Xuanzang

Buddhism ◽  
2021 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
East Asia ◽  
Ming Dynasty ◽  
Tang Dynasty ◽  
East Asian ◽  
Comprehensive Knowledge ◽  
The Tang Dynasty ◽  
Xiyou Ji ◽  
Lasting Influence ◽  
The Silk Road ◽  
Japan And China

Xuanzang玄奘, the peripatetic Chinese Buddhist scholar-monk of the Tang dynasty (618-907 ce), was born into a literati family in Henan province in 600 or 602 ce. He is known by the sobriquet “Master of the Three Baskets [comprising the Buddhist Canon] .” (Skt.: Trepiṭaka; Ch.: Sanzang三藏) Xuanzang is regarded as the most prolific translator of Indic Buddhist texts from Sanskrit into Chinese—as well as the most historically significant, given that his comprehensive translations of Indic abhidharma and Yogācāra sutras and treatises (śāstras) revolutionized the study of Buddhism in East Asia. Attesting to his lasting influence on the tradition of East Asian Buddhism, all Buddhist Indic texts translated prior to Xuanzang are known as either the “ancient translations” (guyi古譯) or “the old translations” (jiuyi舊譯), while Xuanzang’s translations are termed “the new translations” (xinyi新譯). By retrieving the unalloyed teachings of abhidharma and Yogācāra Buddhist traditions from India and rendering them into fluid and readable classical Chinese, Xuanzang has left a legacy in the study of Buddhism in East Asia. Many of Xuanzang’s translations, such as the Heart Sūtra (Xinjing心經), remain the most widely used and circulated versions of these texts. Xuanzang’s long and arduous trek across the Silk Road to India is famously recorded in his travelogue entitled the Da Tang Xiyu ji (Great Tang records of the western regions). During his fourteen years in India (629–643 ce), Xuanzang collected Indic Buddhist texts hitherto not translated, studied with Buddhist masters, engaged in various religious debates, and acquired and mastered a vast and comprehensive knowledge of the Indic Buddhist texts in their original Sanskrit forms. Xuanzang returned to his native China in 645 ce to much acclaim and fanfare. Turning down a prestigious civil service appointment offered by Emperor Taizong, Xuanzang engaged in massive translation projects to render the texts he had gathered during his travels in India into Chinese. Under the lavish patronage of the second and third Tang emperors, Taizong and Gaozong, Xuanzang rose in status to become the preeminent East Asian Buddhist scholar and translator of his generation. Attracting students from Korea, Japan, and China, Xuanzang engaged the finest minds of East Asia in his translation and exegetical projects. Xuanzang has lived on in Chinese popular literary imaginary as the basis for the character Tang Sanzang 唐三藏 (Trepiṭaka of the Tang Dynasty) in the Xiyou ji西游記 (Journey to the west), one of the four great novels of the Ming Dynasty (1368–1644).

scholarly journals 筆談：同文異音下的東亞文化交流

2020 ◽  
Vol 35 (35) ◽  
pp. 189-208
Author(s):  
藍日昌 藍日昌
Keyword(s):  
East Asia ◽  
Ming Dynasty ◽  
Song Dynasty ◽  
Tang Dynasty ◽  
Chinese Culture ◽  
East Asian ◽  
Main Stream ◽  
Six Dynasties ◽  
Tributary System ◽  
The Ming Dynasty

<p>近代所謂漢字文化圈者，意謂在東亞區域之內諸國受中國文化之影響，舉凡儒學、佛教及技術等，皆由中國而向外傳至日、韓、琉及越南等，東亞諸國的文化交流的媒介自然是以漢字為主。</p> <p>東亞交流雖自六朝開始，但當時並無官方語音的觀念，因此交流之時自以當時主流發音為主，而主流發音則隨政治、經濟形勢而變。六朝時以南方吳音為主流，唐時以河洛及西北方音為主流，南宋時則以蘇杭音為主流。</p> <p>書寫文字雖同，但音調則有差異，這對其他諸國而言，也是有所困擾，音調雖有變化，但書寫則不變，筆談即是東亞交流中溝通的媒介。</p> <p>明太祖所建立起朝貢制度，政治及經濟來往熱絡，朝鮮作為明朝與日本的紐帶，明、朝之間的燕行使與朝、日之間的通信使，交往之時大體透過筆談溝通。甚至越南與琉球、日本交往之時亦復透過筆談溝通。</p> <p>筆談之事，少見於唐宋，入明則筆談的記錄頻率轉增，然則筆談出現的頻率則證諸東亞交流的狀況及文化交流的盛景，其事雖簡，其義則甚重大。</p> <p>&nbsp;</p><p>The so-called Chinese cultural circle in modern times means that all countries in the East Asian region are influenced by Chinese culture, and all Confucianism, Buddhism, and technology have been spread from China to Japan, South Korea, Vietnam, and Vietnam, and other countries in East Asia. The medium of cultural exchange is naturally based on Chinese characters.</p> <p>Although the East Asia exchange started from the Six Dynasties, there was no concept of official speech at that time. Therefore, the main stream of pronunciation was mainly from the time when the exchange was made, and the mainstream pronunciation changed with the political and economic situation. At the time of the Six Dynasties, Wu Yin was the mainstream in the South. In the Tang Dynasty, Heluo and Northwestern were the mainstream. In the Southern Song Dynasty, the Su Hang sound was the mainstream.</p> <p>Although the written words are the same, but the tones are different, this is also a nuisance to other countries. Although the tone changes, the writing remains the same. The pen talk is the medium of communication in East Asian communication.</p> <p>Ming Taizu established the tributary system, political and economic exchanges, North Korea as the ties between the Ming Dynasty and Japan, the Yan Dynasty between the Ming Dynasty and the DPRK to exercise communication with the DPRK and Japan, when the exchanges are generally communicated through the pen. Even when Vietnam communicates with Ryukyu and Japan, it communicates through pen talks.</p> <p>The things in pen talk are rare in the Tang and Song dynasties. The frequency of writing records in Ming Ming&rsquo;s writings has increased. However, the frequency of conversations in writing has confirmed the status of exchanges in East Asia and the grand scene of cultural exchanges. Although the matter is simple, its significance is very significant.</p> <p>&nbsp;</p>

The Tang Empire

2021 ◽  
pp. 380-400
Author(s):  
Mark Edward Lewis
Keyword(s):  
East Asia ◽  
Tang Dynasty ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
Eighth Century ◽  
Local Market ◽  
Late Imperial China ◽  
Interregional Trade ◽  
Late Imperial ◽  
Labor Service ◽  
The Tang Dynasty

The Tang dynasty reunited continental East Asia using institutions inherited from the nomad-dominated Northern dynasties: state-owned land; exactions of grain, cloth, and labor service levied on notional “average” households; a hereditary “divisional army” concentrated around the capital and professional soldiers at the frontier, cities divided into walled wards with state-administered markets; a hereditary, imperial super-elite; and state-sponsored Buddhism and Daoism. The An Lushan Rebellion in the mid-eighth century eliminated these institutions. In their place emerged the major characteristics of late-imperial China: a fiscal system that assessed actual wealth and taxed trade; a new pattern of state service based on textual, technical, and military expertise measured by examinations; large-scale interregional trade through purely commercial entrepôts and local market towns; the incorporation of China into a multistate East Asian world; and the linkage of continental East Asia into a world economy through oceanic trans-shipment of commodities.

The Cheng Ho (Zheng He) Cultural Museum in Malacca (Melaka)

2017 ◽  
Vol 3 (3) ◽  
pp. 232-245 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tai Wei Lim
Keyword(s):  
Conflict Resolution ◽  
East Asia ◽  
Capacity Building ◽  
Free Trade ◽  
Ming Dynasty ◽  
Silk Road ◽  
Maritime Silk Road ◽  
Trade Politics ◽  
The Silk Road

The Zheng He Museum is an important depository of material artefacts related to Zheng He’s seven voyages through the maritime world. This writing intends to highlight three contemporary narratives related to his legacies: (1) the idea of Zheng He as a symbol of the ‘art of collaboration’; (2) the narrative that associates Zheng He with peaceful tributary relations; and (3) the concept of Malacca as an emporium of trade that prospered under official trade and diplomatic exchanges with Ming dynasty China. All three narratives highlight the idea of the Maritime Silk Road as a metaphor for exchanges, trade, politics, culture and the ‘Asian’ way of mediating differences between nations. The narratives conform to the idea of the Silk Road Ethos by exceptionalizing intercultural respect and non-hegemonic Pan-Asianism. Arising from these narratives and related to the material artefacts presented in the Malacca Zheng He Museum, the important legacies of Zheng He’s maritime voyages related to contemporary concerns in East Asia are in the realm of conflict resolution, capacity-building and free trade, although, for objectivity, this writing will also selectively discuss contested elements and alternative interpretations of the symbolism of Zheng He’s voyages.

East Asian Cartographic Print Culture

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alexander Akin
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
East Asia ◽  
Print Culture ◽  
Ming Dynasty ◽  
East Asian ◽  
Crucial Importance ◽  
Technological Changes ◽  
Geographical Education ◽  
Choson Korea ◽  
The Late Ming Dynasty

Alexander Akin examines how the expansion of publishing in the late Ming dynasty prompted changes in the nature and circulation of cartographic materials in East Asia. Focusing on mass-produced printed maps, this book investigates a series of path-breaking late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century works in genres including geographical education, military affairs, and history, analysing how maps achieved unprecedented penetration among published materials, even in the absence of major theoretical or technological changes like those that transformed contemporary European cartography. By examining contemporaneous developments in neighboring Choson Korea and Japan, the study demonstrates the crucial importance of considering the broader East Asian sphere in this period as a network of communication and publication, rather than as discrete units with separate cartographic histories. It also reexamines the place of the Jesuits in this context, arguing that in printing maps on Ming soil they should be seen as participants in the local cartographic publishing boom and its trans-regional repercussions.

Primers, Medical Texts, and Other Works

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Peter Francis Kornicki
Keyword(s):  
East Asia ◽  
Forensic Medicine ◽  
Tang Dynasty ◽  
Linguistic Diversity ◽  
East Asian ◽  
Medical Texts ◽  
The West ◽  
Conduct Books ◽  
Chinese Pharmacopoeia ◽  
Vernacular Fiction

This chapter follows on from Chapters 8 and 9, which were devoted to Buddhist and Confucian texts, and applies a similar analysis to a variety of other texts with a focus on those that were subjected to a process of vernacularization. The first genre discussed is that of primers, which initially existed solely to teach the young the elements of Sinitic. Second, medical texts are examined in some depth, for the botanic and linguistic diversity of East Asia necessitated the production of glossaries giving the local names for plants appearing in Chinese pharmacopoeia and later the development of local pharmacopoeia based on locally available plants. Third, conduct books for women are taken up, for the different expectations of women in East Asian societies made Chinese imports unsuitable. Subsequently, a Tang-dynasty manual of statecraft, a manual of forensic medicine, Chinese vernacular fiction, and books about the West are discussed.

The Demise of Silk on the Silk Road: Textiles as Money at Dunhuang from the Late Eighth Century to the Thirteenth Century

2013 ◽  
Vol 23 (2) ◽  
pp. 327-347 ◽  
Author(s):  
ERIC TROMBERT
Keyword(s):  
Tang Dynasty ◽  
Real Life ◽  
Eighth Century ◽  
Silk Road ◽  
First Semester ◽  
Monetary System ◽  
The Tang Dynasty ◽  
Accounting Report ◽  
Political Economic ◽  
The Silk Road

The extensive documentary evidence collected and analysed in the previous studies in this issue suggest a preliminary conclusion that can be summarised as follows: from the collapse of the Han dynasty to the glorious days of the Tang dynasty, the peoples living in the Western Regions along the Silk Road used multiple co-existing forms of money – grain, cloth and coins – with one of these three items becoming predominant according to changes in political and/or economic circumstances. However, this multicurrency system did not outlive the political, economic and fiscal upheavals that shook the Tang empire from the mid-eighth century onwards. As far as the materials from Turfan and Dunhuang are concerned, the latest evidence for this monetary system is provided by a manuscript found at Dunhuang (P 3348 V°), already quoted in Arakawa Masaharu's article, which permits us to see how such a complex monetary system worked in real life once the silk shipped by the Tang government arrived in the Western Regions. In particular, a subsidiary account (P 3348 V°2 B) inscribed in this accounting report reveals how a local official called Li Jingyu 李景玉, who was vice-commissioner in the army stationed in that region, received his salary for the first semester of the year 745 ce.

Silent conversation through Brushtalk (筆談): The use of Sinitic as a scripta franca in early modern East Asia

2020 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-24
Author(s):  
David C. S. Li ◽  
Reijiro Aoyama ◽  
Tak-sum Wong
Keyword(s):  
South Korea ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
East Asia ◽  
Ming Dynasty ◽  
North Korea ◽  
East Asian ◽  
Cultural Practice ◽  
Face To Face ◽  
Cross Border ◽  
Late Ming

AbstractLiterary Sinitic (written Chinese, hereafter Sinitic) functioned as a ‘scripta franca’ in sinographic East Asia, which broadly comprises China, Japan, South Korea and North Korea, and Vietnam today. It was widely used by East Asian literati to facilitate cross-border communication interactively face-to-face. This lingua-cultural practice is generally known as bĭtán 筆談, literally ‘brushtalk’ or ‘brush conversation’. While brushtalk as a substitute for speech to conduct ‘silent conversation’ has been reported since the Sui dynasty (581–619), in this paper brushtalk data will be drawn from sources involving transcultural, cross-border communication from late Ming dynasty (1368–1644) until the 1900s. Brushtalk occurred in four recurrent contexts, comprising both interactional and transactional communication: official brushtalk (公務筆談), poetic brushtalk (詩文筆談), travelogue brushtalk (遊歷筆談), and drifting brushtalk (漂流筆談). For want of space, we will exemplify brushtalk using selected examples drawn from the first three contexts. The use of Sinitic as a ‘scripta franca’ seems to be sui generis and under-researched linguistically and sociolinguistically. More research is needed to unveil the script-specific characteristics of Sinitic in cross-border communication.

scholarly journals Textual Research on Henna Art Introduced into Ancient China Through the Silk Road

2020 ◽  
Vol 16 (9) ◽  
pp. 21
Author(s):  
Xue Yang ◽  
Yu Liu
Keyword(s):  
Tang Dynasty ◽  
Ancient Egypt ◽  
Silk Road ◽  
Ancient China ◽  
Chinese Traditional Culture ◽  
Jin Dynasty ◽  
Mixed Use ◽  
The Tang Dynasty ◽  
Textual Research ◽  
The Silk Road

Since ancient Egypt, henna has been widely used as dyes for women&rsquo;s henna body art. Through the Silk Road, China assimilated cultures of its Western Regions, India, and Persia, such as the henna art. In Ancient China the &quot;garden balsam&quot; is always called &quot;henna&quot;. Nevertheless, they belong to two different kinds of flowers. Folks&rsquo; mixed use of these two kinds of flower names reflects the profound impact of the henna art on Chinese traditional culture of decorative nails. This textual research results revealed that in ancient China the customs of dye red nails are affected by foreign henna art and there were three development stages: the introduction period (from the Western Jin Dynasty to the Tang Dynasty), the development period (in the Song-Yuan Dynasty) and the popularity period (in the Ming-Qing Dynasty).

Writing-Mediated Interaction Face-to-Face: Sinitic Brushtalk (漢文筆談) as an Age-Old Lingua-Cultural Practice in Premodern East Asian Cross-Border Communication

2021 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
pp. 193-233
Author(s):  
David C. S. Li
Keyword(s):  
East Asia ◽  
Ming Dynasty ◽  
East Asian ◽  
Social Activity ◽  
Cultural Practice ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
Synchronous Communication ◽  
Language Functions ◽  
Cross Border ◽  
Interactional Pattern

Abstract In Western societies, speaking is construed as an interactive social activity while writing is widely perceived as a solo or private endeavor. Such a functional dichotomy did not apply to the “Sinographic Cosmopolis” in premodern East Asia, however. Based on selected documented examples of writing-mediated cross-border communication spanning over a thousand years from the Sui dynasty to the late Ming dynasty, this paper demonstrates that Hanzi 漢字, a morphographic, non-phonographic script, was commonly used by literati of classical Chinese or Literary Sinitic to engage in “silent conversation” as a substitute for speech. Except for a “drifting” record co-constructed by Korean maritime officials and Chinese “boat people,” all the other examples featured Chinese–Japanese interaction. While synchronous cross-border communication in written Chinese has been reported in scholarly works in East Asian studies (published more commonly in East Asian languages than in English or other Western languages), to our knowledge no attempt has been made to examine such writing-mediated interaction from a linguistic or discourse-pragmatic point of view. Writing-mediated interaction enacted through Sinitic brushtalk (漢文筆談) is compatible with transactional and interactional language functions as in speech. In premodern and early modern East Asia, it was most commonly conducted using brush, ink, and paper, but it could also take place using a pointed object and a flat surface covered with a fluid substance like sand, finger-drawing using water or tea on a table, and so forth. Such an interactional pattern appears to be unparalleled in other regional lingua francas written with a phonographic script such as Latin and Arabic. To facilitate research into the extent to which this interactional pattern is script-specific to morphographic sinograms, a “morphographic hypothesis” is proposed. The theoretical significance of writing-mediated interaction as a third or even fourth known modality of synchronous communication—after speech and (tactile) sign language—will be briefly discussed.

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