The Study On Longkanshoujing’s Paraphrase

Longkanshoujing(龍龕手镜) is a dictionary which was compiled for the convenience of reading buddhist scriptures by a monk called Xingjun of Liao Dynasty. This book has a role of analyzing glyph, showing pronunciation and giving interpretation. There are only a few comments made by ancient scholars on this book. They can only be found in preambles or postscripts of kinds of carving or handwritten texts. And the derogatory comments are more than the praiseful ones. Since1970s, academia’s studies on this book have become fruitful. So far, the researches have referred to various aspects, such as characters, phonology, exegesis, literature, version, dictionary compilation, and so on. In recent years, there are quite fruitful research results about this book, in particular about its versions and folk characters. In spite of this, the research space of this book remains to be expanded. For example, in the aspect of phonetic notation and paraphrase, there is still a wide research space.This paper is a monographic study on Longkanshoujing’s paraphrase. In other words, paraphrase items in this book are taken as the research objects, and the items of Mu, Zhu and Mi these three parts in Ru Tone Volume are taken as key objects. The specific measures of this study are as follows:doing an overall study on paraphrase items and then summarizing paraphrase styles and features; querying the target meanings which exist in Shuowenjiezi(说文解字), Yupian(玉篇), Yiqiejingyinyi(一切经音義) and other paraphrase books one by one, and making a record document; doing comparisons of paraphrase items in each book, finding out the items which have research value, carrying on further study in order to explore the sources of the items and to point out some errors. The specific content of this study involves analyzing and summarizing the feature of paraphrase, illustrating certain paraphrase problems, exploring the sources of the paraphrase items, demonstrating the suspicious or difficult items, and so on. In researching process, we will comprehensively use analysis, induction, comparison, description, illustration and other methods.The whole paper consists of two parts:the first part is general theory about this book, and the second part is the case study. The first part is as follows:the first chapter is Introduction which is about the general information and the research state of this book, and introduces the research objects, methods, significance and so on. The second chapter is an overview about this book’s paraphrase, namely describing the paraphrasing format, characteristic, and category. The third chapter is about the exploration of the paraphrase sources, which is intended to explore inheritance relationship between this book and Shuowenjiezi(,说文解字),Yupian(玉篇),Yiqiejingyinyi(一切经音议)and other paraphrase books by analyzing the cited contents in paraphrase items. The fourth chapter illustrates the existing errors in paraphrase items, categorizes these errors, and then analyzes causes of them. The fifth chapter is about some examples of researching, namely the specific examples about how to study the suspicious or difficult paraphrase items. The second part is the case study on paraphrase items, namely researching the suspicious or difficult paraphrase items of Mu Part, Zhu Part and Mi Part in Ru Tone Volume.This paper aims to explore the inheritance relationship between ancient paraphrase books by studying the book’s paraphrases, to enhance the book’s accuracy by illustrating the paraphrase items, and to provide basic materials for the later scholars to compile a proofread version, to create a database and so on. By comparing paraphrases between this book and other paraphrase books, a positive effect on proofreading and supplementing other dictionaries will be achieved. By using the research results, reliable materials may be provided for compilation or revision of the modern large scale dictionaries.