation of his teachings in the vernacular.

The actual history of linguistic usage in Indian Buddhism aside, the Buddha's

pronouncement in this celebrated passage stuck. Let us follow it through the vinaya

of five different schools preserved in the Chinese Buddhist canon. In the

Dharmaguptaka recension translated by Buddhayasas during the years 4 10- 12, the

Buddha calls upon his followers to use "the vernacular languages understood in

diverse locales (pradeiZnZpprZ kpbhZ;ah) (Lamotte 1958 :612) to recite the Budd hist

sGt~as"" T22{1428).955a). Alth ough the equivalent sentence is missing in th e vinaya

of the Sarviistiviidins, translated by Punyatara, Dharmaruci, and Kumarajiva from

404-9, the same sense is retained in the passage taken as a whole. (~ 23 {1 43 5) .2 74 a) .

Th e Vinayamatrka version, translated int o Chinese in abou t 41 8, expands the passage

thus: "You should speak in whatever language all the living beings can obtainenlightenment. For this reason it is called 'doing in accordance with the country' "b

(T24(:14631.822a). The vinaya of the MahiSasaka school, translated into Chinese by

Buddhajiva in 422- 23, only indicates that the Buddha's word should be "recited

according to t he language of the country"' (T22 {142 1).17 4b). Finally, the

Vin a y a k ~ z ld ra k a v aof the MGlasarvistiviida, translated by I-ching in 702 or 703,

declares that "there will be no error if one is required to draw out the voice when

reciting in the language of a given locale (p ra de ias ~a ra )" ~ ThereT24{ 1451).2 32c).

can be little doubt that, no matter which version of the vinaya Chinese Buddhists

chose to follow, use of the vernacular was approved by the Buddha himself.

It is worth observing that Piili, the language of the early Buddhist canon, was

originally but one of the Priikrits (v. Hiniiber 1986). Buddhist Hybrid Sanskrit(BHS), likewise, was actually a Priikrit with augmented elements from Sanskrit

(Bender 1 99 1). Aside from being th e usual prose dialect of Sanskrit plays, ~ au ra se ni

is a type of Prakrit used in th e later Digambara scriptures of the Jains. Ma gadhi

is another type of Priikrit used in Sanskrit plays, but for persons of still lower rank

than those who speak ~auraseni.Ardha-magadhi (semi-Miigadhi) is intermediate

between ~a ur as en i nd M agadhi and is important because it was used in the old

Jain writings. Alsdorf (1980) has demonstrated t hat Mahiivira (the founder of Jainism)

and ~ i i k ~ a m u n iuddha shared certain Magadhisms (Chi 1959). There are also clear

an Natt ier ( 1 991 :3 )makes the excellent point that the sentence recommending theuse of the vernacular is absent in the Sarvgstivada vinaya. This was, after all, probably thefirst sect to abandon the use of Prgkrit in favor of elegant, classical Sanskrit. In her words,

"It would not be at all difficult to see this absence as a deliberate omission.""he quo tati on given here is preceded by these sentences: "If a bhiksu in re-

citing a siitra prolongs the sounds as though he were singing or chanting, that is a mistake.Therefore, a bhiksu should not draw out his voice in song or chant when reciting the sutrasor the vinaya. If a b h i k ~urecites the siitras and other texts with the sounds of the chandas,he will commit a sin by overstepping the law." The quotation is followed by this commentary:"Chandas refers to the method of recitation of the brahmans. They prolong the sounds andkeep the rhythm by pointing with their f inger in the air . The master s ings f irs t and theothers follow alone after him."- - - "

I have not been able to locate the equivalent passage in the vinaya of theMahasamghika (T22[1425} .227 -549 ) , translated by Fa-hsien and Buddhabhadra in416-18.



724 V I C T O R H . M A I R

similarities between Old Ardha-miigadhi and the language of the ASokan pillar

inscriptions, which is therefore also referred to as ASokan Magadhi. Mahiiriistri or

Ol d M arath i was influential because of its use in th e later scriptures of the veta am bar as

and in drama. Among the Vibhasas, or lesser Prakrits, of which there are many,

Sauriistri is interesting because it contains elements of Scythian dialects (Walker

1968:2.234-3 5). From this very brief survey of the P rk r it s (early Indian vernaculars),

it is apparent that they were often used by religions and other social groups who

stood outside of the dom ina nt Vedic-Upanisadic-Sanskritic cultu re. Viewed in this

light, the Prakrits played the same role in Indian society that BHSi and written

VS did in China.

T he whole approach to deb-bh@, an expression mea ning "lang uage of a country"

which can be found already in the MahZbhZrata (Poona Critical edition, 9.44.98;

Calcut ta edi t ion, 9.2605; Madras edi t ion, 40.103; Bombay edi t ion, 45.103cd),

may have stimu lated or reflected the exercise of the vernaculars in Ind ia, u nlike th e

attit ude toward fang-yen ( topo lect, "th e language of a place") (Mair 1991 ), its parallel

in China, which seems to have inhibited their use. There has always been such

pronounced official disdain in China for the topolects (in favor of the standard language)

that the notion of their being written down is virtually inconceivable. This is in

contrast to the situation in India where familiarity with local languages was esteemed.

Thus, among the 64 kaiZ (practical skills) cataloged in the Saivatantra, we find

deia-bhu.2-(vi)jfizna ("knowledge of local languages"). This is immediately preceded

by miecchitaka-vikalplh, which clearly signifies a babel of foreign tongues, and isfollowed by pu!pa-iakatikZ-nimitta-jfilna,the ability to understand the omens of

heavenly voices. Given such a positive attitude toward the various deia-bbasz, with

the advent of alphabetic writing it has always been acceptable in India to record

many different languages and dialects. Conversely, since any living language in

China was perforce merely a topolect, there was an almost insuperable prejudice

against the writing down of vernaculars, even the spoken language of the capital.

T he very notion of the Pr ak rits (prZk@a, literally "m ade before") as "natural"

(i.e., unadorned, unrefined) languages versus Sanskrit (samskrta, literally "made

together," i.e., refined) as an."artificial" (in the Buddhist context) language differs

markedly from the Chinese conception of the various fang-yen as vulgar (su) and LS

as elegant (ya). Eventually, however, even the Prakrits became decadent, and byabout 550 c.E.,var ious apabhra~iadeviations) spoken by the Iaukika (commoners)

came into existence. W e f ind no mention of ap ab hr a~ ia n Vararuci , the oldest

Priikrit grammarian who was writing around 579 C.E. (Cowell 1854). Hemacandra

(1088- 1172) , on the o ther hand, in teres tingly def ines a ~ a b h r a ~ i as Prakrit with

additional infusions of popular (deii) speech (Walker 1968:2.233). '

Were it not for the permissive Indian attitude toward the vernaculars, we would

not have th e present s ituation where there are over a dozen major Indo-A ryan official

languages still being spoken and written in India, including some such as Hin di,

Bengali, Marathi, Gujarati, and Oriya with rich literary traditions. This is not to

mention the Dravidian languages such as Tamil, Telugu, and Malayalam, which

' ~ t s likely, however, that there were already written apabhramia by thesixth century (e.g., an inscription of King Dharasena I1 of Valabhi refers to composition inapabhramta) and they may even have existed by the third or fourth century (e .g. , certainverses in the fourth act of Kalidasa's Vikramorvaiija). The bulk of later apabhramia literaturewas mostly Jain works (ei gh th to tw elfth c enturies ). See Encyclopaedia Britannica, 15 th ed .(1988), vol. 2 2, p. 618:2a; vol . 21, p . 5 0: lb ; and vol . 1 , p. 475:3a. Technical ly speaking,deii is considered t o mean language th at is "non-derivable from San skrit."



likewise have long and glorious literary histories. How starkly dissimilar the situation

is in China can be seen by the fact that there was not even official recognition of

Modern Standard M andarin (M SM) as an acceptable form of writing unti l th e founding

of the Republic of China in the first quarter of this century. The amount of

unadulterated writing in the other vernacular Sinitic topolects and languages is so

pathetically small as to be virtually nonexistent, except in fairly recent romanizedtranscriptions (mostly by Christian missionaries and their Chinese followers). Since

about the Sung dynasty (960-127 9), there was a rather surreptitious tradition of

secular vernacular fiction and drama, based largely on the language of the capital.

Before that, as I have shown, virtually all vernacular and semivernacular writing

was done by Buddhists. And, to this day, it remains almost unthinkable to write

down any of the topolects in a relatively integral fo rm, altho ugh isolated topolectical

expressions are occasionally added to Mandarin texts to give a bit of local flavor.

Judging from the overall pattern of the development of the written vernacular in

China, I believe we are justified in stating unequivocally that Buddhism was centrally

involved in its establishment as a viable mode of expression.

T he Concept of "National Language"

One might go even further to say that the whole idea of written national languages

in East Asia as founded on the spoken vernaculars may well have been inspired by

the Indian concept of deb-bh+ introduced by Bud dhis m. Th e exact Sinitic equivalent

of deb-bh@Z is kuo-yii. Before the coming of Buddhism to China, these two graphs,

in the order given, meant only one thing: the title of a book in 2 1 fascicles traditionally

said to have been completed by the historian Tso Ch 'iu -m ing in the year 469 B .C .E .

Naturally, the Kuo-yii, like all other pre-Buddhist writing in China, was composed

in LS. In this case, the two sinographs designate the individual accounts (yii) concerningeach of the eight major contending states (kuo) that became prominent as the Chou

dynasty began to break apart into spheres of influence. After the advent of Buddhism,

however, the expression kuo-yi began to take on a radically different meaning, namely,

the vernacular language belonging to a nation in the sense of a people who saw

themselves as a separate politico-ethnic entity.

Perhaps the earliest occurrence of kuo-yii that may refer to a vernacular Sinitic

topolect (fang-yen) is found in a Buddhist context. This is the account of Vighna's

translation of the Fa-chii ching (Dhammapada) in the Kao-seng chuan (Biographies of

Eminent Monks) by Hui-chiao (497-544):

Vighna (Wei-chih-nan) was originally from India. For generations his family

had professed a heterodox way, considering the fire sacrifices (presumably of theAtbarva-vedz or possibly of Zoroastrianism) as the true religion. It so happened

that an Indian iramana (monk), who was practiced in Hinayana ("Lesser Vehicle")

and who was proficient in Buddhistic arts, wished to lodge in Vighna's house at

nightfall after a long journey. Since Vighna's family sub scribed to a heterodox way,

they were suspicious of Buddh'ists and made him sleep outside in the open. During

the night , the jrdmanu secretly uttered an incantation, causing the fire that was

worshipped in Vighna's house suddenly to be extinguished. Thereupon the entire

household went out and respectfully invited the irdmana to go inside where they

made offerings to him. The framana responded by causing the fire to light again

with his incantatory arts. Perceiving that the supernatural power of the iramana




surpassed his own, Vighna happily and enthusiastically became an adherent of the

Buddhadharma (the Buddhist doctrine).

Consequently, he abandoned his previous faith and left his family (pravraj] to

follow the Buddhist way. Inducted as a monk by the iramana, he received the

teachings of the Tripitaka (the "three baskets" of th'e Buddhist canon), wonderful

goodness, and the four Agamas (division of the "Hinayiina" scriptures). He travelled

to many countries, preaching and converting, and all whom he encountered accepted

the faith.

In the year 224, with his companion Chu Lii-yen (the surname indicates that

he was an Indian), he arrived at W u-c h'an g (in Hu pei province) where he presented

t he Sanskri t t ex t of the ~b a rm a p a d a , ~ha t i s , the Sl l t~a f Verses on the D b a m a .

At that t ime, the gentlemen of W u requested that Vignha produce [a Chineseversion of] the scripture. But Vighna had not yet mastered the language of the

country (ktlo-yzi) so, together with his companion Lii-yen, he translated it into

written Sinitic (Han-wen). Lu-yen likewise had not mastered spoken Sinitic (Han-

yen), so there were quite a few deficiencies. Their aim was to preserve the sense of

the original, but their style approached plainness.

It was not unt i l the end of the reign of the Chin emperor Hui (r . 290-306)

that the jrama?za Fa-li retranslated it in five scrolls, with the iramana Fa-chii writing

it down. Their style was somewhat ornate. Fa-li also produced four or so minor

scriptures, but most of them were lost during the chaos at the end of the Yung-

chia period (307- 13).

(TSOC20591.326bc)

Although this passage is valuable for its early mention of kuo-yii with the ostensible

meaning of vernacular, it evinces the same sort of confusion between spoken and

written language as well as between local and national language that has plagued

Chinese linguistics right up to the present day. Hun-yen and kuo-yii both imply

spoken language, but kuo-yii here seems to indicate the local N gu a ( W u) topolect

(for which there never was a full written form until Christian missionaries much

later created a romanized alphabet to record different varieties of Ngua speech and

to publish religious tracts in them) whereas Hun-yen would appear to indicate a

national lingzla francu. The relationship between Hun-yen and Hun-wen in this passage

is unclear, as is the variety of Sinitic upon which they were based. Presumably,

however, the basis for Hun-yen was the standardized speech of the capital used bybureaucrats from around the country to communicate with each other (a precursor

of kuun-huu o r ~ a n d a r i n ) . 'Hun-wen must have been a current designation for LS

(or, more precisely in this case, its BHSi variant).

It is remarkable that the first clear application of k ~ o - ~ i ii th the new meaning

of a vernacular belonging to a separate politico-ethnic entity was to the language

of a devoutly Buddhist non-Sinitic group of people known as the Tabgatch (T'o-pa

in Modern Standard Mandarin transcription) who ruled over north C hina from 386-534 as the Northern Wei dynasty. These were most likely proto-Mongols (or perhaps

a Turkic people) who were responsible for the building of the monumental assemblages

of Buddhist sculpture at Yiin-kang and Lung-men in north China. In the

his should, perhaps, more accurately be thought of as "the Piilijext of the Dhammapada."' ~ n he eleventh chapter of his Cbllgokugo sbi tsllko, Ohta [Ota) Tatsuo describes the

sporadic rise of Han-erb yen-yii (the [common) language of the Han people) as a legitimatemode of expression. He demonstrates not only that the development of the national vernacularwas fitful, but that it occurred in the popular realm and that it was counterpoised to theLS of the elite. For an extensive discussion of the term kuan-hua and its history, see thenext section.



B U D D H I S M A N D T H E R I S E OF W R I T T E N V E R N A C U L A R 727

"Bibliographical Treatise" ("Ching-chi chih") of Chang-sun W u-c hi (d . 659) et al . ,

in the History of the Su i (S u i shu) , part 1, we read that,

When the Later Wei [ i .e . , the Nor thern Wei = Tabgatch) first took control

of the Central Plains, all of the commands for the disposition of their armies were

given in "barbarian" language (i-yii). Later, when they had become tainted by

Chinese customs (j an Hua-JU), many of the m could no longer understan d theirown tongue. So they began to teach it to each other, calling it their "national

language" (kuo-yii).'

(4 .32 .947)

It is most intriguing that the "Bibliographical Treatise" lists over a dozen works

(4. 32 .93 5, 94 5; Dien 19 91:55a, 59b n. 8 7; Ligeti 1970:279-80) on a wide variety

of topics written in Tabgatch and "Saerbi (or "Shirvi; Hsien-pei in Modern Standard

Mandarin transcription), another powerful, supposedly proto-Mongol, group who

were active in north China from the second century on.10

Unfortunately, none of

these books survive, but it would be extremely valuable to know what script(s) they

were written in. This tantalizing evidence from the "Bibliographical Treatise" indicates

that it was possible to write Tabgatch and "Saerbi centuries before any form ofAltaic writing know n to modern scholars. W ha t script(s) did the Tab gatch and

"Saerbi use? This is a dark mystery whose solution may unfold a new and very

important chapter in the history of writing. What is significant for our purposes

here, however, is the fact that written Tabgatch and "Saerbi are openly referred to

in the "Bibliographical Treatise" as kuo-yii or "national languages."

Elsewhere in Chinese historical records, we can find references to such works

as Lido shih kuo-yii [National Language History of the Khitan) and Chin shih kuo-yii

[N at ion al Language History of the Jurchen). These were presumably histories of the

Khitan and Jurchen dynasties that ruled over much of north China durin g the ten th

through twelfth centuries, written in their native Altaic and Tungusic languages.

Although these books have also regrettably been lost, scattered inscriptional and

documentary instances of writing in these sinographically inspired scripts do survive

and scholars are working on their decipherm ent (Sofranov 1 991 ; Jensen 1969: 195-

97). It is clear that the earliest usage of the term kuo-yii ("national/vernacular

language"), indeed right up to the end of the last dynasty, the Manchu Ch'ing,

was almost always in reference to non-Sinitic peoples (Norman 1988:133).

The History ofthe Yiidn Dynasty (10.115.2893) records that, in the spare moments

when he was not atte ndin g to his troops, the great M ongol warrior-prince Kammala

(1263-1 302, son of Chen-chin ["True Gold"), who was Khubilai 's second son)

would order one of his trusted advisers to lecture him on the Tzu-chih t'ung-chien

[Comprehensive Mirr orfm Aid in G m m e n t ) , the quintessential chronologically arranged

history of China compiled by Ssu-ma Kuan g (1019-86), in the "national language,"f

meaning Mongolian. Manchu, too, was referred to explicitly in the same fashion.For instance, in Wei Yuan's Sheng-wu chi [Records of Sagely Military Exploits] (1.9a),

we read that "the literary officials were ordered to create a national script on the

basis of the national language, using neither Mongol nor Sinitic writing.'Ig Even

the Vietnamese adopted the notio? of a written vernacular with the creation of

qu$c ng i' . As used in Vietnam, quit ngi' seems originally (perhaps as early as the

four teen th century) t? have signified the spoken native language as opposed to Sinitic

languages. Later, quai. ngi ' was applied to chi' nGm ("script" + "vulgar" = "vernacular10

It may be more correct to state that Tabgatch was the name of one clan (the royal clan)within the ethnic group known as the "Saerbi or "Shirvi.



writing"), a system for writing Vietnamese involving phonetic use of sinographs

and the creation of new, wholly indigenous lo5ographic symbols composed of

tetragraphic components. Still later, the term qutc ngi' was used to designate the

French-sponsored romanized alphabet currently employed by th e Vietnamese (DeFrancis

1978:83-87). Th e notion of qutc ngi' as a written national language appears to have

been borrowed by Vietnamese refugee intellectuals in Japan from kokllga (Modern

Standard Mandarin, hereafter MSM, kuo-yil).

Mandarin askoine

Mandarin is, in effect, the close English translation of the MSM expression

kuan-hua ("officials' speech") which, in the latter part of the Ch'ing period, was

based on the dialect of the capital at Peking and which enabled the bureaucrats

from the various parts of China whose native languages were mutually unintelligible

to converse with each other. The word "Mandarin" was borrowed into English from

Portuguese, which picked it up from Malay mEntEri. Malay, in turn, acquired the

word from Hindi mantri, which is from Sanskrit mantrin ("counselor, minister") <

mantra ("counsel").

The te rm kuan-hua was in use from the Yiian period on and referred to the

spoken language of officaldom (kuan-ch'ang), which was based on the speech of thecapital (mostly Peking from that time till the present; Nanking speech was taken

as the standard dur ing th e late Ming)." There are many records from the Min g

and Ch 'ing periods that prove that kuan-baa was considered to be a prestige supradialect

that bureaucrats from all over the empire were forced to learn if they wished to

have a successful career. For most of them, this meant acquiring a second spoken

language, not merely making minor adjustments in their pronunciation and vocabulary.

The complexion of kuan-hua was deliberately changed by reformers around the

end of the nineteenth century who wished to make it the lingua frdnca of all China,

not just of the officials. Chief amon g these was W an g Chao (185 9- 1 93 3), a high-

rank ing literatus who fled to Japan after the collapse of the Reform M ovem ent of

189 8. W hile there, the Japanese use of their k a m syllabaries to overcome th e difficultiesand restrictiveness of the Sinitic script inspired him to devise his own spelling system

called kuan-hua tzu-mu ("Mandarin letters"). Aside from courageously promoting

this enlightened phonetic script during the late Ch'ing-early Republican period,

Wang also energetically pushed for the adoption of Mandarin as China's national

spoken and written language. The following remarks from the introductory notes

to his Kuan-hua ho-sheng tzu-m u [Letters for Combining the Sounds of Manda rin ) serve

to illustrate Wang's attitude toward kuan-hua and his conscious effort to remold it

as a popular language for the whole Chinese nation:

Because the C hinese characters are difficult to u ndersta nd, I wish to devise a script

based on colloquial Pekingese. To facilitate popular usage, I do not refer to it as

colloquial speech but rather as Rzcan-hua. The reason for this is to follow popularcustom. North as far as the Amur River, west across the T'ai-hang Mountains to

Nanyang and Loyang, south almost to the Yangtze, and east to the ocean: all of

"Paul Yang (1 989) has shown tha t Standard Mandarin of the Min g dynasty was basedon the Nanking topolect, not that of Peking, in spite of the fact that the latter city wasthe primary capital for most of the dynasty. Nanking was the capital during the early Ming(1356-1421) and continued t o serve as the secondary capital later.



the colloquial languages from north to south and from east to west for several

thousand tricents [ l i , three hundred paces or about a third of a mile] are more or

less mutually intel l igible with the language of the capital , but the languages of

provinces outside this area are mutually unintelligible. For this reason, it is most

convenient to spread the language of the capital. Therefore, I call it kzcan-ha. Bykuan, I mean "public"; kzcan-hzca is thus "speech for public use." Its selection is

appropriate because it occupies the greatest area and the largest proportion of the

population.

Although Wang's explanation of kuan is quite different from its original meaning

as "[pertaining to the) Mandarinlate)," the linguistic features of the language in

question were essentially the same in both cases. W an g Chao later played a blu stery,

belligerent role in enforcing northern Mandarin as the standard national language

over the other topolects in February 1913, not long after the founding of the Republic

of China (Ramsey 1987:7-8).Kuan-hua corresponds to Jerry No rman 's concept of a koine (a lingua frdnca

developing out of a mixture of other languages) (19 88 :5, 48 , 18 6f. , 246 , and 24 9)

which m ay be traced back as early as the T 'an g dynasty.12 Th is was a supradialectical

form of speech which was normally based on the dialect of Ch'ang-an, Loyang, or

K'aifeng (capitals located along the central part of the Yellow River). The early

Sinitic equivalent of the term koine is t'ung-yzi ("common language"; cf. the current

name for Mandarin in the People's Republic of China, P'u-t 'ung-hua ["common

speech")), which dates to around the beginning of the Common Era. Strained attempts

have been made to find evidence of such a commonly accepted pattern of speech

even in th e t ime of Confucius (5 5 1-479 B. c.E .). T he usual reference is to ya-yen

("elegant language") which occurs in Analects 7. 1 8 . M uch fantastic speculation has

been uttered over the passage in question. Aside from the assertion that it dem onstrates

the existence of Mandarin in t he s ixth century B .c.E ., the passage suppo sedly also

"proves" that there was a connection with the nebulously conceived spoken language

of the Hsia dynasty (whose historicity remains to be demonstrated, in spite of wishful

thinking to the contrary). To arrive at this forced interpretation, ya is conveniently

made to be a synonym of Hsia. Such readings are possible only if much violence

is done to the original text, which is quite straightforward: "The language that the

Master considered elegant is that of the Odes, History, Arts, and Ritual; these areall written in elegant language.

, , hJudging from the actual texts that have been

transmitted to us, it is fairly certain that ya-yen is a designation for an early form

of LS or, at best, a standard reading pronunciation. In any event, by no means can

this sentence be legitimately used to construct a theory of a VS koine dur ing the

mid-first millenn ium B. c.E ., whatever othe r data may or may not be available to

construct such a theory.

W e must observe that th e koine did not correspond to the written language of

government, which was always LS. Instead, the koine constituted the foundation of

the emerging written VS. When spoken by individuals from various areas of China

12I have benefited much from conversations on this subject with Tsu-Lin Mei who is

currently preparing a major study concerning the grammatical influence of the koine on thetopolects during the T'ang and Sung periods. In i t , he will show how the Early Mandarindialect of the mid-eighth century came to function as a koine and how, by the Sung, i t haddeveloped as a written vernacular both for popular literature and for limited bureaucraticpurposes. Nonetheless, until the t urn of the twentieth century, LS remained the sole sanctioned,official medium for writing and there was no conscious attempt to elevate the koine to thestatus of a national language.



7 3 0 V I C T O R H . M A I R

outside of the urban centers upon which it was based, the koine was heavily affected

by local pron unc iation , lexicon, an d, to a lesser ex ten t, grammar-as is MSM today.

The other Sinitic languages essentially remained unwritten and, indeed, "unwritable"

because the set of morphosyllabic sinographs (ban-tzu), though mind-bogglingly

enormous, was inadequate to record accurately all the morphemes in the spokenvernaculars. At the same time, there were no conventions in medieval China for

the alphabetic or syllabic spelling of connected Sinitic speech.

This situation is very different from that in medieval Europe where Latin was

both sayable and writable and hence could serve as a complete vehicle both for the

speech and the writing of the educated. Subsequently, just before and during the

Renaissance, each national vernacular in Europe took on a life of its own separate

from Latin. The development of the written vernaculars in Europe was also facilitated

by an alphabet that was capable of recording with ease any variety of spoken language.

In contrast, the sinographs inhibited the growth of the individual written vernaculars

in China and tended to discourage even the writing of full-fledged Mandarin (it isusually contaminated by LS to one degree or another). Thus there is no flourishing

literary tradition for Cantonese, Taiwanese, Shanghaiese, and the other VS languages

as there is for French, German, Italian, English, and so forth. At best, there are

scattered texts (only an exceeding few of which date from before the late nineteenth

century) that include a smattering of elements of the various regional languages

embedded in basically Mandarin or semi-Mandarin-semi-LS matrices to provide a

bit of "local flavor."

Th e Japanese Inspira tion for k ~ o - ~ i i

It is paradoxical that the C hinese recognized one of their o wn spok en vernaculars

as the basis for a national lan guage (kuo-yii) only in this c entu ry. Th is occurred

when the government of the Republic of China declared after the May Fourth

Movem ent of 1 919 tha t M andarin was to be spread throug hout all of China as the

official language of gove rnme nt and educa tion. Th e first person k now n t o have used

the te rm kuo-yil in reference to a Sin itic language was th e scholar and educa tor W u

Ju-lun. In 19 02 , W u went to Japan to observe the educational system there. H ewas deeply impressed by the success w ith w hich the Japanese g ove rnm ent had spread

the use of the Tokyo dialect as their kokugo (i .e . , kuo-yii) (Rarnsey 199 1). Upo n his

return to China, W u began advocating to the Ch'ing governmen t the adoption of

Man darin as a national language . By 19 09 , various tenta tive steps had been taken

in this direction, but the dynasty collapsed before they became a reality (Chzlng-kuo

tapa i-k'e ch'iian-shu, Yu -yen w en-tzu: 12 3ab ). It remained for the Rep ublic of Ch ina,

und er pressure from progressive intellectu als (Li Chin-hsi 19 34 ), to ma ke official

what had slowly been becoming a reality ever since the arrival of Buddhism in

China-the acceptance of the vernacular as a legiti ma te tool for wri ting.

I t is not s t range that W u Ju- lun would have picked up the idea of a k u ~ - ~ i lnJap an, for the Japanese ac tually had a strong consciousness of possessing a writable

vernacular for centuries. The Tale of Genji (Gmji monogatari), for example, was written

by the court lady Murasaki Shikibu in the vernacular (with phonetic kana) already

at the beginning of the eleventh century. (Gender dynamics appear to have been

operative in this and similar cases, such as that of the recently discovered Women's

Script [Nu-shu) in Hunan. Phonetic scripts for representing the vernacular serve as



B U D D HI S M A N D T H E R IS E OF W R I T T E N V E RN A CU L AR 7 3 1

an empowering counterweight to the male-dominated morphosyllabic [or logographic)

sinographs th at are so splendidly well-suited for wr itin g LS.) T he Japanese preface

(da ted 17 14 ) to th e Fa -hua Ian-shu (Commentary on the Lotus Sg tra ) by t he no ted

Chinese monk Chi-tsang ( f l . 549-69), who was of Parth ian des cent, states tha t in

preparing th e blocks for pri nti ng "t he n ational/vernacular language (kokugo) hasbeen added at the side. "' (T40[18 18).785a) R egrettably, mod ern editions have not

preserved the ru nnin g Japanese an notations.

In its earliest Japanese appearances, the term kokzlgo seems to have had more

the connotation of "local vernacular" than of an official "national language." In

Tokugawa-period Japan, for example, it could even refer to Dutch (Ramsey 1993:3).

All of this, plus the distinctly Sinitic ring to the word, recalls the Chinese usage

of the term kzlo-yzi' to designate spoken vernacular languages as opposed to the customary

written language, namely &nbm (IS).As we have already seen, it was the Buddhists

who introduced this notion to China and it seems to have spread from there to

Japa n. On ly slowly, howeve r, d id the idea of Japanese kokugo as "local vernacular"become transformed into the status of "national language." Not until around the

middle of the nineteenth century did it gradually come to refer specifically to Japanese

as the official national lan gua ge of Ja pa n. Slow as the tra nsform ation may have been,

vernacular Japanese became the accepted, official language of the people who spoke

it long before any variety of VS was sanctioned as the national language of China.

It is ironic, in both cases, that the roots of the acceptance of the vernacular as the

official language of the country lay in the Indian Buddhist concept of deia-bhqd.

The seminal importance of Buddhism in the development of written vernacular

Japanese during the early Heian (794-89 8) is recognized by Habein (1 984 :22) and

Miller (196 7: 126). The role of Buddhism in th e development of the kana syllabariesis detailed by Seeley (1991:ch. 4 , 59-89), especially in such texts as the Abidatsuma

zijuron (Abhidhamzasamuccayavy2khy2) an d Ok utsum araky ~ (Angulim2lika-sgtra or

Angulim2liya-sztra), both of which d ate to aro und 8 0 0 C . E . (also see Miller 1967:

128).

Language Reform in Korea

While, like kuo-yii for Mandarin and quit ngl' for Vietnamese, the concept of

kug'o as the language of a modern Korean nation-state was inspired by Japanese

kokugo, the Koreans themselves had a tradition of writing in the vernacular that

stretched all the way back to the idu ("clerk readings") and hyangch'al ("local letters")

scripts. These depended on either Sino-Korean phonetic or native glosses (similar

to Japanese on and kan readings of sinographs) and are att rib ute d to S61 Ch 'ong ,

son of Korea's greatest Buddhist thinker, W6nhy0, in the late seventh century. The

hyangch'al, used exclusively for vernacular songs and poetry (judging from the few

surviving specimens), may already have died out before the advent of the Chos6n

(so-called Yi) dynasty in 1392. The earliest vernacular texts (songs and poems) inKorean literary history are found only in Buddhist sources, and most of them are

by Buddhists on Buddhist themes (Lee 1959, 1961). The secular derivative of

hyangch'al-idu-lasted rig ht do wn to th e nin ete en th ce ntu ry, even in sp ite of th e

coexistence of the alphabet (Ledyard 1992b).

In 144 6 the enlightened King Sejong (1397 -1450) prom ulgated Hunmin cboig'zim

("correct sounds for instructing the people," also the title of the book in which the



king introduced this new system of writing) as an easily learned phonetic script for

Korea. l 3 Of course, the elite Chinese-oriented Confucian literati were adamantly

opposed to the use of a demotic script like Hunmin cha'ng'zim and gave it the pejorativename oizmun (vernacular writing, literally "proverbial writing") because it threatened

their monopoly on literacy. The Sinitic script, which was the prevailing methodfor writing in Korea from the end of the seventh century, was clearly the preferred

choice of most of the officials. Thus, although Hunmin cha'ng'zim was initially attackedby Korean intellectuals who had a vested interest in the cumbersome sinographs,

during the twentieth century it has now become universally accepted in Korea (both

north and south) as the standard form of writing called han'gul (Korean letters).

Since 1948, there has been exclusive use of han'gzll in the north, and the occasional

adm ixture of sinographs has been steadily decreasing-now dwindled almost to no thin gin general public usage (a small group of Sinitically oriented scholars still cling to

the Chinese characters stub born ly, if only in a token fashion)-in the so uth .

The Koreans take great nationalistic pride in han'gul as a script that permitsthem to record accurately the sounds and words of their own language rather than

LS or what amounts to various degrees of written creolization (if we may coin a

phrase) that resulted when they were forced to rely on the sinographs. Florian Coulmas

(198 9: 115- 17) and Ha ns Jensen (19 69 :2 10- 1 1) describe the contortions that Koreans

had to g o throug h when they tried to w rite their language with sinographs. K ingSejong's own intentions in creating the Hunmin cho'ng'zim are expressed in his preface

as follows:

The speech sounds of our country's language are different from those of the

Middle Kingdom and are not confluent with the characters. Therefore, among the

stupid [ i .e. , "common") people, there have been many who, having some thing to

put into words, have in the end been unable to express their feelings. I have been

distressed because of this, and have newly designed twenty-eight letters, which Iwish to have everyone practice at their ease and make convenient for their daily

use.

(adapted from Ledyard 1966:224)

It is clear that Sejong was deeply concerned about literacy for the common peopleand that he believed a phonetic script permitting them to write out easily the

sounds of their own spoken language would be much more appropriate for that

purpose than the clumsy sinographs.A similar attitude is expressed in Chbng Inji 's postface to the Hunmin choig'zim

haerye (Explanations and Examples of the Correct Sounds for Instructing the People), a

commentary on the Hzlnmin cha'ng'zim prepared by a group of scholars commissioned

by King Sejong:

In our Eastern Quarter , ceremonials, music, and literature are comparable to

and imitative of those of China, but our local speech and rustic colloquial are not

the same. Students of books are troubled by the difficulty of understanding the

purport and meaning [of Chinese characters); those who preside at processes are

distressed at the difficulty of the twists and turns [of a legal text). In olden days,

Sdl Ch'ong of Silla first made the Clerk Readings, and they are practiced in thegovernment offices and among the people to this day. But all of them are used as

borrowed characters; some grate on you, others stop you completely. They are not

13For an excellent brief account of Hunmin rho'ng'zim, see Ramsey 1992. For more information

on the history of han'gul, see Gari Ledyard's superb dissertation which, unfortunately, hasnever been published. I have relied on it heavily for the account of Korean writing presentedin these paragraphs.



B U D D H I S M A N D T H E R I S E OF W R I T T E N V E R N A C U L A R 7 3 3

Figure 3 . Ope ning page of the preface to Hzlnmin cho'ng'zim [Cmrect Sozlndsfor Instrzlcting the People1 b y K i n g S ej o n g ( 1 3 9 7 - 1 4 5 0 ) . I t w a s i n th i s

work th a t t h e Buddh i st i ca l ly i nc l ined , en l igh ted ru l e r fo rma l ly p resen ted

h i s a l p h a b e t f o r s p e l l i n g v e r n a c u l a r K o r e a n . N a t i o n a l T r e a s u r e N o . 7 0 ,

p r es e rv e d i n t h e K a n s o n g A r t M u s e u m . C h ' d n 1 9 9 3 : 1 3 .

just rustic and crude and unattested; when it comes to the realm of actual speech,

not one in a myriad of them is applicable.. . .Though only twenty-eight letters are used, their shifts and changes in

function are endless; they are simple and fine, reduced to the minimum yet universally

applicable. Therefore, a wise man can acquaint himself with them before the morning

is over; a stupid man can learn them in the space of ten days. Using these inexplaining books, one can know the appropri1e)ties; using these in hearing a litigation,

one can grasp the situation. Insofar as the phonology of characters is concerned,

clear and eluvial can be distinguished; in matters of music and singing, the twelve

semi-tones may be blended. There is no usage not provided for, no direction in

which they do not extend. Even the sound of the winds, the cry of the crane, the

cackle of fowl and the barking of dogs-all may be writ ten.

(quoted in Ledyard 1966:257-58)

T h e r e c a n b e n o d o u b t t h a t t h e d e v is e rs a n d a d v o ca t es o f t h e K o r e a n a l p h a b e t w e r e

searching for a s imple means that would p erm i t thei r people to express thei r thoughts




and ideas in their own language and that they considered the sinographs to be ill-

adapted for that purpose. What is more, the striking formulation of the last sentencemanifestly derives from a remarkab le expostulation in th e preface to the S ung scholar

Chen g Ch'iao's (1 104-62) Cb'i-yin liieh [Compendium on the Seven Sounds) in which

he profusely praises the phonological sophistication of Buddhist monks (Mair1993:338 -39) . Chiing Inji and his associates were obviously striving to em ulate

the flexibility of Indian phonetic writing that was so much admired by Cheng Ch'iao.

It is significant that King Sejong and his wife (d . 144 6) were both devou t

Buddhists and that all except two of the earliest texts written in this new script

were Buddhist. The two exceptions are the stultifyingly Confucian Songs of Dragons

Flying through Heaven (Yongbi o'ch'oi? ka, 14 47 ) and th e Sino-Korean glossary entitledTonggzlk cho'ng'zm. As literature, the Buddhist works are quite impressive, certainly

far superior to the Songs of the Flying Dragons. Furthermore, although Hunmin chhg'zim

( i .e . , han'gul) is deservedly praised as an ingenious and accurate phonetic script, it

was based in part on 'Phags-pa, a Mongolian script devised by a Tibetan lama withthat eponym in 12 60 to replace the mo dified old Uighu r (<old Syriac < Palmyrene< Aramaic < N or th Semitic) script tha t had previously been used to w rite Mongol

(the modified old Uighur script survived as the usual way to write Mongol until

the twen tieth-century im portation of Cyrillic and was later adapted by the M anchus

to write their own language). The shapes of the 'Phags-pa letters were inspired by

Tibetan letters which themselves were modeled upon Indian Gupta letters. The

Tibetan script had been commissioned by the great king Srong-brtsan-sgam-po (ca.608-50 ), who is credited with in troducing Bu ddhism t o Ti be t. It is evident that

Khubilai was acting under Buddhist influence when he ordered 'Phags-pa to create

a new script for Mongol. The Buddhist impetus, in turn, carried through to KingSejong's Hzlnmin choig'zim. Also operative was Chinese phonology, in which King

Sejong and his closest associates in devising Hunmin cho'ng'zim were qu ite learned and

which , in t ur n , was based on Indian phonological theories initially broug ht to Chinaby Buddhist monks during the Han and Six Dynasties periods. It is not surprising,therefore, that Korean Buddhists enthusiastically welcomed the new alphabetic,demotic script as an effective device for the propagation and study of their faith,uclike the elitist, Confucian-minded officials who resolutely resisted it.

A further observation concerning the Buddhist affiliations of phonetic writingin Korea is that Hunmin choizg'zim was preceded by an even more explicitly Indian-

inspired script, poinso' (= MSM fanshu, "Brahmanic script," probably a form ofSiddham). The name, arrangement, and phonological composition of the script allclearly reveal its ultimate Indian origins. Po'mso' is still employed today for thetranscription of Sanskrit term s in Bu ddh ist ritual texts (Jensen 19 69:2 16).

Ledyard's dissertation (1966) provides a great amount of detailed evidence thatBuddhism was indeed a key factor in the creation of the Korean alphabet. Forexample, he delineates (pp. 261ff.) an alliance between the pro-alphabeticists andBuddhists. He shows, furthermore (p. 267), that many of the earliest compositionsusing the new alphabet were Buddhist, including a Korean translation of thePraj~zpzramita-hrday a-sitra Heart Sit ra ). He also notes (p. 90) that the good king

Sejong himself put his alphabet to work by composing odes in Korean on the lifeand work of the Buddha. It cannot be emphasized too often that Sejong carried outhis Buddhist-inspired program of vernacular language reform in the face of fierceopposition from the literati:

In the last years of his life, Sejong turned more and more to the comforts ofBuddhism, and this was tantamount to alienating himself almost completely fromthe men of his time, whose hatred of that religion bordered on the pathological.




Py h 4 . ' It pb99 %

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& +& p;r& *

kj

*4

% yil # jG%- yu

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A

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t ;p * &v cie p h &*

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6Figure 4. Opening page of an article on writing from Hsi-tzu ch'i-chi

[The Mirdcle of Western Letters) (1 60 5) by the Jesuit p riest, M atteo Ricci

(1552 -1610 ). Althou gh Ricci's book was written in Literary Sinitic, it

represented the first use of the Roman alphabet to indicate the sounds

of a Sinitic language and ultimately led to the creation of convenient

methods for writing all of the vernacular languages of China. Published

here with the permission of the Vatican Library.

But Sejong had actually been sympathetic to Buddhism from early in his reign,

and his remonstrators had foug ht him on this ever since 142 6, when they petitioned

him to have removed from his throne room a dhii~aniwritten on one of the ceiling

beams in Siddham letters.(Ledyard 1966:9 0;

the reference in the last sentence is to Sejong sillok,

November 12, 14 26, 34.3a )



7 3 6 V I C T O R H . M A I R

But it was not just King Sejong whose Buddhist affinities stimulated him to concrete

act ion a imed a t the vernacular iza t ion of wr i t ing in Korea . Al ready n ine centur ies

ea r l i e r , t he B uddh i s t con t r i bu t i ons t o t he es t ab l i shmen t o f an au then t i c Korean

!iterature were absolutely essential:

The leading role played by Buddhists in the early history of Korean writing must

be emphasized. . . . If what has survived of Silla poetry is any indication, it wasBuddhists who wrote most of Silla's native literature. Buddhists preserved it through

the Koryd period, and Buddhists wrote the biography of ~ ~ u n ~ 6nd the Samgzrk

yzrsa and thus transmitted all we know of that literature to modern times. Even

Sdl Ch'ong, the great expositor of the Chinese (Confucian) classics, was the son of

a Buddhist priest (the famous Wbnhyo, b. 597), and would have grown up with

the concern for the native language sha red by his co-religionists. It was no accidentthat it was a man of this background who should have finally systematized long-

standing practices in transcription into a practical way of writing Korean. It wasnot just in Korea that it was so. The role of Buddhism in the general history ofwriting in Asia is a story that, when it comes to be written in its entirety, will

fill many interesting volumes.(Ledyard 1966:57)

The ro l e o f B uddh i sm in t he r i s e o f p r i n t i ng i s ano the r impor t an t a rea o f

i nves t i ga t i on t ha t dese rves a t t en t i on . There i s l i t t l e doub t t ha t p r i n t i ng i n Eas t

As ia , f rom i t s very incep t ion , was pr imar i ly a Budd his t phe nom enon . I n fac t , the

invent ion of print ing i tself may have occurred as an extension of the pract ice of

impres s ing woodcu t eng rav ings o f t he B uddha ' s image on s i l k and paper and o fdup l i ca t i ng dhzrani (charms or prayers , especia l ly as used in Tant r i sm) . Both of

these pract ices were a l ready widespread in China dur ing the seventh century . By

the e igh th cen tu ry , m i l l i ons o f dhzrani were be ing p r in t ed i n J apan . F o r example ,

b e tw e e n 7 6 4 a n d 7 7 0 , o n e m i ll i o n dhzrani were p r in t ed by t h e o rde r of t he empres s

S ho toku (d . 769 ) and were depos i t ed i n smal l s t upas wh ich were d i s t r i bu t ed t o a

numb er o f ma jo r B uddh i s t t emples (Goodr ich 1960 : 117 ) . T he B u ddh i s t monopo ly

on th e early pr in t in g of books proper in Japan i s no teworthy:

Printin g after its introduction into Japan (a bout 740 A . D . ) was confined to

wealthy Buddhist monasteries until toward the end of the Kamakura period (about1569) [sic) with the result tha t it was restricted either to Buddh ist sutras or Chinese

texts. There was very little secular printing in this period from 740 to 1569.(Peake 1939:58)

T he m at t e r o f B uddh i sm ' s con t r i bu t i on t o t h e h i st o ry o f p r i n t i n g i n East As i a,

a l though re la ted to the r i se of the wri t t en vernacular in the sense that bo th per ta in

to the dissemination of learning beyond Confucian literati circles, is a separate question

requiring intensive, special ized research of i ts own. St i l l , i t i s s ignificant that this

India n re lig ion had a decisive imp act up on b oth of these fundam ental ly democrat icdevelopments concern ing wri t ing in Eas t As ia that occurred a t approximately the

same t ime. This natura l ly leads us to a cons idera t ion of the broader i s sues of the

sociology of know ledge, bu t these unfor tunate ly l ie beyond t he scope of the present

s tudy . F o r t he mo m en t , however, i t needs t o be po in t ed ou t t ha t t h e l eg it im iza t ion

of the vernacular as a wr i t t en medium, the invent ion of phonet ic sy l labar ies and

a lphabe ts , and t he i nven t ion o f p r i n t i ng a re a ll i n t e r re l a ted phenom ena t h a t w ou ld

appear to s tem from the B udd his t miss ioniz ing procl iv i ty , nam ely , the des i re to



B U D D H I S M A N D T H E R I S E O F W R I T T E N V E R N A C U L A R 737

Figure 5 . A page from I-mu liao-jan ch'u-chieh [First Steps in Being Able

to Comprehend at a Glance) by Lu Chuang-chang (185 4-1 92 8), who had

close ties with Christian missionaries. This is the first work by a Chinese

author advocating a system of phonetic spelling for Sinitic languages. It

was published in Amo y in 18 92 and was keyed to the local Southern

Min language, but Lu contended that his system could be applied to all

the living Sinitic vernaculars.

spread the Buddha's word as far afield and to as many people, regardless of theirbackground or station, as possible.

Ledyard (1992a) has recently returned to the question of the significance of

'Phags-pa for the creation of han'gul in his "The International L inguistic Background

of the Correct Sounds for the Instruction of the People." Along with him, we must

make a specific disclaimer that Hunmin choizg'zim was not merely a combination of

'Phags-pa orthography and Sino-Indian phonology, but a remarkable creation for



7 3 8 V I C T O R H . M A I R

which King Sejong personally deserves much credit. Ledyard correctly and perceptively

points out the connection between the Korean adoption of vernacular (i.e., native)

language as a legitimate medium for writing (as opposed to LS) and the consequent

need for a phonetic script with which to represent it. It was this motivation that

impelled the king and his associates ingeniously to adapt 'Phags-pa to their own

purposes. The han'gzll alphabet that resulted is marvelously well suited for the

phonological representation of Korean and is justly hailed as being perh aps the m ost

logically designed of all alphabets in the world. A drawback to the use of han'gul

became apparent only in this century with the advent of mode rn information-processing

techniques (mechanical and electronic). The tetragraphic (i.e., square) configuration

of syllables (originally intended for ease of combination with the sinographs) in the

Korean alphabet poses an obstacle to the efficient application of modern information-

processing m etho ds th at are essentially linear (C hun g 199 1). There have lately been

attempts to rearrange the script in a linear sequence and to mark word boundaries

for greater efficiency in information-processing systems (Hannas 1993).

Conclusion

W e have seen how , under the probable influence of the Ind ian concept of

deia-bhd~dbrought to China by Buddhism, numerous peoples in East Asia createda whole series of written vernaculars. While Chinese authorities stubbornly resisted

recognition of any of their own vernaculars as a national language-probably du e

to the extremely high prestige and power of LS-the Bu ddh ists used the vernacular

liberally in their own writings. Once proffered as a functional alternative written

language, use of the vernacular steadily grew until, by the late Ming-early Ch'ing,

it is likely that as many books were being printed in vernacular or a heavily

vernacularized literary style as in LS, notwithstanding the censure and ridicule of

strait-laced scholars. Finally, even the Manchus, who already had their own written

national langu age, which was. swiftly dyin g ou t because of pervasive sin icizatio n,

yielded to the idea that their Sinitic subjects, too, needed a national language keyed

to one of the spoken vernaculars. After the agitation of the May Fourth Movementled by progressive Chinese intellectuals and students, many of whom were exposed

to radical ideas about language and other aspects of culture and society through the

window of Japan, kuo-yii was publicly proclaimed the official written language of

the nation. This marked the formal end of the mult imillennial separation between

book langu age (shu-mien-yii) and spok en la ngu age (k'ou-yii) in Ch ina .

That Buddhism played a crucial role in the evolution of the written vernacular

throughout East Asia is beyond any doubt. The question remains, however: Which

aspect of Budd hism was responsible for these mome ntou s changes? W as there some

religious doctrine belonging to B uddhism that fostered the writ ten vernacular? O r

was it du e to a special Bu ddh ist philosophical p rincip le? W as i t the fondness for

storytel l ing, preaching, and pub lic speaking by the early Bu ddhists in the language

of the people? Did the ostensible orality of Buddhist scripture have anything to do

with the origins of the writ ten vernacular in C hina? Was the fact that most of the

early translators of Buddhist texts into Sinitic were foreigners with a poor command

of the literary languag e a significant factor? And di d the phonological sophistication

of Indian linguistical science lend credibility to the spoken vis-a-vis the written?

What of the elaborate, rigorously defined Indian traditions of chanting and recitation?



B U D D H I S M A N D T H E R IS E OF W R I T T E N V E R N A C U L A R 739

And may the social values, institutions, and position of Buddhism have contributed

to the rise of the written vernacular? Last bu t not least, did B uddh ist practice have

anything to do with the validation of the vernacular? Perhaps I have entirely overlooked

some vital facet of Buddhism that contributed to this process. In the end, Buddhist

suppo rt for the written vernacular may best be identified as a complex com bination

of diverse factors, all of which were determ ined by an integrated socioreligious ideology.

Abbreviations

B.C.E. Before Common Era

BHSi Buddhist Hybrid Sini t ic

B H S Buddhist Hybrid Sanskri t

C.E. Common Era

LS Literary SiniticMSM Modern Standard Mandarin

proper name

Taishi Tripitaka (the standard edition of the Chinese Buddhist canon)

Vernacular Sinitic

Glossary

Abidatsuma zquron Abhidharmasamuccayay2khyd

An Hsiian p.n.

An Shih-kao p.n.

chang-che irestha elder

Chang-sun Wu-chi , "Ching- "Bibliographical T reatise"

chi chih"

Cheng Ch'iao p.n.

ch 'eng-yii set phrase (so-called "idiom")

chi gztha verse

Chi Hsien-lin p.n.

Chi Tsang p.n.

Ch'i-yin liieh Compendium on the Seven Scripts

chidng-ching-wen sGtra lecture text

Chih Lou -chia-ch'an p .n .

Chih Yao p.n.

Chin shih kuo-yii National Language History of the

chin-shih-nu z%&Jurchen

upasikd lay woman

Ch6ng Inji

Chou Yu-kuang

Chu Ch'ing-chih

%@&k

a6%%@z

p.n.

p.n.

p .n .



Chu Lu-yen

Chu Ta-li

Chu T 'an-kuo

chti' no^m

ch'u-chia

chi-shih

ch'uan-ch'i

Chtigokugo rekishi bunp i

Chzigoktlgo shi tstikd

Chung -kuo ta pai-k'e ch'iian-shu

Yii-yen wen-tzu

Fa-chu

Fa-chi ching

Fa-hsien

Fa-li

Fa-hua lun-shu

fan-ch'ieh

fan-pai

fan-shu

fang-pien

fang-y en

fang-k'uai-tzu

Fo shuo

"Fo-tien yii chung-ku Han-yu

tz'u-hui yen-chiu"

hai

Hun-erh yen-yii

Hun-yen

Hun-wen

Hun-tzu

Hsi-tzu ch'i-chi

hsi-wen

Hsien-pei

Hsien-yii ching

E*

(33

qi5!m!E*g%@mZ&%%

@m A s $ q fs,T?

??kg:&6J$g?A@? A 2

?&%;@%Lfz+-?l

%nH

2s fsEfs=

f s kI&;%

p.n.

p.n.

p.n.

Vietnamese vernacular writing

pravrajyd, Pali pabbajjd leaving

the home (to become a

monk)

up2saka layman

classical fiction

A Historical Grammar of Modern

Chinese

A Historical Study of Chinese

Language

The Great Chinese Encyclopedia.

Language an d Script.

p .n .

Dhammapaah

p.n.

p.n.

Cornmentay on the Lotus Stitra

coun tertom y; cut-and-splice

pseudospelling

*brama-p+ha "Brahmanic" (i.e.

Buddhist) hymnody

Brahmanic script

upzya skillful me ans

topolect

tetragraph

buddhavacana, buddhabhd!ita

spoken by th e Buddha; cf.

{&pfi$gthat which was

spoken by the Buddha),I?+= I%'&, !-

Bl&Z( the

true words of the Buddha),

~$$(&iggthe words of the

various Buddhas)

{&&$$@&?$$ ig z@&$fRA Study of th e Relationship

%

jg-=zznu

jgg?ST?%T

B?%i&!l

@?z%%

* E Z ~ . I \ X~ , & + R

between Buddhist Scriptures

an d the Vocabulary of

Middle Sinitic"

to be (Cantonese)

the (common) language of the

Ha n people

spoken Sinitic

writte n Sinitic

sinograph ("Chinese character")

The Miracle of Western Letters

southern drama

*Saerbi, *Shirvi

Stitra ofthe Wise and the Foolish



Li-shih yen-chiu

Liao shih kuo-yii

Lin S ~ U

Lu Chuang-chang, I-mu liao-

jan ch'u-chieh

Lun-yii

~ u n g - m e n

M a h i k -Mubarnmad

man-t'e-Lo

Mei T su-Lin, "Sun-ch'aopei-

meng hui-pien li te pai-hua

tzu-liao," Chtmg-kuo shu-mu

chi-k'an

Mo-he chih-kuan

nei-ming

Ni H ai-shu, Chung-kuop'in-

yin wen-tzu kai-lun

nien Fo

nii-shu

O h ta [O ta) Ta t s uodkutsumarakyo

%mun

pai-hua [-wen)

pan-wen-pan-pa2

Pei W ei

pien-wen

poinJo-

pu li wen-tzu

p 'a-t'ung-hua

Qoninci;

quit n g i l

san-shih-liu tzu-mu

Sejong

Sejong sillok

Shao-wu

sheng-ming

shihShih pei y i- lu

shou-lu

Shou-wen

shu-mien-yi

l&d38%

%%@ZE n u

HrKF@%da, - T%m$&

GAZE BfWnaWLPY ,%&&%~ % @ .

!A:@&H3

3~ f ; ; $@

t!izzs8i

dB&

fi?

!$;I3&

a23

q$g~ j f j j ~ ~ u

Studies on Histovy

National Language History of the

Khitan

p.n.

First Steps in Being Able to

Comprehend at a Glance

Analects

place-name

p.n.

mantra magical formu la or

incantation

"Vernacular Materials in the

Compendium of Northern

Treatises of Three Emperors,"

Bibliographic Quarterly

*MahZiamathauipaiyan~

adhyztma-vidyz psychology

Introduction to the Chinese

Phonetic Script

recite the name of the Buddha

women's script

p.n.Arigulimdika-sitra or

A ngulimZl yZ-sitra

Chinese-style phonetic reading

of a sinograph used in

Japanese

vernacular writing

written Vernacular Sinitic

semiliterary-semivernacular

Northern Wei

transformation text

Brahmanic script (see fan-shu)

not to establish w ritten words

common speech (i.e., Modern

Standard Mandarin)

p.n.

Vietnamese roman alphabet

thirty-six letters

p .n .

Veritable Records ofthe Reign o f

King Sejong

name of a place in Fukien

jab&-uidyz linguistics

to be Transcripts rom a Northern

Mission

jloka stanza

p.n.

book language




Sdl Ch'ong @$r",Ssu-ma Ch'ien, Shih-chi, EIRB,&$L'Ssu-ma Kuang, Tzu-chih q,%,%,:&Bg

t'ung-chien

su 4%

su-chiang@ z ? z

sujenI

46Asung

Sung Lien, Yiian shih %@,Z%Ta chih-tu lun p a p - "n n ~Taka ta Tokio, "Chibetto moji ga@&, f Y /-23

shosha 'Ch6kan1no kenkyli 3%r E B ~08%(honbun hen)," Tbhbgakuhd ($%$%),%zg$E

Ta-lu ti-ch'ii po-shih lun-wen kMii&Et@$k$k2%4rlts 'ung-k 'an

"T'an g-tai ch'an-chia yu-lu so ~~<@#~$j@~f iJ$$~$&&chien te yii-fa ch'eng-fen" Ef i

tao-lu SF&

teng-yiin 3%

t'o-Lo-ni P%EE

Tongguk chhg'un %BEE%

T'o-pa $&/%&"Ton kb henbun shfi" kbgo goi ha-i B@!j$%s a o ria@

"Tonkd henbun s h in kbgo goi BB!j$%%

iss@sakuin 5% 1"Tsai lun yuan-shih Fo-chiao @i$jE964$$&1?9$3Sr07%

te yu-yen wen -t'i"

"Tsai t 'an Fu-t'u yu Fo" s&@W@{$$

tsan BTso Ch' iu-ming &hw

Tso chuan &%

"T'u-huo-lo-yii te fa-hsien nkkE;Gf?'g@£E%%@Eyu k'ao-shih chi ch'i tsai 3&@+EP24k?Z?R~9fFChung-Yin wen-hua chiao- Hliu te tso-yung"

Tu an Li-fen, "Tsui-tsao ch'u- $ g f i s ,"@T~%R$#idhsien hsi-tz'u (shih) te ti- * f$ J 69i&Tg#4"hsia tzu-liao," Yii-wen t'ien-ti $B?Xi&

Tu n -h u an g %&?

t'ung-yii

tz u yiieh ?ElW a n g C h ao EW

p.n.

Records ofthe Gran d Historian

Comprehensive Mirror for Aid n

Government

vulgar

lay lecturegrhastha householder

song of praise

History of the Yiicln Dynasty

MahzprajE2p~amitopadeia

"Studies on the 'Long Scroll' in

Tibetan Transcription (Text),"

Journal of O riental Studies

Mainland Region Doctoral

Dissertations Series

"Grammatical Elements Ob -

served in Zen Records of

Conversations from th eT'ang Period"

way, road

rhyme classification

dhrSra?zimysticalcharm , prayer

Correct Rhymes of the Eastern

Kingdom

Tabgatch

Supplement of Colloquial Expres-

sions in "Tun-huangpien-wen

chi"

Indexof

Colloquial Expressions in"Tun-huangpien-wen chi"

"A Reexamination of the

Language Problem of

Primitive Buddhism"

"More about th e Chinese

Terms 'Fu T u' and 'Fo" '

stotra eulogy

p.n.

Tso's Chronicle

"The Tokharian Language: Its

Discovery and D ecipher-

ment and Its Role in the

Cultu ral Relations between

India and China"

"The Earliest Excavated Ma te-

rial for the Copula shih," The

World o f Language and Scr$t

place-name

comm on language

the m aster said




We i Cheng, Sui sbu

Wei-chih-nan

We i Y uan, Sheng-wu chi

wen-yen [-wen]

W o wen sbih-tsun shuo tz'u i

Wo wen sbib-tsun ying-kung

ts'eng ju sbib sbuo

W 6 n h y o

W u (N gu a)

W u J u- lu n

wu-ming

ya-yen

yebYen-cbing bsiieb-pao

yin-ming

y i

yii-lu

Yii-yen yen-chiu

Yun-kang

yen-yii tao tuan, bsin-bsing cb'u

mieb

Yongbi oi.hJoi2ka

Yueh-chih (also pronounced

as Ju-chih)

%#, l%s$6E?E%%%EL%8z!,

2 Z ?I

%f;ff!i@%k%

%Mf?@@{%%$Uzi%

a?%$3

%&,%Tim

8BKm%%

a&, var. &,a3

Texts

History oftbe Sui Dynasty

Vighna (p .n .)

Records of Sagely Military

Exploits

Literary Sinitic

"I heard the W orld-Hono red

explain this [m eaning]."

"Thus did I hear the w orshipful

World-Honored speak."

p .n .

p .n .

p .n .

pa&a vidy&sthan2ni five types

of knowledge

elegant language

LS sente nce particle

YencbingJournal

betu-vidya logic

language

recorded sayings

Linguistic Researches

place-name

"The way of language is cut

off, the w orkings of the

mind are obliterated."

Songs of Dragons Flying the

Heavens

"Indo-Scythian," more properly

Kushgn or Kusiina; perhaps

were originally Toch arians



BUDDH I SM A N D THE R I S E OF WR I T TEN V E R N A C U L A R 745

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