A Chinese text in Central Asian Brahmi script
RONALD EMMERICK and EDWIN G. PULLEYBLANK: A Chinese text in Central Asian Brahmi script: new evidence for the pronunciation of Late Middle Chinese and Khotanese. (Serie Orientate Roma, LXIX.) vi, 80 pp., 9 plates. Roma: Istituto Italiano per il Medio ed Estremo Oriente, 1993. L.45,000.
The value of the manuscript numbered Ch. 00120 in the Stein collection as a witness to the way in which the sounds of the Diamond Sutra in the Chinese of a thousand years ago were transcribed by a Khotanese into the Brahmi script has been recognized for over half a century, and this document has therefore already attracted the attention of a number of outstanding orientalists. The volume under review adds two further illustrious names to this roster, and also makes clear that they have at various points in their researches been aided by several other scholars who have not yet published on the document in question in their own right: one notices in particular references to L. Hurvitz, K. P. K. Whitaker, N. Sims- Williams and Y. Yoshida. Under such circum- stances it comes as no surprise to find that this slim monograph represents pure, concentrated scholarship of the very highest order.
Thus a brief introduction is followed by a romanization of the Brahmi document accom- panied by the Chinese original not only of the scriptural text but also of the introductory Chinese invocations first identified by the late W. Simon as transcribed from a source still transmitted in China—a translation of this material follows the presentation of the docu- ment itself. Next comes a Chinese-Brahmi index, and then a study of the treatment of words of Indian origin by the Khotanese scribe. At the heart of the work lies an examination of 'The values of the Brahmi letters in Khotanese and their equivalents in Late Middle Chinese' (pp. 29-46), followed by 'The repres- entation of finals classified by rhyme groups' (pp. 47-53), and a note on a Chinese loanword in Khotanese raising a particular further issue in the reconstruction of the latter language. Finally we find a ' Summary of the proposed Late Khotanese value of the Brahmi letters', and a short conclusion.
Appended to this main material is a ten-page review of T. Takata's Japanese monograph on alphabetic transcriptions from Dunhuang, sug- gesting that some of the anomalous material taken by that scholar to reflect local dialect might actually reflect late Tang metropolitan standard speech. A bibliography, a Brahmi- Chinese Index and a Pinyin-Late Middle Chinese Index take up the remaining pages, which are followed by the plates, reproducing P.5597 (a detached fragment of the main document, discovered by Emmerick) and the whole of Ch. 00120. As the foregoing descrip- tion suggests, this is exhaustive treatment indeed, about as much as one could possibly wish for, though the authors do identify (p. 5) one problem they have left aside as not germane to their task of interpreting the firm linguistic evidence at their disposal.
This concerns two interpolations in the text of the scripture, for which B. Csongor did propose a partial and tentative reconstruction of the Chinese text in an article published in 1972. Given their scrupulously rigorous approach, however, Emmerick and Pulleyblank make no attempt to reconstruct a hypothetical Chinese original, and do not record Csongor's efforts, either. Readers whose idle curiosity has not been disciplined by a lifetime of philological scholarship may if they wish consult Csongor's speculations on p. 39 of the article cited. In fact it turns out that Csongor has not done badly in finding plausible equivalents both among the 16 characters of the first interpola- tion and the ten characters of the second, well enough indeed for it to be possible to discern that they are both comments relating to the analysis of the scripture put forward in a standard exegetical work on the Diamond Sutra.
This is the Chinese text of a prose comment- ary ascribed to Vasubandhu and translated in 603, Taisho Canon number 1510, in volume XXV. Consultation of this source allows there- fore the restitution of the two interpolations with some degree of assurance, as follows:
It is reassuring to find that these remarks derive from the tradition of academic comment- ary, rather than reflect liturgical instructions. The one uncertainty about this source which appears to have been discounted by all who have worked on the document is that the text could have been transcribed for liturgical purposes (a likely enough hypothesis, since sound rather than sense seems to be in question), and that therefore liturgical practice (either in Khotan, China, or both) could have influenced pronunciation, with the result that we may not be able to take it for granted that normal speech is always accurately reflected in the transcription. This admittedly slight but still marginally worrying possibility is not in fact eliminated by the identification of the interpolations, since P.2133 verso, a roughly contemporary popular exposition of the same scripture in Chinese, likewise draws on the same Vasubandhu commentary for its analysis, but at the same time seems to envisage the chanting of the text between expository remarks. But such trivial addenda and reserva- tions brought forward by this reviewer do not, of course, affect in any way the sterling value of the scholarship contained in the monograph under review, which stands as an altogether laudable testimony to the longstanding efforts of both authors to bridge the artificial gap within our current academic studies between research on the culture of China and on that of Central Asia, at all times so closely inter- twined, yet so rarely studied in conjunction.
