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172-538: The Chinese Buddhist canon refers to a specific collection of Chinese Buddhist literature which contains the main canonical scriptures of East Asian Buddhism . The traditional term for the canon is Great Storage of Scriptures ( traditional Chinese : 大藏經 ; simplified Chinese : 大藏经 ; pinyin : Dàzàngjīng ; Japanese : 大蔵経 ; rōmaji : Daizōkyō ; Korean : 대장경 ; romaja : Daejanggyeong ; Vietnamese : Đại tạng kinh ). The Chinese canon

344-464: A nucleus that has a vowel (which can be a monophthong , diphthong , or even a triphthong in certain varieties), preceded by an onset (a single consonant , or consonant + glide ; a zero onset is also possible), and followed (optionally) by a coda consonant; a syllable also carries a tone . There are some instances where a vowel is not used as a nucleus. An example of this is in Cantonese, where

516-457: A subject–verb–object word order , and like many other languages of East Asia, makes frequent use of the topic–comment construction to form sentences. Chinese also has an extensive system of classifiers and measure words , another trait shared with neighboring languages such as Japanese and Korean. Other notable grammatical features common to all the spoken varieties of Chinese include the use of serial verb construction , pronoun dropping , and

688-425: A "large and important" part of Mahayana Buddhism, and that they were magic formulae and "protective spells" as well as amulets. Benefits of chanting a dharani [For one reciting this Great Peacock Spell], there will be no fear of kings’ [capricious punishment], no fear of thieves or of fire, or of death by drowning. Nor will poison afflict his body, nor weapons, and he will live long and prosper, only excepting

860-505: A Chinese character is the morpheme, as characters represent the smallest grammatical units with individual meanings in the Chinese language. Estimates of the total number of Chinese words and lexicalized phrases vary greatly. The Hanyu Da Zidian , a compendium of Chinese characters, includes 54,678 head entries for characters, including oracle bone versions. The Zhonghua Zihai (1994) contains 85,568 head entries for character definitions and

1032-588: A Japanese priest named Chishu supports the ordination of his student Hata no kimi Toyotari by listing that he can recite following dharanis: "the Greater Prajna-paramita , Amoghapasa Avalokiteshvara, Eleven-faced Avalokiteshvara, the Golden Light , Akashagarbha, Bhaisajyaguru, consecrating water, concealing ritual space" with the dharani rituals of prostration after eight years of training. A study of numerous such ubasoku koshinge recommendation letters from

1204-549: A Pali chant text used during rites such as the consecration of a Buddha image. The text, states Donald Swearer, includes a "unique dharani in praise of the Buddha" and his victory over the evil Mara . Though the dharani appears at the end of the text and the associated chant in Thai Buddhist practice occurs at the close of the ceremony, they highlight their key role in "the buddhabhiseka ritual". The Buddhist dharani invocations are

1376-799: A Sanskrit root √ dhṛ meaning "to hold or maintain". This root is likely derived from the historical Vedic religion of ancient India, where chants and melodious sounds were believed to have innate spiritual and healing powers even if the sound cannot be translated and has no meaning (as in a music). The same root gives dharma or dhamma . According to the East Asian Buddhism studies scholar Paul Copp, some Buddhist communities outside India sometimes refer to dharanis with alternate terms such as "mantra, hṛdaya (hridiya), paritrana (paritta), raksha (Pali: rakkha), gutti, or vidyā" though these terms also have other contextual meanings in Buddhism. According to

1548-595: A Shanghai resident may speak both Standard Chinese and Shanghainese ; if they grew up elsewhere, they are also likely fluent in the dialect of their home region. In addition to Standard Chinese, a majority of Taiwanese people also speak Taiwanese Hokkien (also called 台語 ; 'Taiwanese' ), Hakka , or an Austronesian language . A speaker in Taiwan may mix pronunciations and vocabulary from Standard Chinese and other languages of Taiwan in everyday speech. In part due to traditional cultural ties with Guangdong , Cantonese

1720-462: A central variety (i.e. prestige variety, such as Standard Mandarin), as the issue requires some careful handling when mutual intelligibility is inconsistent with language identity. The Chinese government's official Chinese designation for the major branches of Chinese is 方言 ; fāngyán ; 'regional speech', whereas the more closely related varieties within these are called 地点方言 ; 地點方言 ; dìdiǎn fāngyán ; 'local speech'. Because of

1892-597: A compromise between the pronunciations of different regions. The royal courts of the Ming and early Qing dynasties operated using a koiné language known as Guanhua , based on the Nanjing dialect of Mandarin. Standard Chinese is an official language of both the People's Republic of China and the Republic of China (Taiwan), one of the four official languages of Singapore , and one of

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2064-700: A corresponding increase in the number of homophones . As an example, the small Langenscheidt Pocket Chinese Dictionary lists six words that are commonly pronounced as shí in Standard Chinese: In modern spoken Mandarin, however, tremendous ambiguity would result if all of these words could be used as-is. The 20th century Yuen Ren Chao poem Lion-Eating Poet in the Stone Den exploits this, consisting of 92 characters all pronounced shi . As such, most of these words have been replaced in speech, if not in writing, with less ambiguous disyllabic compounds. Only

2236-500: A dharani resembles the incantations found in the Atharvaveda and Yajurveda of Hinduism. The dharani-genre of Buddhist literature includes mantra, states Étienne Lamotte , but they were also a "memory aid" to memorize and chant Buddha's teachings. This practice was linked to concentration ( samadhi ) and believed to have magical virtues and a means to both spiritual and material karma -related merit making. According to Braarvig,

2408-410: A form of proto-tantrism. According to Richard McBride, as well as Richard Payne, the "proto-tantra" proposal too is problematic because it is a meaningless anachronistic teleological category that "misleads" and implies that the dharanis somehow anticipated and nurtured Buddhist tantra tradition. There is no evidence for such a sequential development. Instead, the evidence points to an overlap but that

2580-456: A glossary. The Taishō scholars also provided scholarly annotations that contain alternate readings from other sources, though it was not a true critical edition of the Chinese canon. It also contained punctuation marks not found in the earlier canons, though they are often mistaken. The Taishō canon was also revolutionary in the way it organized the canonical texts. It abandoned the traditional canonical schemas of organization which date back to

2752-518: A large number of different genres, and were produced over a period of nearly two thousand years. This vast corpus includes texts in a kind of ‘translationese’, influenced by the vocabulary and grammar of the original languages from which they were translated, texts written throughout in an elegant Wenyan style, and texts containing a lot of colloquial language, some of which is recognizably MSC [Modern Standard Chinese]. So any generalizations made about BC will not hold for every text. The various editions of

2924-564: A millennium. The Four Commanderies of Han were established in northern Korea in the 1st century BCE but disintegrated in the following centuries. Chinese Buddhism spread over East Asia between the 2nd and 5th centuries CE, and with it the study of scriptures and literature in Literary Chinese. Later, strong central governments modeled on Chinese institutions were established in Korea, Japan, and Vietnam, with Literary Chinese serving as

3096-661: A renowned master of the Ōbaku school . The Qianlong Dazangjing (乾隆大藏經) also known as the Longzang (龍藏 “Dragon Store”) or the "Qing Canon" (清藏) was produced in Qing Dynasty (1644–1912) between the 13th year of Yongzheng (1735 CE) and the third year of the reign of the Qianlong Emperor (1738 CE). The edition of the Buddhist canon contains 1,675 titles in 7,240 fascicles and survives in a complete set of woodblocks (79,036 blocks). It

3268-599: A revolving wheel storage cabinet. In the following one thousand years of Chinese Buddhist history, fifteen further editions of the Chinese Buddhist canon were constructed. Half of these were royal editions, supported by the Imperial Court , while other canons were made through the efforts of laypersons and monastics. Throughout its history, the Chinese Buddhist canon was also an object of worship and devotion for whole Buddhist communities. This practice has its roots in

3440-538: A secure reconstruction of Proto-Sino-Tibetan, the higher-level structure of the family remains unclear. A top-level branching into Chinese and Tibeto-Burman languages is often assumed, but has not been convincingly demonstrated. The first written records appeared over 3,000 years ago during the Shang dynasty . As the language evolved over this period, the various local varieties became mutually unintelligible. In reaction, central governments have repeatedly sought to promulgate

3612-456: A series of magical formulae such as "sara sire sire suru suru naganam java java jivi jivi juvu juvu etc." , states Moriz Winternitz. The historic Mahayana dharanis have survived as single manuscripts as well as large collections. The versions found in Nepal and China include spells to end sickness, lengthen life, recovery from poison, magic for luck in war, drive away demons and snakes, protection from

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3784-503: A similar way to the use of Latin and Ancient Greek roots in European languages. Many new compounds, or new meanings for old phrases, were created in the late 19th and early 20th centuries to name Western concepts and artifacts. These coinages, written in shared Chinese characters, have then been borrowed freely between languages. They have even been accepted into Chinese, a language usually resistant to loanwords, because their foreign origin

3956-678: A single language. However, their lack of mutual intelligibility means they are sometimes considered to be separate languages in a family . Investigation of the historical relationships among the varieties of Chinese is ongoing. Currently, most classifications posit 7 to 13 main regional groups based on phonetic developments from Middle Chinese , of which the most spoken by far is Mandarin with 66%, or around 800 million speakers, followed by Min (75 million, e.g. Southern Min ), Wu (74 million, e.g. Shanghainese ), and Yue (68 million, e.g. Cantonese ). These branches are unintelligible to each other, and many of their subgroups are unintelligible with

4128-539: A supplementary section for liturgical texts in Siddham script, a section for Dunhuang texts , a section for lost ancient texts, suspected texts and twelve volumes of iconographical content. The Zhonghua Dazangjing (中華大藏經), also called the Tripitaka Sinica, is a modern edition of the Chinese canon developed by Chinese scholars. The project was led Professor Ren Jiyu 任繼愈 (1916–2009) between 1984 and 1996 and sponsored by

4300-528: A term which referred to the scriptural canons of the various Indian Buddhist schools . However, Chinese Buddhists historically did not have access to a single Tripitaka from one school or collection. Instead, the canon was complied piecemeal over centuries as various Indian texts were translated and new texts composed in China. These were all later collected into a distinct Chinese canon. The Chinese Buddhist Canon also contains many texts which were composed outside of

4472-524: A text which claims to be Indian was actually Indian or not). Dictionaries were also important supplements to the various canons, explaining difficult terms and names found in the various texts of the canon. One influential example was Huilin's Sounds and Meanings of the Canon (c. 810) , which explains the meanings of 6,000 characters. While the Kaibao Canon is the earliest printed canon (completed c. 983), it

4644-610: A unified standard. The earliest examples of Old Chinese are divinatory inscriptions on oracle bones dated to c.  1250 BCE , during the Late Shang . The next attested stage came from inscriptions on bronze artifacts dating to the Western Zhou period (1046–771 BCE), the Classic of Poetry and portions of the Book of Documents and I Ching . Scholars have attempted to reconstruct

4816-563: A variety of Yue from a small coastal area around Taishan, Guangdong . In parts of South China, the dialect of a major city may be only marginally intelligible to its neighbors. For example, Wuzhou and Taishan are located approximately 260 km (160 mi) and 190 km (120 mi) away from Guangzhou respectively, but the Yue variety spoken in Wuzhou is more similar to the Guangzhou dialect than

4988-579: Is "almost certain" that some of the East Asian Buddhist literature on dharani were indigenous Chinese texts and syncretic with the Daoist practices. For example, the Guanding jing composed in mid-5th century in China is largely a collection of magical spells in the dharani-genre in twelve semi-independent chapters. It includes spells such as those of the 72,000 spirit kings to protect Buddhist monks, spells of

5160-596: Is Taishanese. Wuzhou is located directly upstream from Guangzhou on the Pearl River , whereas Taishan is to Guangzhou's southwest, with the two cities separated by several river valleys. In parts of Fujian , the speech of some neighbouring counties or villages is mutually unintelligible. Local varieties of Chinese are conventionally classified into seven dialect groups, largely based on the different evolution of Middle Chinese voiced initials: Proportions of first-language speakers The classification of Li Rong , which

5332-689: Is a group of languages spoken natively by the ethnic Han Chinese majority and many minority ethnic groups in China , as well as by various communities of the Chinese diaspora . Approximately 1.35 billion people, or 17% of the global population, speak a variety of Chinese as their first language . Chinese languages form the Sinitic branch of the Sino-Tibetan language family. The spoken varieties of Chinese are usually considered by native speakers to be dialects of

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5504-524: Is a major source of scriptural and spiritual authority for East Asian Buddhism. It is also an object of worship and devotion for Asian Buddhists and its reproduction is seen as an act of merit making . The development of the Great Storage of Scriptures was influenced by the Indian Buddhist concept of a Tripitaka , literally meaning "three baskets" (of Sutra , Vinaya , and Abhidharma ),

5676-475: Is about the Buddha reciting six dharanis . The first part states its significance as follows (Japanese version of the Chinese text): People who wish to perform the ceremony for it should, on the 8th, 13th, 14th or 15th day of the month, walk round and round the pagoda containing the relics a full seventy-seven times, with it on their right, reciting this charm [dhāraṇī] also seventy-seven times: they should build an altar and keep its surface clean. They should have

5848-410: Is believed to result from it containing words or wisdom in nunce from a Buddhist Sutta. The Japanese Horiuzi manuscript of Prajna paramita hrdaya sutra and Usnisha Vijaya dharani dated to 609 CE illustrate both, with the latter being only invocations consisting of meaningless series of syllables. In Buddhism, a dharani has been believed to have magical virtues and a means to earn merit to offset

6020-485: Is called either 华语 ; 華語 ; Huáyǔ or 汉语 ; 漢語 ; Hànyǔ ). Standard Chinese is based on the Beijing dialect of Mandarin. The governments of both China and Taiwan intend for speakers of all Chinese speech varieties to use it as a common language of communication. Therefore, it is used in government agencies, in the media, and as a language of instruction in schools. Diglossia is common among Chinese speakers. For example,

6192-895: Is dated to 690 to 699. This coincides with the reign of Wu Zetian , under which the Longer Sukhāvatīvyūha Sūtra , which advocates printing apotropaic and merit making texts and images, was translated by Chinese monks. The oldest extant evidence of woodblock prints created for the purpose of reading are portions of the Lotus Sutra discovered at Turpan in 1906. They have been dated to the reign of Wu Zetian using character form recognition. The Hyakumantō Darani found as charms in wooden pagodas of Japan were broadly accepted as having been printed between 764 and 770 CE. In 1966, similarly printed dharani were discovered in stone pagoda of Pulguksa temple in Gyeongju, Korea. These are dated to

6364-590: Is found in a Chinese text dated between 317 and 420 CE. This text is the Qifo bapusa suoshuo da tuoluoni shenzhou jing (or, Great Dharani Spirit-Spell Scripture Spoken by the Seven Buddhas and Eight Bodhisattvas). The Collected Dhāraṇī Sūtras , for example, were compiled in the mid-seventh century. Some of the oldest Buddhist religious inscriptions in Stupas (Dagoba, Chörten) are extracts from dharani-genre compositions such as

6536-467: Is found in both esoteric and exoteric rituals. In the Nara and early Heian period of Japanese history, a monk or nun was tested for their fluency and knowledge of dharanis to confirm whether they are well trained and competent in Buddhist knowledge. Their appointment letters listed the sutras and dharanis that he or she could recite from memory. In an appointment recommendation letter dated 732 CE, as an example,

6708-595: Is often described as a 'monosyllabic' language. However, this is only partially correct. It is largely accurate when describing Old and Middle Chinese; in Classical Chinese, around 90% of words consist of a single character that corresponds one-to-one with a morpheme , the smallest unit of meaning in a language. In modern varieties, it usually remains the case that morphemes are monosyllabic—in contrast, English has many multi-syllable morphemes, both bound and free , such as 'seven', 'elephant', 'para-' and '-able'. Some of

6880-445: Is only about an eighth as many as English. All varieties of spoken Chinese use tones to distinguish words. A few dialects of north China may have as few as three tones, while some dialects in south China have up to 6 or 12 tones, depending on how one counts. One exception from this is Shanghainese which has reduced the set of tones to a two-toned pitch accent system much like modern Japanese. A very common example used to illustrate

7052-668: Is specifically meant. However, when one of the above words forms part of a compound, the disambiguating syllable is generally dropped and the resulting word is still disyllabic. For example, 石 ; shí alone, and not 石头 ; 石頭 ; shítou , appears in compounds as meaning 'stone' such as 石膏 ; shígāo ; 'plaster', 石灰 ; shíhuī ; 'lime', 石窟 ; shíkū ; 'grotto', 石英 ; 'quartz', and 石油 ; shíyóu ; 'petroleum'. Although many single-syllable morphemes ( 字 ; zì ) can stand alone as individual words, they more often than not form multi-syllable compounds known as 词 ; 詞 ; cí , which more closely resembles

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7224-504: Is symbolic on multiple levels. The dharanis have been a large and important part of Mahayana Buddhist literature. They are particularly abundant in the esoteric tradition of Buddhism (Vajrayana, Tibetan). However, the dharanis were not unique to esoteric Mahayana texts. The most significant and popular Mahayana sutras such as the Lotus Sutra , Heart Sutra and others prominently include dharani chapters. The dharanis are prominent in

7396-732: Is the Zhaocheng Jin Tripitaka , which dates to the Jin dynasty (1115–1234) , that is the earliest Tripitaka collection that survives intact. While more than twenty different woodblock canons were carved in China throughout the history of Chinese Buddhism, the Goryeo Tripitaka and the Qianlong Tripitaka are the only collections which have survived as complete woodblock printing sets. All other woodblock canons were fully or partially lost and destroyed in wars. The first printed version of

7568-436: Is the fact that Buddhist Chinese makes greater of disyllabic and polysyllabic words. Much of this is due to Buddhist terminology not found in other literary Chinese works. One example of a Chinese term that was coined to translate an India term is 如來 (rúlái, "thus come") which refers to the term Tathagata . Buddhist Chinese also contains many transliterations from Indian languages such as Sanskrit, for example 波羅蜜 bōluómì for

7740-484: Is the largest reference work based purely on character and its literary variants. The CC-CEDICT project (2010) contains 97,404 contemporary entries including idioms, technology terms, and names of political figures, businesses, and products. The 2009 version of the Webster's Digital Chinese Dictionary (WDCD), based on CC-CEDICT, contains over 84,000 entries. The most comprehensive pure linguistic Chinese-language dictionary,

7912-427: Is the last canon printed in the traditional style (without any punctuation or modern typography ) and the best preserved of the classic Chinese Tripitakas in China. The Taishō Tripiṭaka ( taishō shinshū daizōkyō 大正新脩大藏經) is one of the most influential modern editions, being widely used by modern scholars. Led by Junjiro Takakusu, Kaigyoku Watanabe, and Ono Genmyo , over 300 Japanese scholars worked on compiling

8084-496: Is used as an everyday language in Hong Kong and Macau . The designation of various Chinese branches remains controversial. Some linguists and most ordinary Chinese people consider all the spoken varieties as one single language, as speakers share a common national identity and a common written form. Others instead argue that it is inappropriate to refer to major branches of Chinese such as Mandarin, Wu, and so on as "dialects" because

8256-497: Is used in education, media, formal speech, and everyday life—though Mandarin is increasingly taught in schools due to the mainland's growing influence. Historically, the Chinese language has spread to its neighbors through a variety of means. Northern Vietnam was incorporated into the Han dynasty (202 BCE – 220 CE) in 111 BCE, marking the beginning of a period of Chinese control that ran almost continuously for

8428-540: Is used in the Language Atlas of China (1987), distinguishes three further groups: Some varieties remain unclassified, including the Danzhou dialect on Hainan , Waxianghua spoken in western Hunan , and Shaozhou Tuhua spoken in northern Guangdong . Standard Chinese is the standard language of China (where it is called 普通话 ; pǔtōnghuà ) and Taiwan, and one of the four official languages of Singapore (where it

8600-428: Is very complex, with a large number of consonants and vowels, but they are probably not all distinguished in any single dialect. Most linguists now believe it represents a diasystem encompassing 6th-century northern and southern standards for reading the classics. The complex relationship between spoken and written Chinese is an example of diglossia : as spoken, Chinese varieties have evolved at different rates, while

8772-630: The Prajñāpāramitā Sutras wherein the Buddha "praises dharani incantation, along with the cultivation of samadhi , as virtuous activity of a bodhisattva ", states Ryûichi Abé. The Megha-Sutra is an example of an ancient Mahayana magico-religious text. In it, the snake deities appear before the Buddha and offer him adoration, then ask how the suffering of snakes, as well as people, can be alleviated. The text suggests friendliness ( maitri ) and lists numerous invocations such as those to female deities, exorcisms, means to induce rains, along with

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8944-735: The Qieyun rime dictionary (601 CE), and a late period in the 10th century, reflected by rhyme tables such as the Yunjing constructed by ancient Chinese philologists as a guide to the Qieyun system. These works define phonological categories but with little hint of what sounds they represent. Linguists have identified these sounds by comparing the categories with pronunciations in modern varieties of Chinese , borrowed Chinese words in Japanese, Vietnamese, and Korean, and transcription evidence. The resulting system

9116-703: The Bodhigarbhalankaralaksa-dharani . Manuscript fragments of Sumukha-dharani discovered in Central Asia and now held at the Leningrad Branch of Russian Academy of Sciences are in the Sanskrit language and the Brahmi script , a script that was prevalent before the early centuries of the common era. The Chinese text Wugou jing guangda tuoluoni jing of the influential Empress Wu 's era – 683 to 705 CE –

9288-602: The Chinese state . This edition was based on the Zhaocheng jinzang canon (趙城金藏), and made use of eight other editions like the Korean Tripitaka for proofreading and adding sections missing from the Zhaocheng copies. The original goal of the project was to include many texts not included in many of the traditional canons, such as texts preserved in Fangshan Stone Canon and the supplementary sections of other canons like

9460-814: The Eastern Jin and the Sui Dynasties , the earliest canons were compiled using manuscripts . None of these early manuscript canons have survived. The earliest surviving manuscripts from the early Chinese canons are found in the Dunhuang text collections and the earliest catalogue of the contents of the canon is the Lidai sanbao ji 歷代三寳記 ( Records of the Dharma Jewels through the Generations ) by Fei Changfang (fl. 562–598). There are also many early manuscripts which have survived in

9632-536: The Edo Period , in the 17th Century that the Japanese produced a printed canon, the Tenkai Edition (天海版) which was completed in 1648 and was based on a Yuan Dynasty edition. Its production was sponsored by Tokugawa Iemitsu (1623–51) and led by the influential monk Tenkai (1534–1643). Before this time, Japanese Buddhists relied on hand copied texts or printed copies imported from the mainland. A later edition, known as

9804-864: The Heart Sutra , the Great Compassion Mantra and the Shurangama Mantra . The Theravada Paritta texts are a type of the Dharani texts, providing protective charm through chanting of hymns. According to Buddhist studies scholars Sarah LeVine and David Gellner, Theravada lay devotees traditionally invite the monks into their homes for rites of "protection from evil" and the monk(s) chant the paritrana hymns. These rituals are particularly common during rites-of-passage ceremonies such as baby naming, first rice-eating and others. According to Buddhologist Karel Werner, some Mahayana and Vajrayana dharani texts influenced

9976-459: The Indian Buddhist schools had their own canon, which could differ significantly from that of other schools and be in different languages ( prakrits like Gandhari and Pali , as well as classic Sanskrit and Hybrid Sanskrit ). Some schools had extra pitakas or divisions, including a Dharani Pitaka, or Bodhisattva Pitakas. The first Chinese translations of Buddhist texts appeared during

10148-489: The Indian subcontinent , including numerous texts composed in China, such as Chinese Buddhist treatises and commentaries, histories, biographies and other reference works. As such, the Great Storage of Scriptures , the foundation of East Asian Buddhist teachings, reflects the evolution of Chinese Buddhism over time, and the religious and scholarly efforts of generations of translators, scholars and monastics. This process began with

10320-525: The Korean , Japanese and Vietnamese languages, and today comprise over half of their vocabularies. This massive influx led to changes in the phonological structure of the languages, contributing to the development of moraic structure in Japanese and the disruption of vowel harmony in Korean. Borrowed Chinese morphemes have been used extensively in all these languages to coin compound words for new concepts, in

10492-680: The May Fourth Movement beginning in 1919. After the fall of the Northern Song dynasty and subsequent reign of the Jurchen Jin and Mongol Yuan dynasties in northern China, a common speech (now called Old Mandarin ) developed based on the dialects of the North China Plain around the capital. The 1324 Zhongyuan Yinyun was a dictionary that codified the rhyming conventions of new sanqu verse form in this language. Together with

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10664-508: The Ming dynasty (1368 to 1644). It was carved in the new capital of Beijing from 1419 to 1440. This canon was very similar to a previous Ming era Yongle canon, called the Yongle Southern Canon (Yongle nanzang 永樂南藏, c. 1413 to 1420). The Yongle canons were the first canons to merge all the texts into a single set of pitakas . Previous canons like the Korean canon had followed the older schema of having two main divisions of " Hīnayāna " and Mahāyāna sections (each with separate sub-divisions for

10836-407: The Ming dynasty ). The earliest dated Heart Sutra from 661 comes from this collection of stone carved sutras. Another important milestone in the development of the canon was the compilation of the Kaiyuan Catalogue (Kāiyuán Shìjiàolù, 開元釋教錄, Kaiyuan Era Record of Buddhist Teachings , Taishō Tripitaka No. 2154) during the Tang dynasty by the monk Zhisheng (699-740). This catalogue provided

11008-497: The National Language Unification Commission finally settled on the Beijing dialect in 1932. The People's Republic founded in 1949 retained this standard but renamed it 普通话 ; 普通話 ; pǔtōnghuà ; 'common speech'. The national language is now used in education, the media, and formal situations in both mainland China and Taiwan. In Hong Kong and Macau , Cantonese is the dominant spoken language due to cultural influence from Guangdong immigrants and colonial-era policies, and

11180-480: The Palman Daejanggyeong (80,000 Tripitaka), was first carved in the 11th century during the Goryeo period (918–1392). The first edition was completely destroyed by the Mongols in 1232 and thus a second set was carved from 1236 to 1251 during the reign of Gojong (1192–1259). This second Korean canon was carved into 81,258 woodblocks . According to Lewis R. Lancaster "each was carved on both sides with twenty-three lines of fourteen characters each. The calligraphy

11352-429: The dhamma , to remember the dhamma , to remember virtue". There is very little prescriptive or practical difference between dharani and mantras except that dharani are much longer, states Eugene Burnouf. According to Winternitz, a Buddhist dharani resembles the incantations and mantras found in Hinduism. A dharani may contain simple magical syllables and words without any literal meaning ( mantra-padani ), or its power

11524-446: The early Buddhist teachings were collected into canons called tripiṭaka (‘three baskets’; Chin. 三藏 sānzàng ‘three stores’ or ‘three repositories’). Most canons contained sūtras (discourses of the Buddha, 經 jīng), monastic rule texts (vinaya; 律 lǜ); and scholastic treatises (abhidharma; 阿毘曇 āpítán or 阿毗達磨 āpídámó). Initially these sources were transmitted orally but later they were written down into various manuscript collections. Each of

11696-423: The oracle bone inscriptions created during the Shang dynasty c.  1250 BCE . The phonetic categories of Old Chinese can be reconstructed from the rhymes of ancient poetry. During the Northern and Southern period , Middle Chinese went through several sound changes and split into several varieties following prolonged geographic and political separation. The Qieyun , a rime dictionary , recorded

11868-542: The phonology of Old Chinese by comparing later varieties of Chinese with the rhyming practice of the Classic of Poetry and the phonetic elements found in the majority of Chinese characters. Although many of the finer details remain unclear, most scholars agree that Old Chinese differs from Middle Chinese in lacking retroflex and palatal obstruents but having initial consonant clusters of some sort, and in having voiceless nasals and liquids. Most recent reconstructions also describe an atonal language with consonant clusters at

12040-409: The "dharani incantations and related mystic phrases and practices have been integral parts of nearly all Buddhist traditions since at least the early centuries of the common era". Dhāraṇīs are a form of amulet and believed in the various Buddhist traditions to deliver protection from malign influences and calamities. Mantra and dharani are synonymous in some Buddhist traditions, but in others such as

12212-539: The "oldest authenticated printed texts in the world", states Robert Sewell. These were mass-produced as a set consisting of miniature hollow wooden pagodas each containing a printed dharani prayer or charm in Sanskrit on thick paper strips. The Japanese records state a million dharanis were so produced and distributed through Buddhist temples by the order of Empress Shōtoku – previously a Buddhist nun – after an attempted coup against her court. According to Ross Bender, these events and Empress Shōtoku's initiatives led to

12384-639: The 12-volume Hanyu Da Cidian , records more than 23,000 head Chinese characters and gives over 370,000 definitions. The 1999 revised Cihai , a multi-volume encyclopedic dictionary reference work, gives 122,836 vocabulary entry definitions under 19,485 Chinese characters, including proper names, phrases, and common zoological, geographical, sociological, scientific, and technical terms. The 2016 edition of Xiandai Hanyu Cidian , an authoritative one-volume dictionary on modern standard Chinese language as used in mainland China, has 13,000 head characters and defines 70,000 words. Dharani Dharanis are found in

12556-510: The 120,000 spirit kings to protect the Buddhist nuns, incantations of spirit kings to protect one's surroundings, seals and spells to subdue devils, chants to summon dragon kings to treat infections and remove pests, and seeking rebirth in pure lands of one's desire. The significance of dharanis was such that both the government and monastic organization had stipulated, by the 7th century, how and when dharanis may or may not be used. A ritsuryo code for Buddhist clerics dated 718 CE, promulgated by

12728-404: The 19th-century French Indologist and a scholar of Buddhism, dharanis are magical formulas that to Buddhist devotees are the most important parts of their books. Burnouf, states Davidson, was the first scholar to realise how important and widespread dharani had been in Buddhism sutras and Mahayana texts. The Indologist Moriz Winternitz concurred in the early 20th century that dharanis constituted

12900-549: The 1st-millennium Japan confirm that dharanis were an essential and core part of monastic training, though the specific group of dharanis memorized by a monk or nun varied. Kūkai classified mantras as a special class of dhāraṇīs and argued that every syllable of a dhāraṇī was a manifestation of the true nature of reality – in Buddhist terms, that all sound is a manifestation of śūnyatā or emptiness of self-nature. Thus, rather than being devoid of meaning, Kūkai suggests that dhāraṇīs are in fact saturated with meaning – every syllable

13072-511: The 2nd century and 4th century CE of Mahayana texts do contain dharanis. The Dunhuang manuscript collections include extensive talismanic dharani sections. The dharanis as conceptualized by medieval era Buddhist intellectuals and eminent Chinese monks were an "integral component of mainstream Sinitic Buddhism", states Richard McBride. The popularity of Buddhist spells in China was probably because older native Chinese religions valued spells already. According to Robert Buswell and Donald Lopez, it

13244-500: The Buddha stays, "non-humans do not harm the people of that town or village", states the Buddhism scholar Peter Skilling. This and similar statements are also found in the early Chinese translations of Indian Buddhist texts. According to Skilling, these "protective Buddhist literature" are used by both the monks and the laypeople of Theravada countries. These texts are a part of any "meagre library of Buddhist Sri Lankan households" and they are called Pirit Pota . In Myanmar, all classes of

13416-591: The Buddha. In this context, dharani were acknowledged in the Buddhist tradition by about the second century BCE, and they were a memory aid to ground and remember the dharma teachings. The term dharani as used in the history of Mahayana and tantric Buddhism, and its interpretation has been problematic since the mid-19th century, states Ronald Davidson. It was initially understood as "magical formula or phrase", but later studies such as by Lamotte and Berhard interpreted them to be "memory", while Davidson proposes that some dharani are "codes". According to Eugène Burnouf ,

13588-463: The Buddhist lay devotees may have led to the development of textual printing innovations. The dharani records of East Asia are the oldest known "authenticated printed texts in the world", state Robert Sewell and other scholars. The early-eighth-century dharani texts discovered in the Bulguksa of Gyeongju , Korea are considered as the oldest known printed texts in the world. Dharani recitation for

13760-787: The Chinese Buddhist canon all include translations of Indian Āgama , Vinaya and Abhidharma texts from the Early Buddhist schools , as well as translations of the Mahāyāna sūtras , śāstras (treatises) and scriptures from Indian Esoteric Buddhism . The various canons also contain texts composed in China, Korea and Japan, including apocryphal sutras and Chinese Buddhist treatises. These additional non-Indic works include philosophical treatises, commentaries, philological works, catalogues, sectarian writings, geographic works, travelogues, biographies , genealogies and hagiographies , encyclopedias and dictionaries . Furthermore, each edition of

13932-530: The Chinese Buddhist canon was Song dynasty Kaibao Canon (開寶藏) also known as the Shu-pen (蜀本) or Sichuan edition (since it was printed in Sichuan province ). It was printed on the order of Emperor Taizu of Song (r. 960–976) and the work of printing the whole canon lasted from 971 to 983. This canon comprised 5,048 fascicles and 1,076 titles, only 14 fascicles from this canon survive today. The blocks used to print

14104-457: The Indian worship of Mahayana sutras . Some scholars even speak of a "cult of the canon" when referring to the various devotional activities which revolved around the creation, distribution, and preservation of the Chinese Buddhist canon. These activities included sponsoring the printing of a canon, working on the project, ceremonial rituals consecrating the texts, reading and manual ritual copying of

14276-967: The Jiaxing, Pinjia, Puhui, and the Taisho. In 1994, the main section of the canon was completed, including 1,937 titles in 10,230 fascicles. The planned supplementary sections were later undertaken by other projects. The Chinese Manuscripts in the Tripitaka Sinica (中華大藏經–漢文部份 Zhonghua Dazangjing: Hanwen bufen ), a new collection of canonical texts, was published by Zhonghua Book Company in Beijing in 1983–97, with 107 volumes of literature, are photocopies of early manuscripts, and include many newly unearthed scriptures from Dunhuang . There are also newer Tripitaka Sinica projects. Chinese language Chinese ( simplified Chinese : 汉语 ; traditional Chinese : 漢語 ; pinyin : Hànyǔ ; lit. ' Han language' or 中文 ; Zhōngwén ; 'Chinese writing')

14448-669: The Kaibao Canon were lost in the fall of the Northern Song capital Kaifeng in 1127 and there are only about twelve fascicles worth of surviving material. However, the Kaibao formed the basis for future printed versions that do survive intact. Most importantly, the Shu-pen canon (along with later editions like the Liao dynasty edition) was the main source for the Tripitaka Koreana , which in turn

14620-488: The Kaiyuan catalogue. Instead, the Taisho was organized into the following categories based on the historical development of Buddhist texts : The Supplementary section of the canon contains further texts including: Furthermore there are more sections for supplementary content by Japanese authors (30 volumes), supplementary sections of extra sutra, vinaya and sastra commentaries, a supplementary section on schools and lineages,

14792-604: The Korean Canon (which follows the organization of Zhisheng 's Kaiyuan Catalogue ) are as follows: The Jin Dynasty Zhaocheng Canon 趙城藏 (also known as the Jin Canon 金藏 ) was based on the Kaibao Canon. The blocks were carved between 1149 and 1178, a project led by the nun Cui Fazhen 崔法珍. This canon contains 1,576 titles in 6,980 fascicles. The woodblocks were originally stored at Hongfa Monastery in Beijing. This canon

14964-688: The Korean dharani were likely printed in China, the evidence confirms that the Japanese dharani were printed in Japan from Buddhist chants that arrived through China. The tradition of printing and distributing the Buddhist dharanis, as well as transliterated Sanskrit sutras, continued in East Asia over the centuries that followed. By the 9th century, the era of mass printing and the sale of books had begun covering additional subjects such as " astrology , divination of dreams, alchemy , and geomancy ". According to languages and ancient manuscripts scholar Ernst Wolff, "it

15136-555: The Latin-based Vietnamese alphabet . English words of Chinese origin include tea from Hokkien 茶 ( tê ), dim sum from Cantonese 點心 ( dim2 sam1 ), and kumquat from Cantonese 金橘 ( gam1 gwat1 ). The sinologist Jerry Norman has estimated that there are hundreds of mutually unintelligible varieties of Chinese. These varieties form a dialect continuum , in which differences in speech generally become more pronounced as distances increase, though

15308-678: The Ming era Jiaxing Canon and with the Chongning Canon and Pilu Canon stored at the Library of the Imperial Household ( Kunai-shō ). The Japanese scholars also referenced the Pali canon and Sanskrit manuscripts. Some texts which were missing from the Koryŏ canon were also added from other sources such as Japanese collections or other Chinese canons. The Taishō editors also compiled catalogues, an index, and

15480-402: The Nara government in Japan, forbid the use of dharani for any unauthorized medical treatment, military and political rebellion. The code explicitly exempted their use for "healing of the sick by chanting dharanis in accordance with the Buddha dharma". Another document dated 797 CE mentions "healer-meditation masters" ( kanbyo zenji ) in dharanis to protect the family of the ruler. Others evidence

15652-587: The Qianlong Canon (1735-1738). One of the most widespread edition used by modern scholars today is the Taishō Tripiṭaka , produced in Japan in the 20th century. The language of these scriptures is termed "Buddhist Chinese" ( Fojiao Hanyu 佛教漢語), and is a variety of literary Chinese with several unique elements such as a distinctly Buddhist terminology that includes transliterations from Indian languages and newly coined Chinese Buddhist words. In India,

15824-476: The Sanskrit term pāramitā . Another feature of Buddhist Chinese is that it tends to rely on more vernacular elements than non-Buddhist literary Chinese. However, these generalizations should be understood to be very broad since, as Lock and Linebarger write: it should be borne in mind that the term in fact covers the language of thousands of texts, both those translated from Sanskrit and other languages, and those written originally in Chinese. The texts are also in

15996-574: The Sūtra, Vinaya, and Abhidharma texts of each yana ). The Yongle canons however merged all these texts into a single collection of Sūtra, Vinaya, and Abhidharma (which sub-divisions for Mahāyāna and Hīnayāna). As such, the structure of the Yongle Northern canon was as follows: This canon was also influential outside of China, as it was re-printed in Japan under the auspices of Tetsugen Doko (1630–1682),

16168-572: The Taishō from 1922–1934 and a total number of 450,000 people worked on the project. The project cost 2.8 million Japanese yen. Named after the Taishō era of Japanese history, a modern standardized edition was published in Tokyo between 1924 and 1934 in 100 volumes. It is one of the first editions of the canon with modern punctuation and also scholarly notes. The main section of the Taishō (the section that contains

16340-546: The Tathagata Buddha and Ananda being the last chapter. This dharani chapter, states Buswell, "encodes ( dharayati ) the important meanings, without forgetting them, and it reminds and codes the points to remember. The Indologist Frits Staal who is known for his scholarship on mantras and chants in Indian religions, states the Dharani mantras reflect a continuity of the Vedic mantras. He quotes Wayman to be similarly stressing

16512-510: The Theravada community more widely know about the paritta incantation literature than any other Pali Buddhist work. The average Theravada monk in other southeast Asian countries who may not know much about a Tipitaka , states Skilling, is likely to "be able to recite numerous chants [paritta, dharani] from memory". In northern Thailand, the Suat Boek Phranet (lit. Eye-Opening Sutta) is

16684-554: The Tibetan tantric traditions a dharani is a type of mantra. According to Jose Cabezon, in the tantric traditions, mantra ( sngags ) is all knowledge and the mind of all the Buddhas, that which possesses the dharma-dhatu (essence of dhamma). The mantra exist in three forms – guhya (secret), vidya (knowledge) dharani (memory aid). The guhya mantra are about male deity and female deity relationships and union. The vidya mantra represent

16856-646: The ancient texts of all major traditions of Buddhism. They are a major part of the Pali canon preserved by the Theravada tradition. Mahayana sutras such as the Lotus Sutra and the Heart Sutra include or conclude with dharani. Some Buddhist texts, such as Pancarakṣa found in the homes of many Buddhist tantra tradition followers, are entirely dedicated to dharani. They are a part of the regular ritual prayers as well as considered to be an amulet and charm in themselves, whose recitation believed to allay bad luck, diseases or other calamity. They were an essential part of

17028-420: The canon has its own organizational schema, with different divisions for the various types of texts. The development of the Buddhist canons also saw the development of other supplemental texts, including textual catalogues and lexicographical works. Catalogues contained much information about the texts in the canon, including how it was translated, its content and its textual history and authenticity (whether

17200-401: The charm copied out seventy-seven times, and out of respect for the ceremony should give the copyist perfume, flowers, food and drink, clean clothes and a bath, and reward him either by anointing and covering him with perfumes or by giving him much money, or by paying him according to his ability. Then they should take these copies of the charms, place them inside the pagoda, and make offerings at

17372-468: The collection at Nanatsudera 七寺 (in Nagoya ) and the library at Bonshakuji. These collections were often used for rituals in which the sutras were recited, an act which was seen as bringing merit and protecting the state. This practice was called tendoku (転読) and is discussed by Nihon shoki 日本書紀, an important 8th century history book. The practice of copying Buddhist scriptures led to a new class of scribes,

17544-460: The death of the Buddha in a grove provided by Ashoka , where the knowledge was compiled again, but it too did not write anything down. The third council gathered in Kashmir a century later, according to the Tibetan tradition, and the teachings were put down in writing for those "who had not obtained the power ( dharani ) of not-forgetting" because people were reciting corrupted forms of the teachings of

17716-463: The dharani spells and incantations. It demonstrates that dharanis were valued and in use within Buddhist communities before the 1st century CE, state Charles Prebish and Damien Keown. The role of dharanis in Buddhist practice of mid-1st-millennium CE is illustrated by numerous texts including the systematic treatises that emerged. According to Paul Copp, one of the earliest attestable literary mandate about writing dharanis as an effective spell in itself

17888-409: The dharanis and related rituals may have been an influence on Buddhism of other Indian religions such as from the esoteric tantra traditions of Hinduism around the mid-1st-millennium CE. This assumption, along with the view that early Buddhism was an "abstract philosophy or even a broad-based social movement" is now a part of a scholarly debate. With increased access to the primary texts of Buddhism and

18060-506: The dharanis are "seemingly meaningless strings of syllables". While they may once have been "memory aids", the dharanis that have survived into the modern era do not match with any text. In later practice, the dharanis were "hardly employed as summaries of doctrine, but were employed as aids to concentration and magical protection benefits". According to Jan Nattier, Vedic mantras are more ancient than Buddhist dharani, but over time they both were forms of incantations that are quite similar. In

18232-399: The different spoken dialects varies, but in general, there has been a tendency to a reduction in sounds from Middle Chinese. The Mandarin dialects in particular have experienced a dramatic decrease in sounds and so have far more polysyllabic words than most other spoken varieties. The total number of syllables in some varieties is therefore only about a thousand, including tonal variation, which

18404-484: The difficulties involved in determining the difference between language and dialect, other terms have been proposed. These include topolect , lect , vernacular , regional , and variety . Syllables in the Chinese languages have some unique characteristics. They are tightly related to the morphology and also to the characters of the writing system, and phonologically they are structured according to fixed rules. The structure of each syllable consists of

18576-475: The discoveries of historical manuscripts in China, Korea and Japan, such as those about early Silla Buddhism, McBride and others state that dharani incantations and ritualism had widespread significance in East Asia from the early years. Coupled with Waddell's scholarship on the "dharani cult in Buddhism" in the early 20th century, the post-colonial era scholarship proposed that dharanis did not develop with or after tantric Buddhism emerged, but preceded it and were

18748-594: The earliest mass printed texts that have survived. The earliest extant example of printing on paper is a fragment of a dhāraṇī miniature scroll in Sanskrit unearthed in a tomb in Xi'an , called the Great spell of unsullied pure light ( Wugou jingguang da tuoluoni jing 無垢淨光大陀羅尼經). It was printed using woodblock during the Tang dynasty, c. 650–670 AD. Another print, the Saddharma pundarika sutra,

18920-818: The early texts of Buddhism, proposes Nattier, "it would appear that the word dharani was first employed in reference to mnemonic devices used to retain (Skt. "hold") certain elements of Buddhist doctrine in one's memory". In Nattier's view, the term dharani is "peculiar to Buddhism". A dhāraṇī can be a mnemonic to encapsulate the meaning of a section or chapter of a sutra . According to the Buddhism-related writer Red Pine , mantra and dharani were originally interchangeable, but at some point dhāraṇī came to be used for meaningful, intelligible phrases, and mantra for syllabic formulae which are not meant to be understood. According to Robert Buswell and Ronald Davidson, dharani were codes in some Buddhist texts. They appeared at

19092-527: The effects of ill-omened constellations, release from a confessed sin, birth of a son or daughter to a woman wanting a baby, rebirth into sukhavati heaven or avoiding a bad rebirth. The snake-charm dharani is found in the Bower Manuscript found in Western China. While a 443 CE Chinese translation of Lankavatara Sutra does not contain some of the dharani chapters, other Chinese translations dated to

19264-612: The emergence of the Mahayana Buddhism tradition, the dharanis became closely related to mantras. Later, as the Vajrayana Buddhism tradition grew, they proliferated. The dharanis and mantras overlap because in the Vajrayana tradition. There exist "single seed-syllable bija like dharanis, treated as having special powers to protect chanters from dangers such as "snakes, enemies, demons and robbers". The bija (seed) mantra condenses

19436-566: The end of the syllable, developing into tone distinctions in Middle Chinese. Several derivational affixes have also been identified, but the language lacks inflection , and indicated grammatical relationships using word order and grammatical particles . Middle Chinese was the language used during Northern and Southern dynasties and the Sui , Tang , and Song dynasties (6th–10th centuries CE). It can be divided into an early period, reflected by

19608-569: The end of the text, and they may be seen as a coded, distilled summary of Buddhist teachings in the chapters that preceded it. For example, the Vajrasamadhi-sutra – a Korean Buddhist text likely composed in the 7th century by an unknown monk, one important to the Chan and Zen Buddhist tradition in East Asia, the Dharani chapter is the eighth (second last), with a brief conversational epilogue between

19780-424: The first half of the 8th century. According to Tsien Tsuen-Hsuin, the Korean dharani scrolls were printed after the era of Empress Wu in China, and these date "no earlier than 704 CE, when the translation of the sutra was finished, and no later than 751, when the building of the temple and stupa was completed". The printed Korean text consists of "Chinese characters transliterated from the [Indian] Sanskrit". While

19952-413: The first one, 十 , normally appears in monosyllabic form in spoken Mandarin; the rest are normally used in the polysyllabic forms of respectively. In each, the homophone was disambiguated by the addition of another morpheme, typically either a near-synonym or some sort of generic word (e.g. 'head', 'thing'), the purpose of which is to indicate which of the possible meanings of the other, homophonic syllable

20124-490: The first translations in the Han dynasty (206 BCE–220 CE) after which a period of intense translation work followed in the succeeding dynasties . The first complete canonical collection, known as the Kaibao Canon or Shu-pen (蜀本) edition was printed during the Song dynasty between 971 to 983. Later eras saw further editions of the canon published in China, Korea and Japan like the Tripitaka Koreana (11th & 13th centuries) and

20296-491: The form of a word), to indicate a word's function within a sentence. In other words, Chinese has very few grammatical inflections —it possesses no tenses , no voices , no grammatical number , and only a few articles . They make heavy use of grammatical particles to indicate aspect and mood . In Mandarin, this involves the use of particles such as 了 ; le ; ' PFV ', 还 ; 還 ; hái ; 'still', and 已经 ; 已經 ; yǐjīng ; 'already'. Chinese has

20468-466: The founding of major new Buddhist temples, a "great acceleration" and the "active propagation of Buddhism" in Japan . Empress Shōtoku's million dharanis are among the oldest known printed literature in the world. While dharanis are found inside major texts of Buddhism, some texts are predominantly or exclusively of the dharani-genre. Some illustrations include, The Theravada compilations of paritta (dharani) are ancient and extensive. Some are

20640-599: The government of the People's Republic of China, with Singapore officially adopting them in 1976. Traditional characters are used in Taiwan, Hong Kong, Macau, and among Chinese-speaking communities overseas . Linguists classify all varieties of Chinese as part of the Sino-Tibetan language family , together with Burmese , Tibetan and many other languages spoken in the Himalayas and the Southeast Asian Massif . Although

20812-681: The historic Chinese dazangjing (scriptures of the great repository) and the Korean daejanggyeong – the East Asian compilations of the Buddhist canon between the 5th and 10th centuries. A dharani example Tuṭṭe, tuṭṭe–vuṭṭe, vuṭṭe–paṭṭe, paṭṭe–kaṭṭe, kaṭṭe–amale, amale–vimale, vimale–nime, nime–hime, hime–vame, [...] sarkke-cakre, cakre–dime, dime–hime, hime–ṭu ṭu ṭu ṭu– ḍu ḍu ḍu ḍu–ru ru ru ru–phu phu phu phu–svāhā. — Buddha to monk Mahamati, in Laṅkāvatāra Sūtra 9.260 Translator: D. T. Suzuki The word dhāraṇī derives from

20984-580: The history of the Chinese Buddhist Canon can be divided into four main periods: the handwriting era (from the Han up to the 10th century), the era of woodblock printing (beginning in the Song era with the Kaibao edition of the 10th century), the era of modern printing , and the digital era . From the Han to the Song dynasty era, many translations were made and made new texts were also composed in China. During

21156-581: The language of administration and scholarship, a position it would retain until the late 19th century in Korea and (to a lesser extent) Japan, and the early 20th century in Vietnam. Scholars from different lands could communicate, albeit only in writing, using Literary Chinese. Although they used Chinese solely for written communication, each country had its own tradition of reading texts aloud using what are known as Sino-Xenic pronunciations . Chinese words with these pronunciations were also extensively imported into

21328-516: The late 19th century. Today Japanese is written with a composite script using both Chinese characters called kanji , and kana. Korean is written exclusively with hangul in North Korea, although knowledge of the supplementary Chinese characters called hanja is still required, and hanja are increasingly rarely used in South Korea. As a result of its historical colonization by France, Vietnamese now uses

21500-766: The later Han Dynasty during the reign of Emperor Ming (r. 58–75 ce). The first sutra to be translated is said to be the Sutra of Forty-two Sections (四十二章經 sìshíèr zhāng jīng). Many of the early translators were monks from Central Asia, like the Parthian Ān Shìgāo (安世高), and the Kuchan translator Kumārajīva (鳩摩羅什; 343– 413). Later figures were native Chinese who traveled to India and studied Sanskrit texts there, like Fǎxiǎn (法顯, c. 337–422 ce) and Xuánzàng (玄奘, 602–664 ce). Most translators who produced significant translations did not work alone, making use of teams of translators and scribes. Thus,

21672-501: The libraries of Japanese temples. Another surviving early collection of Chinese Buddhist canonical material is the Fangshan Stone Sutras (房山石經) which a set of around 15,000 stone tablets containing Buddhist sutras carved at Yúnjū Temple (雲居寺). This project was begun in the 7th century by a devout monk named Jìngwǎn . His followers at the temple continue to carve sutras on stone tablets for generations after (even well into

21844-540: The main blueprint for the restoration and organization of future canons after the Great Buddhist Persecution in 845 . These early textual developments influenced the compilation of the first printed canon (the Kaibao Canon ) during the Song dynasty . The Kaibao was completed in 983 and comprised 130,000 woodblocks, organized according to the Kaiyuan catalogue. After the Song, the manuscript canons gradually disappeared and were replaced by printed canons. However,

22016-428: The mind of male Buddhist deities, while dharani mantras of the female Buddhist deities. Theologically, the vidya mantras constitute that knowledge in tantric Buddhism, according to Cabezon, which "pacifies the suffering experienced in the existential world ( samsara ) and the heaps of faults such as desire". The dharani mantras, in contrast, constitute that knowledge in tantric Buddhism which "causes one to hold onto

22188-555: The modern era, and are seen as accurate sources for the classic Chinese Buddhist Canon. Today, the woodblocks are stored at the Haeinsa temple, in South Korea . The main texts in this canon are divided into main sections: a Mahāyāna Tripiṭaka and a Hīnayāna Tripiṭaka, each one having the three classic sub-divisions of Sūtra, Vinaya, and Abhidharma. There are also supplementary sections with texts of East Asian provenance. The contents of

22360-434: The monastic training in Buddhism's history in East Asia. In some Buddhist regions, they served as texts upon which the Buddhist witness would swear to tell the truth. The dharani-genre of literature became popular in East Asia in the first millennium CE, with Chinese records suggesting their profusion by the early centuries of the common era. These migrated from China to Korea and Japan. The demand for printed dharani among

22532-464: The monks. The emerging evidence and later scholarship increasingly states that "dharani and ritual procedures were mainstream Mahayana practices" many centuries before the emergence of tantric and esoteric Buddhism and Vajrayana, states McBride. The Buddhist tantra traditions added another layer of sophistication and complexity to the rituals with deities and mandalas. Dharanis are not limited to an esoteric cult within Buddhism, states Paul Copp, rather

22704-455: The more conservative modern varieties, usually found in the south, have largely monosyllabic words , especially with basic vocabulary. However, most nouns, adjectives, and verbs in modern Mandarin are disyllabic. A significant cause of this is phonetic erosion : sound changes over time have steadily reduced the number of possible syllables in the language's inventory. In modern Mandarin, there are only around 1,200 possible syllables, including

22876-425: The mutual unintelligibility between them is too great. However, calling major Chinese branches "languages" would also be wrong under the same criterion, since a branch such as Wu, itself contains many mutually unintelligible varieties, and could not be properly called a single language. There are also viewpoints pointing out that linguists often ignore mutual intelligibility when varieties share intelligibility with

23048-513: The names of printers and binders. Some editions also included illustrations of various scenes, such as Buddha assemblies from specific sutras and landscapes. Various types of paper were used for the canons, many of them being made from mulberry and hemp , while woodblocks were made from pear wood or jujube wood. After printing, a canon would be stored in special cabinets produced for storing canonical texts. These huge cabinets were called "tripitaka cabinets" and were of different designs, including

23220-583: The nasal sonorant consonants /m/ and /ŋ/ can stand alone as their own syllable. In Mandarin much more than in other spoken varieties, most syllables tend to be open syllables, meaning they have no coda (assuming that a final glide is not analyzed as a coda), but syllables that do have codas are restricted to nasals /m/ , /n/ , /ŋ/ , the retroflex approximant /ɻ/ , and voiceless stops /p/ , /t/ , /k/ , or /ʔ/ . Some varieties allow most of these codas, whereas others, such as Standard Chinese, are limited to only /n/ , /ŋ/ , and /ɻ/ . The number of sounds in

23392-790: The new printed canons. One of these changes was the use of the Thousand Character Classic for a library classification system. Each text was assigned a character from this classic work which was widely memorized by school children and thus known by all educated persons. Regarding physical aspects, while the Kaibao canon came in scrolls made from several sheets of paper pasted together, later editions were packaged in different styles such as accordion folding books and string bound books (called "Indian style" since it imitated Indian manuscripts). Texts were also preceded or closed by prefaces and colophons that contained information such as titles, text origin, printing date, sponsors, and even

23564-538: The other varieties within the same branch (e.g. Southern Min). There are, however, transitional areas where varieties from different branches share enough features for some limited intelligibility, including New Xiang with Southwestern Mandarin , Xuanzhou Wu Chinese with Lower Yangtze Mandarin , Jin with Central Plains Mandarin and certain divergent dialects of Hakka with Gan . All varieties of Chinese are tonal at least to some degree, and are largely analytic . The earliest attested written Chinese consists of

23736-700: The pagoda. Alternatively they should make seventy-seven small clay pagodas, place one copy inside each, and make offerings. If they duly perform this, people who are about to die will prolong their lives to old age, all their previous sins and evil deeds being completely destroyed. Early mentions of dharani in the European literature are from the records left by John of Plano Carpini (1245–7) and William of Rubruck (1254) where they wrote in their respective memoirs that Uighurs and Mongols chanted "Om man baccam", later identified with "Om mani padme hum". They also mention that these Asians write "short sorcery sentences on paper and hang them up". Other than such scant remarks, little

23908-565: The paritta texts of Theravada tradition, such as the Gini (fire) Paritta, as the hymns are identical in parts and the Theravada text uses the same terms, for example, "dharani dharaniti" . The Pali canon makes many references to protective ( raksha , paritta ) incantations and magical spells. These invocations provide protection from "malignant spirits, disease and calamity". For example, in Digha Nikaya (DN I.116.14), Sonadanda remarks that wherever

24080-471: The past karma , allay fear, diseases and disasters in this life, and for a better rebirth . To the lay Buddhist communities, states Davidson, the material benefits encouraged the popularity and use of dharanis for devotionalism, rituals and rites in Buddhism. According to Janet Gyatso , there is a difference between mantras and dharanis. The mantras are more than melodious sounds and have meaning, and these were found sporadically in pre-Mahayana Buddhism. With

24252-430: The practice of hand copying sutras remained an important religious practice, some figures famously copied sutras by hand in their own blood. Sutra copying was also retained as an elite art form that made use of ink mixed with gold and silver powder and produced richly decorated manuscripts. This shift from manuscript culture to xylography introduced several changes to the physical layout and other material aspects of

24424-506: The protective powers of a Buddhist deity or a Buddhist text into a single syllable. For example, the single letter "a" (अ) condenses the 100,000 verses of the Prajna-paramita sutras into a single syllable. The Japanese Buddhist monk Kūkai drew a distinction between dhāraṇī and mantra and used it as the basis of his theory of language. According to Kūkai, a Buddhist mantra is restricted to esoteric Buddhist practice whereas dhāraṇī

24596-561: The purposes of healing and protection is referred to as Paritta in some Buddhist regions, particularly in Theravada communities. The dharani-genre ideas also inspired Buddhist chanting practices such as the Nianfo ( Chinese : 念佛; Pinyin : niànfó ; Rōmaji : nenbutsu ; RR : yeombul; Vietnamese : niệm Phật ), the Daimoku , as well as the Koshiki texts in Japan. They are a significant part of

24768-404: The rate of change varies immensely. Generally, mountainous South China exhibits more linguistic diversity than the North China Plain . Until the late 20th century, Chinese emigrants to Southeast Asia and North America came from southeast coastal areas, where Min, Hakka, and Yue dialects were spoken. Specifically, most Chinese immigrants to North America until the mid-20th century spoke Taishanese ,

24940-552: The related subject dropping . Although the grammars of the spoken varieties share many traits, they do possess differences. The entire Chinese character corpus since antiquity comprises well over 50,000 characters, of which only roughly 10,000 are in use and only about 3,000 are frequently used in Chinese media and newspapers. However, Chinese characters should not be confused with Chinese words. Because most Chinese words are made up of two or more characters, there are many more Chinese words than characters. A more accurate equivalent for

25112-509: The relationship was first proposed in the early 19th century and is now broadly accepted, reconstruction of Sino-Tibetan is much less developed than that of families such as Indo-European or Austroasiatic . Difficulties have included the great diversity of the languages, the lack of inflection in many of them, and the effects of language contact. In addition, many of the smaller languages are spoken in mountainous areas that are difficult to reach and are often also sensitive border zones. Without

25284-480: The results of prior karma . And he will awake happy from dreams. He will be content, not experience a catastrophe, lead a life lacking terror, his enemies destroyed, his opponents ruined, himself untouched, freed from fear of any poison, living long and prosperously, only excepting the results of prior karma. — Buddha to monk Svati, in Mahamayuri 58.20–59.6 Translator: Ronald Davidson According to Winternitz,

25456-533: The significance of the dharanis in mainstream Buddhist traditions and the esoteric Buddhist tantra tradition co-existed independent of each other. Phonic mysticism and musical chanting based on dharanis – parittas or raksas in the Theravada Pali literature – along with related mantras were important in early Buddhism. They continue to be an essential part of actual Buddhist practice in Asia, both for its laypersons and

25628-456: The six official languages of the United Nations . Standard Chinese is based on the Beijing dialect of Mandarin and was first officially adopted in the 1930s. The language is written primarily using a logography of Chinese characters , largely shared by readers who may otherwise speak mutually unintelligible varieties. Since the 1950s, the use of simplified characters has been promoted by

25800-557: The slightly later Menggu Ziyun , this dictionary describes a language with many of the features characteristic of modern Mandarin dialects. Up to the early 20th century, most Chinese people only spoke their local variety. Thus, as a practical measure, officials of the Ming and Qing dynasties carried out the administration of the empire using a common language based on Mandarin varieties , known as 官话 ; 官話 ; Guānhuà ; 'language of officials'. For most of this period, this language

25972-463: The standardization of textual production as well as the rise of manuscript art. Some copies of the canon were lavishly decorated, like the Jingo-ji Tripiṭaka , commissioned by Emperor Toba and Emperor Go-Shirakawa from 1150-1185. This canon was written in golden ink on 5400 scrolls of Indigo dyed paper. Block-printing in large scale arrived relatively late to Japan. It was only during

26144-425: The texts (a practice which remained important even as printing dominated the production of sutras). One of the various textual ceremonies was called "sunning the scriptures" (shaijing), which developed out of the need to regularly take out texts to prevent dampness. This utilitarian practice developed into a ritual in which the texts would be displayed to the public who would come to venerate them. Another popular ritual

26316-460: The texts of the Chinese canon were translated by various figures from different source texts (in different forms of Sanskrit and prakrit). This process happened over several centuries and thus the various texts of the Chinese canon reflect different translation styles and philosophies. According to a Yuan dynasty catalogue, there were about 194 known translators who worked on about 1,440 texts in 5,580 fascicles (juans). According to Guangchang Fang,

26488-609: The tonal distinctions, compared with about 5,000 in Vietnamese (still a largely monosyllabic language), and over 8,000 in English. Most modern varieties tend to form new words through polysyllabic compounds . In some cases, monosyllabic words have become disyllabic formed from different characters without the use of compounding, as in 窟窿 ; kūlong from 孔 ; kǒng ; this is especially common in Jin varieties. This phonological collapse has led to

26660-547: The traditional Western notion of a word. A Chinese cí can consist of more than one character–morpheme, usually two, but there can be three or more. Examples of Chinese words of more than two syllables include 汉堡包 ; 漢堡包 ; hànbǎobāo ; 'hamburger', 守门员 ; 守門員 ; shǒuményuán ; 'goalkeeper', and 电子邮件 ; 電子郵件 ; diànzǐyóujiàn ; 'e-mail'. All varieties of modern Chinese are analytic languages : they depend on syntax (word order and sentence structure), rather than inflectional morphology (changes in

26832-721: The traditional belief in Tibetan texts, states José Ignacio Cabezón, there were three councils and the term dharani was recorded and became the norm after the third council. The first council, according to this belief, compiled the sūtrānta , the Vinaya and the Abhidharma in Vimalabhada to the south of Rajagriha in India. The first council was held in the year Buddha died, but the compiled dhamma consisted of spoken words that were not written down. The second council occurred about 200 years after

27004-620: The traditional contents of the Chinese Buddhist Canon) has fifty-five volumes and 2,184 texts. The main section of the Taishō mostly consists of copies of the second edition of the Korean ( Koryŏ ) canon. These texts were checked and collated with various other canons, such as those housed at Zōjō-ji temple (which houses the Sixi Canon made in the Song, and the Puning Canon from the Yuan), with

27176-505: The use of dharani chanting by monks and nuns as "one of the common methods of healing during the Nara period", states Ryûichi Abé. The dharanis were an essential part of the rokujikyoho (six-syllable sutra) liturgy ritual in Japan. They were greatly popular between the 11th and 15th centuries and a part of comprehensive solution to various ailments, a ritual performed by Buddhist monks and practitioners of onmyōdō . In Chinese Buddhism, some important dharanis include Ten Small Mantras ,

27348-512: The use of tones in Chinese is the application of the four tones of Standard Chinese, along with the neutral tone, to the syllable ma . The tones are exemplified by the following five Chinese words: In contrast, Standard Cantonese has six tones. Historically, finals that end in a stop consonant were considered to be " checked tones " and thus counted separately for a total of nine tones. However, they are considered to be duplicates in modern linguistics and are no longer counted as such: Chinese

27520-424: The view that the Buddhist chants have a "profound debt to the Vedic religion". The Yogacara scholars, states Staal, followed the same classification as one found in the Vedas – arthadharani , dharmadharani and mantradharani , along with express acknowledgment like the Vedas that some "dharani are meaningful and others are meaningless" yet all effective for ritual purposes. The early Buddhism literature includes

27692-452: The words in newspapers, and 60% of the words in science magazines. Vietnam, Korea, and Japan each developed writing systems for their own languages, initially based on Chinese characters , but later replaced with the hangul alphabet for Korean and supplemented with kana syllabaries for Japanese, while Vietnamese continued to be written with the complex chữ Nôm script. However, these were limited to popular literature until

27864-408: The written language used throughout China changed comparatively little, crystallizing into a prestige form known as Classical or Literary Chinese . Literature written distinctly in the Classical form began to emerge during the Spring and Autumn period . Its use in writing remained nearly universal until the late 19th century, culminating with the widespread adoption of written vernacular Chinese with

28036-433: The Ōbaku Canon 黃檗藏 (or Tetsugen Canon 鐵眼藏 ), was begun in 1667 by a monk of the Ōbaku school named Tetsugen who set up a print shop in Kyoto. The Ōbaku Canon, a reprint of the Chinese Jiaxing Canon, was the most important edition of the canon in Japan until the modern creation of the Taisho canon. The Yongle Northern Tripiṭaka ( yongle beizang 永樂北藏), named after the Yongle Emperor , was the most important canon carved in

28208-429: Was Buddhism, above all, that eminently stimulated and sustained printing activities". Its chants and ideas were in demand in East Asia, and this led to the development of wood-block based mass printing technology. The oldest known dharanis were mass-produced by the 8th century, and later in the 10th century the canonical Tripitaka in addition to 84,000 copies of dharanis were mass printed. The 8th-century dharanis are

28380-453: Was a koiné based on dialects spoken in the Nanjing area, though not identical to any single dialect. By the middle of the 19th century, the Beijing dialect had become dominant and was essential for any business with the imperial court. In the 1930s, a standard national language ( 国语 ; 國語 ; Guóyǔ ), was adopted. After much dispute between proponents of northern and southern dialects and an abortive attempt at an artificial pronunciation,

28552-407: Was excellent and the layout such that all the characters appeared in large size. The blocks measured two feet three inches in length and nearly ten inches in width and more than an inch in thickness. A very hard and durable wood from the Betula schmidtii regal tree (known as Paktal in Korean), gathered on the islands off the coast, was used." These woodblocks were kept in good condition until

28724-445: Was first chanted in 651 at a royal palace and in 673, Emperor Tenmu ordered the Issaikyō to be copied in full. During the Nara period (710-794), the imperial government led a large-scale copying of the Issaikyō at Tōdaiji . In the following eras, the canon was widely copied and maintained at various temple libraries and repositories, often with support from the government or important nobles. Some early important libraries included

28896-433: Was hidden by their written form. Often different compounds for the same concept were in circulation for some time before a winner emerged, and sometimes the final choice differed between countries. The proportion of vocabulary of Chinese origin thus tends to be greater in technical, abstract, or formal language. For example, in Japan, Sino-Japanese words account for about 35% of the words in entertainment magazines, over half

29068-585: Was known about the Dharani-genre of literature or its value in Buddhism till the mid-19th-century colonial era, when Brian Hodgson began buying Sanskrit and related manuscripts in Nepal, Tibet and India for a more thorough scholarship, often at his personal expense. According to Hodgson, as quoted by Ronald Davidson, dharani were esoteric short prayers "derived from [Buddhist tantric] Upadesa" that are believed to be amulet to be constantly repeated or worn inside little lockets, something that leads to "a charmed life". The colonial era scholarship initially proposed that

29240-428: Was supplemented various times during the Yuan dynasty. A copy of the Zhaocheng Canon (containing about 4,800 fascicles) was discovered in 1933 at Zhaocheng County, Shanxi . This canon was used as the basis for the modern Chinese Tripitaka compiled and published in the 1980s. The Buddhist canon, known as the Issaikyō (一切經) in Japanese, also played an important role in the history of Japanese Buddhism . The canon

29412-447: Was the basis for the modern Taisho edition. The Liao Canon 遼藏 or Khitan Canon 契丹藏 was printed in the Liao Dynasty (916–1125) during the reign of Emperor Shengzong (983–1031), shortly after the printing of the Kaibao Canon. It followed a different manuscript tradition than the Kaibao. It had 1,414 titles and 6,054 fascicles. The earliest edition of the Korean canon or Tripiṭaka Koreana ( Koryŏ Taejanggyōng 高麗大藏經), also known as

29584-443: Was the ceremonial reading of the entire canon, a rite called "turning the scriptures" (zhuanjing). This was also sometimes done by a person as a solitary spiritual practice. The texts of the Chinese Buddhist canon are written in a unique variant of literary Chinese (Wényán 文言) which is termed Buddhist Chinese by scholars. This "Buddhist Chinese" contains several features that distinguish it from standard literary Chinese. One of these

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