英文摘要
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During the thousand years from Eastern Han dynasty to Song dynasty, there was lots of Buddhist scriptures have been translated into Chinese with venerable lexicons, which reflects the spoken languages in different era. Also, the quantity of well-preserved Chinese Buddhist texts is much more than any texts in other languages. Due to the function of Buddhist scriptures is for popular to read, not for scholars or monks to study, the languages in Buddhist scriptures must be the spoken language which publics could understand, so that Buddhism can be accepted by public. Yet, a living language tends to be changeable with time; some lexicons which can be found in Buddhist scriptures are still using nowadays but with different meaning. This situation results in the linguistic obstacles, and that is why we feel difficult to understand Buddhist scriptures. The Buddhist linguistics uses the knowledge of phonology, etymology, scholium, lexicology, and grammar to study Buddhist scriptures; and use existing Middle Chinese knowledge to understand Buddhist scriptures. Chu (2011) once proposed a method of "manifesting the scripture by scripture". Considering that even ancient linguists and scholiasts accumulated many research findings and experiences, those studies of traditional scholium were mainly focus on the classics of Confucianism, the scholiastic studying of Buddhist scriptures is insufficient. And using the traditional data, traditional reference books or scholiastic results to studying Buddhist linguistics helps little. Hence, to use the method of" manifesting the scripture by scripture" is necessary. That is, using the Buddhist scripture to study Buddhist scripture; discover the meaning or grammar of one word through the context of Buddhist scriptures. Nowadays, the computer database especially helps a lot to this kind of researches. Through the retrieval system, it takes a little time to list amounts of contexts of one word; and base on these data, the observation and analysis could be objective and detailed. This research findings show that there are six main ways to study Buddhist language: first, through a phonological way; second, through a etymological way; third, through a scholium way; fourth, through a lexicology way; fifth, through a grammatical way; and the last, through the way of Sanskrit, Pali, and Tibetan. The method of manifesting the scripture by scripture of Buddhist linguistic studying, which is like field studies, does further analysis on the basis of considerable sentences; and whether the target is lexicons or grammar, the original linguistic feature can be revealed through the numerous contexts.
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