A Literature Review And Variants Repertoire Of The Dunhuang Manuscripts On The Fodingaunshengtuoluonijing

The FODINGZUNSHENGTUOLUONIJING(《佛顶尊腾陀罗尼经》),also named ZUNSHENGTUOLUONIJING(《尊腾陀罗尼经》)or ZUNSHENGTUOLUONI(《尊腾陀罗尼》), is known as an esoteric classic of Indian Mahayana Buddhism. The main content is that the Buddha preached to Emperor ShanZhu on the way of precluding disasters and extending lifetime, in order to show the efficaciousness of’ZUNSHENGTUOLUONI’. This Buddhist text spread to China during the Emperor Tang kao-tsung period and had been translated several times since then. There had been already eight different translations, excluding the ritual procedures derived from the Buddhist text, of FODINGZUNSHENGTUOLUONIJING until the late Tang dynasty. This Buddhist text has been found to include one hundred and ninety-three manuscripts after a comprehensive statistics over all published Dunhuang manuscripts and part of unpublished ones. Characters in the manuscripts are hugely different from each other due to the diversities of time and writer of the transcriptions. The FODINGZUNSHENGTUOLUONIJING from Dunhuang manuscripts plays an extraordinarily important role in history of Chinese language and research of Chinese characters.This paper will have six parts:The first part is introduction. An overall introduction of the FODINGZUNSHENGTUOLUONIJING and some information on its translations will be mentioned, as well as the research status and significance of this Buddhist text.The next part is summary of FODINGZUNSHENGTUOLUONIJING from Dunhuang manuscripts. The main content of this part is to summarize all named manuscripts of FODINGZUNSHENGTUOLUONIJING. Sources, names and details of the manuscripts are involved in the summaries.The third and forth parts are detailed research over FODINGZUNSHENGTUOLUONIJING from Dunhuang manuscripts. Denominating the unnamed fragments and conjugating the fragments together are separately referred in part three and four.Part five comes to the conclusion.Two appendixes are appended at the end of the paper. This last part is the foundation of the entire paper. One of them is the detailed summary of FODINGZUNSHENGTUOLUONIJING from Dunhuang manuscripts, including the number, source, naming, description and comment of the manuscripts. The other one is the variants of FODINGZUNSHENGTUOLUONIJING from Dunhuang manuscripts.