Sanskrit in China and Japan

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In the very beginning I want to express my sincere gratitude to Prof. Victor H. Mair of the University of Pennsylvania for permitting me to bring out "in whatever form I wish" this enlarged version of my earlier work Siddham in China and Japan that appeared in his Sino-Platonic Papers as its eighty-eighth issue. The scope of this work was restricted to the area of linguistics. Prof. Mair sent me articles covering other areas of exchanges. I have added these as well as other areas in my present book.

China in the early years of the Christian era was a highly literate society surrounded by illiterate barbarians. The Buddhist monks from the west were the first literate group they encountered in their midst, and this encounter opened up a totally new vista before them. Some Chinese intellectuals assisted the monks in translating the scripture, and they were the first to become aware of the phonetic script. It was a very novel idea for the Chinese whose pictographic script. called characters, gave the meaning and not the reading. They were struggling hard around that time to find a method to record the readings of their characters that numbered in thousands. In a phonetic script, a grasp of a limited number of symbols, called alphabets, is enough to read any text. This is not so in the case of Chinese. One had to learn the reading of a character from somebody. There was no alphabet-like way to know the reading of a character independently as in the case of the phonetic script. Again, the readings of the characters were not standardised. They varied from region to region, and also with the passing of time. The linguistic information embodied in the Sanskrit letters helped the Chinese to study their characters from a linguistic angle, and ultimately they evolved forty-four tables that allowed them to read their characters independently, without any help. These forty-four tables served the function of alphabets for the Chinese characters. A look at these tables readily betrays their Sanskrit root. In Japan, Sanskrit helped the Japanese to evolve their native phonetic script, and arrange them in the Sanskrit alphabetic order. The works on Sanskrit by Japanese scholars are the earliest records of linguistic information of the Japanese language.