“The Major Modern Study”

HUANG, Cuibo (or Quebo).

Huilin yi qie jing yin yi fan qie kao [Textual Research on the Sounds & Meanings of Huilin’s Sutra].

2 p.l., 217, [2] folding leaves. Seven juan in one vol. 8vo, orig. printed wrappers, orig. stitching. Shanghai & Beijing: Institute of History and Philology, Academia Sinica, 1931.

First edition of “the major modern study” (W. South Coblin) of the classic Buddhist phonological work Yiqiejing yinyi [Sounds & Meanings of All the Buddhist Scriptures] of Huilin (737-820). He was “a monk of Xi Ming Temple in Chang’an (today’s Xi’an, Shanxi Province)…He had a profound knowledge of Indian philology and exegetic studies. It is recorded that he started to write Sounds and Meanings of All the Buddhist Scriptures in 788 and finished it in 810…It has 100 volumes, covering 31,000 entries and the characters individually treated came to 6,000 in total. The words and phrases interpreted and notated in the book are cited from over 5,700 volumes of the 1,300 different Buddhist scriptures, with a total of about 600,000 characters in size. In order to notate and interpret the sound and meaning of the character in Buddhist scriptures, he has broadly cited from various ancient rhyme dictionaries…It is a huge masterpiece of notation and interpretation of the sounds and meanings of characters in Buddhist scriptures — exhaustively embracing the ancient exegetic interpretations, phonetically noting the Sanskrit classics — and it is broad in collection and rich in content.”–Yong & Peng, Chinese Lexicography. A History from 1046 BC to AD 1911 (Oxford, 2008), p. 220.

Huang (1899-1970), trained at the Academia Sinica and was professor of Chinese at Nanjing University, specializing in Chinese phonology, philology, poetry, and history. In this work, Huang uses the fanqie system to study Huilin’s work.

Fine copy, preserved in a hantao.

❧ W. South Coblin, “A Compendium of Phonetics in Northwest Chinese” in Journal of Chinese Linguistics Monograph Series (1994), No. 7, p. 22.

Price: $1,500.00

Item ID: 7825