"buddhosnisah Dharani Sutra The Tangut Script Zhu The Comparative Study

Usnisavijaya Dharani Sutra is one of the classics at the time of early Esoteric Buddhism in China. The sutra has been rapidly translated and popularized since the first year in Feng-Yi era of Tang dynasty (Year 676) when it was first disseminated to China. Stone columns with inscriptions of Usnisavijaya Dharani Sutra can be seen all through the country, which verifies the popularity of this sutra. The extant Usnisavijaya Dharani Sutra texts are of various scripts, including Chinese, Tibetan, Uyghur, Pagba, Tangut scripts, etc. Of them, the Tangut texts are studied in this dissertation.The extant Tangut texts of Usnisavijaya Dharani Sutra are remarkable regarding the storage and editions. In terms of the bearer form, the sutra can be divided into two groups:paper texts and stone inscriptions. The paper texts again can be divided into two categories, block-printed editions and manuscripts. To be exact, the block-printed editions include the single edtion of Usnisavijaya Dharani Sutra, as well as the co-edition with Maha Karunika Citta Dharani Sutra. At the beginning of 20th century, the paper texts of Usnisavijaya Dharani Sutra were successively discovered in Khara-Khoto and Lv Fortress in Inner Mongolia. These texts are now preserved in China, Russia, Britain and other countries. As for the stone inscriptions, they do not refer to the whole sutra, but merely the dharani part. The stone inscriptions can be found in two regions:one is carved on the walls of a tower base in JuYong Guan; the others are the two stone-column inscriptions located in Baoding Ancient Lotus Garden.Studies on the Tangut Usnisavijaya Dharani Sutra have been comprehensive. Nishida Tatsuo first made a research on the JuYong Guang inscription of Usnisavijaya Dharani in the middle age of last century. In recent years, more and more editions of the sutra have been noted and studied including the one preserved in Fu Ssu-Nien library, the two stone column inscriptions in Baoding, as well as some fragmental texts preserved in Chinese mainland and Britain. Since the Russia-preserved Tangut Usnisavijaya Dharani Sutra have not been published, studies on this part is comparatively deficient, although scholars did refer to them in former studies.According to the pictures taken from Russia by Jiang Weisong and Yan Keqin, this dissertation chooses the Russia-preserved textинв.(?)6796(6821) as the working text and makes an interpretation adapting 'the three-line interpretation method', which is a traditional method for ancient ethnic literature interpretation. Annotations are given wherever differences are found among these Tangut Texts. Through analysis of all the Tangut texts, we are able to generalize them into nine editions. Then a comparative study is conducted among these nine edtions. Thereby this paper comes to such a conclusion that all these editions were translated from the same original text and were merely produced in different times. It is hoped that this study could be benefitial to the the study of Buddhist Bibliography and Buddhism communication in Tangut society.