Buddhism and Chinese Linguistics

Abstract

In this paper, different aspects of the relation between Buddhism and the Buddhist Chinese literature and the linguistic study of Chinese will be at issue. The introduction of Buddhism and the Buddhist literature not only introduced new methods for the traditional Chinese linguistic analyses, particularly, the analysis of the phonology of Chinese, but also new styles of writing. The highly educated translators of Buddhist texts into Chinese, who frequently were not native speakers of Chinese, developed a writing style which on the one hand displayed a strong influence from their traditional Chinese education, but on the other hand attempted to appeal to less formally educated readers and a more general audience, in order to achieve missionary success. Consequently, the Buddhist Chinese literature, though it is predominantly written in a variety of the literary Chinese language wényán 文言, displays a number of grammatical features which most likely reflect the vernacular language spoken at the time of the translation. Since all documents genuinely Chinese from the latter part of the Han period on (first century CE) are written in the wényán language, our knowledge about any spoken variety of Chinese in the first millennium of the Common Era would be non-existent without these Buddhist texts. Accordingly, the study of Buddhist Chinese texts is most relevant for the study of the history of the Chinese language; the only entirely vernacular corpus is actually the Buddhist biànwén 變文 collection found in Dunhuang.