The “system” of transcription.

There is, however, another fact which also points to a connection between the Department of Foreign Relations and the Buddhist Church, viz. the origin of the Buddhist system of phonetic transcription.

From the earliest times the translators of Buddhist texts (and more especially the Chinese literati who wrote down the translation) had to face the problem of phonetic transcription of Indian proper names and Buddhist technical expressions by means of Chinese characters a script which by its ideographic nature was (and is) much less suited to this purpose than any alphabetical writing system would have been. In order to avoid the danger of confusion and misunderstanding (which of course would have been very great if all Chinese characters without distinction would have been used in this way), the transcribers appear to have

used a limited set of signs conventionally employed in phonetic renderings. For obvious reasons preference was given to those characters which seldom occurred in normal written Chinese (such as 薩, 闐, 鞮, 伊, 曇 etc.). But on the other hand, quite common signs like 山, 尸, 于, 門, 車, and 沙 are frequently found in Buddhist transcriptions. We can hardly speak of a “system of transcription” for the earliest period; the foreign words, transposed into Chinese phonological

patterns, are broken up at random into syllable units, each of which is rendered by one of these signs. One Chinese syllable may be written in various ways (*,zâän: 善, 膳, 鄯, 禪, 饍, 繟; *b’u®t: 軷, 鈸, 颶, 跋), and may stand for a great variety of foreign sounds (b’u®, 婆 or 陂: va, v®, p®, b®, pha, bh®, vat, vajra, ava, upa, sph®, etc.). The transcriptions of the individual words are not yet standardized (buddha: *b’jűu.d’uo 浮屠, id. 浮圖, *b’jűu.d’±u 浮頭, *b’ju±t ( ) 佛). But both in most ancient phonetic renderings and in the highly developed and normalized transcription systems of much later times we nd the same marked tendency to use a certain restricted number of characters for transcriptions purposes, a conventional set of signs which could be used as phonetical symbols without semantic value.

However, it is a notable fact that this primitive transcription system was not a Buddhist invention at all; it can already be traced in secular literature from Former Han times. We nd it applied in the Accounts of the Western Regions (Xiyu zhuan) of the Hanshu and Hou-Han shu which together contain some two hundred foreign words (mainly geographical names) in transcription. More than eighty percent of the characters which are used phonetically in these texts more than one

time (viz. 77 out of 93) consists of signs which regularly occur in “Buddhist” phonetic renderings. The great number of rather exceptional characters which are thus shared by secular and Buddhist transcriptions proves that coincidence is out of the question; we must conclude that the Buddhist transcribers made use of an existing rudimenta ry system for rendering foreign sounds. We cannot give a satisfactory explan ation for this fact, but one possible clue as to its origin may be found in the activities of the Department of Foreign Relations.

We do not know in any detail what kind of administrative work was done in Han times at the Honglu bureau in dealing with foreign nations and with foreigners on Chinese soil. It is, however, certain that there were several interpreters in its sta112 and it is quite probable that here, in this administra tive sphere, the rst attempts were made to normalize the transcription of foreign names, especially in the last decades of the second century BC, the period of the rst

Chinese expansion on the continent and of the establishment of Chinese military and administrative centres in the Western regions. It may also be remarked that at all these centres a considerable number of interpreters were employed by the Chinese residents; the existence of (Chinese?) “directors of interpreters” (釋長) is attested in Former Han times in no less than twenty-three Chinese headquarters in Central Asia.113 It remains obscure how the transcription system developed in Chinese government circles (and most probably at the Department of Foreign Relations) came to be used by Buddhist translators.