"mysterious Sound And Meaning" Study

Xuan Ying Yin Yi, the existing earliest interpretation of pronunciations and meanings in Buddhist sutra, is not only one of the classics of the Buddhism collections, but also a famous work for linguistic study. It has 25 volumes and contains plenty of content involving with various social and cultural aspects of religious, philology, language, literature, art and the history of communication between China and other countries. It is of essential academic value with regards to philology, linguistics and the research on traditional culture. The Paper mainly combines linguistics with philology, further collects and selects the related materials thoroughly, compares and corrects word by word the difference and similarities of various versions of Xuan Ying Yin Yi. After exploring the questions, resolving the difficulties and discriminating the errors, the Paper makes textual research on the finishing year of Xuan Ying Yin Yi, the circulation of its versions and its text system, and the complicated original relations between its different versions were cleared up. It is pointed out that Xuan Ying Yin Yi could mainly be divided into two series: Gaoli Collections and Qisha Collections. And discussion of the origin of the two series' shaping up were made in the paper, supplementing and correcting some mistakes in Mr. Zhou Zumo's Postscript of Reading and Collating Interpretation of Pronunciations and meanings in All Buddhist Sutras by Xuan Ying and Mr. Zhang Jingquan and Mr. Xu Jianping's Collective Textual Research on Interpretation of Pronunciations and meanings in Buddhist sutra in Dunhuang Caves.Xuan Ying Yin Yi incorporates the wordbook of Shuowen series, lexicon of Erya series, rhyming dictionary of Qieyun series and critical word explanation of ancient classics, annotating words and expressions needed to be explained in the Buddhist sutra. In some way it would be regarded as a relatively complete summary of all the using words at that time, more or less reflecting the real condition of the language in Han and Tang Dynasty. It is the gem for study of the history of Chinese language. In view of the above-mentioned facts, this paper discusses the different phonetic notations in each version of Xuan Ying Yin Yi and the words explained by Xuan Ying from the angle of the history of Chinese language study. After thoroughly inspecting of over 1100 different phonetic notations of Xuan Ying Yin Yi and exploiting the lexical diffusion, the author thinks that different contents of different text versions of one document reflect different language conditions in different times, which could be used to inspect the successive process of the variation of pronunciation. The paper discusses the phenomenon of phonetic development reflected by different notations in each version, supplementing and correcting Mr. Zhou Fagao and Mr. Wang Li's exposition about the phonetic notation of Xuan Ying Yin Yi. And on the basis of inspecting and collating over 8000 terms in over 400 Buddhist sutras interpreted by Xuan Ying, this paper traces back to the origin and explores the polysyllabic words, new meaning of new words, dialect and spoken words and some other loanwords in Xuan Ying Yin Yi, particularly making textual research on the evolving clues of polysyllabic words, spoken words and loanwords, and also discusses the academic value of Xuan Ying Yin Yi in language study, study of Chinese ancient books, and study in lexicography and history of culture.