ZAMORSKI, Jakub, Assistant Professor, Centre for Comparative Studies of Civilisations, Jagiellonian University.
關鍵詞
Kiben; eight cases; Hossō school; Buddhist hermeneutics; Edo period
摘要
The present article is a preliminary study of a little known treatise called Kango hattenshō gakusoku 漢語八囀聲學則 (Guidelines for Studying the Eight Cases of the Chinese Language) written by Kiben (基辨,1718-1792), a scholarly priest of the Japanese Buddhist Hossō school. The concept of “eight cases” is derived from medieval Chinese accounts of Sanskrit grammar where it refers to the patterns of noun declension. However, Kiben did not apply this category to Sanskrit, but rather to literary Chinese (kango 漢語), the language of Buddhist sutras and doctrinal treatises studied by contemporaneous Japanese monks. Whereas this idea may appear questionable from a linguistic point of view, Kiben’s treatise deserves attention as the product of a well-established intellectual tradition rooted in the historical context of early modern Japan. The present article aims to make clear why someone working within this tradition decided to turn to ancient Indian grammatical theory in a creative way that appears so unusual. It will attempt to extract the author’s main argument from the philological technicalities in which it is seated and to analyse it from the viewpoint of intellectual history—namely, the inspirations Kiben received from his predecessors, his polemical targets, and the reactions of his target audience. It is argued that Kiben regarded the eight cases as universal categories common to all languages and believed that knowledge of these categories could aid Japanese exegetes in reconstructing the true meaning of the Chinese texts they studied. In this way he related the study of grammar to some of the most important intellectual trends of his age: the development of distinctly Japanese methods of philological inquiry into Chinese texts and of distinctly Japanese interpretations of the shared East Asian tradition. For this reason, this obscure work represents a remarkable attempt at “domesticating” the Indian tradition of linguistics in the intellectual setting of early modern East Asia.
