Chinese Buddhist exegesis=中國佛教注疏; Sanskrit studies in China=中國梵語學; Chinese grammatical studies=中國文法學; Kuiji=窺基
摘要
The purpose of this article a preliminary study aiming to demonstrate how the medieval indigenous Chinese Buddhist literature, especially the Buddhist exegeses, could contribute to our understanding of the grammatical knowledge of the medieval Chinese Buddhist scholarly monks in particular, and to the overall picture of the premodern Chinese grammatical studies in general. Much ink has been spilled on the important influences of the Chinese translation of Buddhist texts （漢譯佛典）on the development and innovation of Chinese language, so much so that the “Chinese language” of these translated texts has been regarded as a distinct type of Chinese language known as the “Buddhist hybrid Chinese”（佛教混合漢語）1. Rather than embarking this trend of study, this paper takes a different source and undertakes a different kind of research: instead of the Chinese translation of Buddhist texts, it studies the indigenous writings by the Chinese Buddhist exegetes and studies their grammatical accounts and understanding. Admittedly, the subject matter of their discussion is Sanskrit grammar, but the fact that the target language of their grammatical analysis and application is Chinese gives us an unusual opportunity otherwise unavailable for studying an alternative Chinese grammatical knowledge outside of the traditional sinology. Although a few scholars such as Zhou Yiliang 周一良, Lu Cheng 呂瀓, R. van Gulik, C. Harbsmeier, have begun to address this subject, but their findings that ancient Chinese scholarly monks were either uninterested or ignorant in Sanskrit grammar are, in my view, oversimplified and inaccurate. This article will also serve as a corrective to such findings.
