Chan monks had a language problem. They needed to deal with at least four registers; the language of the street in their district, the Chan koine with its colloquialisms and argot, the guanhua or official language, and the elite formal language in Literary Sinitic that was packed with allusions. Zen monks in Japan had to deal with registers of Japanese, plus the Chan koine and the formal Literary Chinese. One response was philological, glosses on vocabulary that were likely to be misunderstood, such as dialect words and words that had changed meaning over time. Notably, most of these responses originated in or were connected to the greater Hangzhou region and its Wu language. After discussing whether there was a “standard” or common language used by elites throughout China, this article contends that the awareness of language differences between the “standard” or Mandarin Chinese and the Wu language by native Wu speakers contributed to the rise of Chan philology and then Zen philology. A few key examples of specialized Chan philological texts will be examined, but it should be kept in mind that examples of Chan philology may be embedded in other Chan works.
目次
Abstract 1 Keywords 1 1. Introduction 1 2. Chan and Regional Languages 2 3. Common Languages 3 3.1. A Common Language? 3 3.2. Liwen 5 4. The Wu-Dialect Area 6 5. A Standard Chan Koine 7 6. Zuting Shiyuan 祖庭事苑 (Anthology of Allusions from the Courtyard of the Patriarchs) and “Dialect” 10 7. Other Philological Works: Chanlin Baoxun 禅林寶訓 (Valuable Glosses on the Chan Monasteries) and Its Commentaries 14 7.1. Chanlin Baoxun 15 7.2. Chanlin Leiju 禪林類聚 (Encyclopedia of Chan Monasteries) 17 8. Japan 17 9. Conclusions 21 Funding 22 Institutional Review Board Statement 22 Informed Consent Statement 22 Data Availability Statement 22 Acknowledgments 22 Conflicts of Interest 22 Abbreviations 23 Notes 23 References 27
