Shin'yaku Kegonkyō Ongi Shiki

The Shin'yaku Kegonkyō Ongi Shiki (新訳華厳経音義私記) is a Japanese annotation of the Avatamsaka Sūtra. Dated to 794,[1] it is the oldest Japanese ongi, or collection of difficult to interpret words showing their pronunciation and meaning,[2] and is a National Treasure of Japan.[3]

Background

The text is two fascicles in length.[4][5] The compiler is unknown but is presumed to have related to Tōdai-ji.[3] It is an annotation of the 80-volume Avatamsaka Sūtra. As the original was written in Chinese, the annotation contains a list of words and expressions from the original and glosses them with Japanese readings and meanings. The orthography of the Japanese suggests that it is a late Nara period text.[4][5] However, the manuscript contains a number of errors and is judged to be a copy of an earlier original.[4][5] There is only one known existing manuscript.

Linguistics

The text is viewed as a valuable reference for Old Japanese linguistics.[1][4][5] The Japanese annotations are written in Man'yōgana and, with the exception of /to1, to2/,[4] distinguishes between Jōdai Tokushu Kanazukai. It contains a total of 162 Japanese words, many of which are the oldest extant citations.[1][4][5] In addition, it also contains the oldest example of a long vowel as well as a number of Japanese-specific Kan'yō-on readings of kanji.[5]

Notes

  1. 1 2 3 Takeuchi (1962:133-134)
  2. ↑ Kindaichi (1988:74)
  3. 1 2 Yoshida (2001: 128)
  4. 1 2 3 4 5 6 Omodaka (1967: 880-881)
  5. 1 2 3 4 5 6 Nihon Koten Bungaku Daijiten (1985: 512-513)

References

This article is issued from Wikipedia - version of the 9/3/2015. The text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution/Share Alike but additional terms may apply for the media files.