Grammar Study of the

Author: Zhang Meilan
Publisher:
Publishing Date: 2003-10-01
Features: The Zutangji is the earliest extant history of Chan Buddhism, with its preface written in the tenth year of the Baoda era of the Southern Tang (952). The book primarily records the history of the lineage of Fuzhou Xuefeng Yicun Zen Master (822–908) in Fuzhou, Quanzhou, and Zhangzhou. The other sects recorded in the book were mostly active in Hunan, Hubei, Jiangxi, Guangdong, and Zhejiang. As an important source of Chan Buddhist linguistic materials, it was completed fifty years before the Jingde Chuan Deng Lu of the Song Dynasty, and most of the Zen masters recorded in it were from the ninth century. Therefore, it has attracted significant attention from academic circles both domestically and internationally, serving as an important resource for studying the history of Chan Buddhism during the Tang and Five Dynasties periods, colloquial spoken Chinese, dialects, social history, and cultural history. The linguistic community places great importance on this book. As the Japanese sinologist Taito Tatsuo said, "From a linguistic perspective, this book is the only material for systematically understanding early colloquial Chinese." Japanese scholars began studying the language of The Zutangji as early as the 1950s and 1960s, with Taito Tatsuo's research being particularly notable. His A Historical Grammar of the Chinese Language (Jiangnan College Press, 1957) utilized a significant amount of material from The Zutangji, and his A Glossary of Colloquial Terms in The Zutangji (1962) collected approximately 2,500 terms. He later compiled A Glossary of Popular Characters from the Tang and Song Dynasties (The Zutangji section, Jigu College Press, 1982). In A Comprehensive Study of the History of the Chinese Language (Hakubisha, 1988), he dedicated a chapter to "A General Overview of the Grammar of The Zutangji, which was supplemented based on lecture notes from his courses in 1956 and 1981. This chapter systematically and comprehensively describes the grammatical phenomena in The Zutangji. Chinese scholars, on the other hand, began to encounter The Zutangji and study its linguistic phenomena in the early 1980s. From the series of research papers and published works, it is evident that some focused on studies of The Zutangji, while others used it as reference material for synchronic or diachronic research. What is particularly encouraging is the great interest shown by dialectologists and modern Chinese linguists in The Zutangji. They study it from perspectives such as regional dialects and the comparison of modern Chinese with late imperial Chinese, pushing the linguistic study of The Zutangji into a new phase. This book is a specialized study on the linguistic aspects of The Zutangji.