Miscellanea in the Brāhmī Script from the Berezovsky and Krotkov Collections (IOM, RAS) with an Appendix: ВФ-4190

The main part of this article provides a complete edition (description, transliteration, transcription, preliminary translation, annotation as well as the reproduction of the photographs) of forty-two fragments in different languages, circulated along the northern Silk Road, today in the territory of modern Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region (PR China) in pre-Mongolian times: Sanskrit, Tocharian A/B, Old Uyghur [hereafter: Uyghur]. Their common feature is the use of the standard North Turkestan Brāhmī and its Tocharian and Uyghur varieties. In terms of content, the fragments include extracts from Buddhist texts such as Abhidharmadīpavibhāṣaprabhāvr̥tti, Prajāpāramitā, Prasādapratibhodbhava, Prātimokṣasūtra, Pravāraṇasūtra, Saṃyuktāgama, Suvarṇabhāsottamasūtra, Udānavarga. There are also some Tocharian B document fragments. Several of these texts are found on the back of Chinese scrolls. The Chinese texts have been identified. Where possible, a reconstruction of the relevant section of the scroll has been added. An introduction provides general background information. The lexis of the edited manuscripts is given in concordances.

Jealousy and Domestic Violence by Women in Early and Medieval China

Beginning in the early imperial era, Chinese texts recorded instances of domestic violence perpetrated by women living in polygynous households. These acts of abuse were commonly understood to be the result of sexual jealousy. Marital disharmony was a cause of great concern to the elite, as a result of which legal and historical texts, as well as the literature of the period, provide a rich vein of evidence concerning domestic violence perpetrated by women. Furthermore, there are some surprisingly sympathetic accounts of the psychological pressures that led to such abuse by wives. As the importance of this material in the history of marital relationships and domestic life in China has been neglected, this study provides an overview of some of the key sources, particularly the recently discovered Han dynasty narrative poem, Wang Ji 妄稽.

Science, Technology and Religion: The Exchange Between Enlightenment Europe and Imperial China

The European Enlightenment fostered a sense of progress through a delineation of universal human rights as well as through a reductionist mathematization of nature. Science, technology and religion became a form of cultural currency between Europe and Imperial China. The Jesuits bartered mathematics, geographic surveys and military technology to win religious permissions with Chinese emperors. Other Europeans were convinced ancient Chinese texts corresponded to the Old Testament. China sent to Europe a Confucian model of a social ethic that demonstrated non-Christian civic virtues. This article examines this exchange using the intercourse in science, technology and religion as the metric.

Linguistic Annotation of Translated Chinese Texts: Coordinating Theory, Algorithms and Data

The article tackles the problems of linguistic annotation in the Chinese texts presented in the Ruzhcorp – Russian-Chinese Parallel Corpus of RNC, and the ways to solve them. Particular attention is paid to the processing of Russian loanwords. On the one hand, we present the theoretical comparison of the widespread standards of Chinese text processing. On the other hand, we describe our experiments in three fields: word segmentation, grapheme-to-phoneme conversion, and PoS-tagging, on the specific corpus data that contains many transliterations and loanwords. As a result, we propose the preprocessing pipeline of the Chinese texts, that will be implemented in Ruzhcorp.

The lyric oeuvre of Afanasy Fet and Chinese idyllic poems

There are compelling similarities between Afanasy Fet’s lyric poetry and classical Chinese lyric poetry. This connection is traced in the article with specific examples. Fet, carried away by the ideas of Schopenhauer, argued that thepoetic feeling lives in every person and can be called the sixth and highest feeling. In classical Chinese poetry, the Confucian concept of ‘the sense of things,’ the Taoist formula ‘words and forms’ and the idea of the unity of man and nature played an important role. With characteristic fixation of subtle changes of light and shadow, with the transmission of flushed feelings, Fet’s oeuvre reminds the readers of the ancient Chinese lyric poetry. Like classic Chinese texts, Fet’s poems are textbooks where the idea of the unity of man and nature is developed. In both Chinese poetry and Fet’s works, human life goes into natural life, gaining eternity in the nature. As a result, although Fet was not familiar with Chinese culture, the intuitions that fed his work surprisingly coincided with pictorial techniques as a way of conveying emotion in classical Chinese poetry, separated from him by many centuries.

Scene Text Detection Based on Expanding the Text Center Region for Bilingual Tibetan-Chinese

Scene text detection is an important research branch of artificial intelligence technology whose goal is to locate text in scene images. In the Tibetan areas of China, scene images containing both Tibetan and Chinese texts are ubiquitous. Thus, detecting bilingual Tibetan-Chinese scene texts is important in promoting intelligent applications for minority languages. In this study, a scene text detection database for bilingual Tibetan-Chinese is constructed using a manually labeled method and an automatic synthesis method, and a text detection method is proposed. First, we predict a text rectangular region and the text center region for each text instance and simultaneously learned the expansion distance of the text center region. Second, based on the classification score of the text center region and the text rectangular region, we obtain the final confidence of each text instance and then filter out the text center region with lower confidence. Third, through the learned expansion distance, the full-text instance from the remaining text center region is recovered. The results show that our method obtains good detection performance; it achieves an accuracy of up to 75.47% during the text detection phase, laying the foundation for scene text recognition in the subsequent step.

Computer-assisted Analysis of Zhu Fonian’s Original Mahayana Sutras

In her 2010 study of the Shi zhu duan jie jing T309, Jan Nattier found that several passages in T309 were copied from earlier Chinese Buddhist texts. She thus proposed that T309 is not a translation from an Indian text, but a “forgery” by Zhu Fonian. Extending Nattier’s analysis with the help of TACL, a tool for computational textual analysis, we conducted a more thorough analysis of Zhu Fonian’s four Mahayana texts, namely, T309, the Pusa chu tai jing T384, the Zhongyin jin T385, and the Pusa yingluo jing T656, and found in T309 and T656 additional content deriving from earlier Chinese texts. On the basis of this analysis of these features of the texts, we propose that all four were likely compiled by Zhu Fonian himself.

Ancient Chinese Political Thought

“Ancient Chinese political thought” refers to the reflections and discussions about politics during the period before the First Emperor established the Qin dynasty in 221 bce. Although one could also infer some political thought of that period from the other archeological evidence, the main sources of such reflections and discussions are texts believed to date back to that period, some of which became the foundation of Chinese education that began in the Han dynasty (210 bce–220 ce) and lasted till the beginning of the 20th century. Although disrupted by the turbulent history of China’s encounter with modernity in the early 20th century, the study of ancient Chinese texts has become the center of what is known as “national studies (guoxue国学)” in the People’s Republic of China (PRC) today, with institutes devoted to it in many Chinese universities, supporting researchers from various disciplines. In the revival of Confucianism coupled with the rise of cultural nationalism in mainland China, many Chinese scholars have turned to ancient Chinese political thought for inspiration in their search for distinctively Chinese perspectives on politics, both local and global, and they advocate Chinese alternatives or models to address contemporary challenges. With limited space, the publications selected for this article make up only a small fraction of the works in English and even fewer in Mandarin that discuss ancient Chinese political thought. (The focus on English works is due to the consideration that not all readers of this article would be able to read Mandarin.) In addition to being studied as part of early Chinese civilization that has influenced Chinese society through subsequent centuries, political theorists and philosophers engage ancient Chinese political thought to address perennial or contemporary political problems, contributing significantly to the growth of comparative political theory and comparative political philosophy.

A Dramaturgy of Death: Performing (And Spectating) Filial Piety in Early China

This essay analyzes the early Chinese elite discourse on filial death rituals, arguing that early Chinese texts depict these rituals as performance events. Building on spectacle of xiao sacrifices in the Western Zhou Dynasty, Eastern Zhou authors conceived of filial death rituals as dramaturgical phenomena that underscored not only what needed to be performed, but also how it should be performed, and led to an important distinction between personal dispositions and inherited ritual protocol. This distinction, then, led to concerns about artifice in human behavior, both inside and outside the Ruist (Confucian) tradition. By end of the Warring States Period and in the early Western Han Dynasty, with the embracement of artifice in self-cultivation, the dramatic role of the filial son in death rituals became even more developed and complex, requiring the role of cultivated spectators to be engaged critics who recognized the nuances of cultivated performances.