The Character Research On Lotus Sutra

"Lotus Sutra" is one of the Buddhist Scriptures included in "Taisho Tripitaka"(hereafter referred to as "Taisho"), which is the Chinese version that now widely used in the world, published in Japan in 1923-1934. It was compiled after Punctuation and emendation, mainly based on Song, Yuan, Ming versions and Korea version, with reference to relevant Buddhist Scriptures in Tunhuang, Sanskrit and Pali languages. As one research object of this paper, a lot of variant characters of different versions were recorded in the end of every page. Another research object is the variant characters compiled with "Lotus Sutra" of "Taisho" as the master copy, and with"Lotus Sutra" in "Chinese Tripitaka" and Tunhuang hand-copied Scripture(reserved in Russia, France and National Library of China), "Lotus Sutra" in "The Sound and Meaning of the Tripitaka"and "Suihanlu"as the collated copy. It is the task of this paper to research on these variant characters.We know that even a character is of great importance to the meaning of the whole text. As "Taisho" didn't make discrimination on the variant characters thus compiled, it would unavoidably bring certain trouble to readers and researchers in their work, so it is necessary to make discrimination on the variant characters. It is just because variant character reading has such great importance and value on collating Chinese language Buddhist scriptures that this paper, seeing this as a juncture, intends to attract the attention of relevant experts and scholars, to initiate an all-out collating work on the variant characters of Buddhist scriptures in the future.Besides, the research process on variant characters of "Lotus Sutra"is also a research process on Chinese characters history to a certain extent. Because variant characters often gather various writing styles of a certain word, which has offered abundant data for us to study the topography of Chinese characters, and investigate the source and changing course of Chinese characters, as well as the situation of choice of words in different eras. What's more, the study and discrimination on variant characters of "Lotus Sutra" will also help to perfect the compilation of the Unabridged Chinese Dictionary. Some variant characters of Lotus Sutra" are able to present the deficiency of such aspects in the Unabridged Chinese Dictionary as vocabulary entry missing, documentary evidence lagging, illustration fragmentation, meaning omission and so on.