再論佛教漢語研究的主要任務和基本方法

文章介紹了筆者對佛教漢語研究的主要任務和基本方法的最新看法。具有鮮明的漢外混合特徵的佛教漢語，是我們了解語言接觸對漢語歷史演變影響的不可多得的珍貴資料，其在漢語歷史的研究中最重要的學術價值正在於此。因此，在漢語歷史語言學框架下所進行的佛教漢語研究的主要任務就是了解印度佛教的傳入，佛經的大量翻譯，對漢語的歷史演變究竟造成了什麼樣的影響。為了達成這個目標，具體的研究重點一是找出漢譯佛經中來自原典的任何語言成分，二是弄清它們在後世非佛教語言中的使用情況。從方法論的角度來說，將譯文與平行的原典語文進行對勘，應是佛教漢語研究最基本的方法。
This article, written for the keynote speech in IACL 20 held in 2012, tried to convey our new understanding about the main tasks and methodology of the Buddhist Chinese Studies, a relatively new area of the Chinese historical linguistics focusing on the language of Chinese translation of Indian Buddhist texts and its varieties. In 1990, the author discussed firstly in his Ph.D. dissertation what the Buddhist Chinese or Buddhist Hybrid Chinese was, and how we could study the Buddhist Chinese. It signaled the creation of the Buddhist Chinese Studies as a relatively independent branch in Chinese historical linguistics. Frankly speaking, at that time, we were aware that this language was not only a pure written language but also not a pure Chinese because of two hybridizations, however, we did not know much about it in details. During past twenty two years, besides author, more and more scholars, especially younger generation had contributed their wisdom and talents to the study and achieved a lot. So it is time to do further discussing on the issue of main task of Buddhist Chinese Studies and the methodology used in the research.
As we knew, the most significant feature of the Buddhist Chinese was its two types of mixture, the mixture of the target language with elements of the source language, and the mixture of the spoken language with elements from written language. The mixture of the target language with source language elements meant that, while Buddhist Chinese was undoubtedly a variety of Chinese language, it contained many non-Chinese elements, which came from Middle Indic and some Central Asian languages in the early period and later from Sanskrit. Obviously, the Buddhist Chinese was the product of the language contact between ancient Chinese and Indo-European languages. It was argued in this paper that the most important research value of Buddhist Chinese was to find out how the language contact impacted the course of the historical evolution of Chinese language. There were so many new or special elements in Buddhist Chinese and we could guess some came from source languages. Therefore, the tracing-back to their sources was very much needed. Moreover, if their Indian original were confirmed, we had to find out their whereabouts in non-Buddhist Chinese. From this point of view, the most impactful tool to do Buddhist Chinese Studies was to compare Chinese translations with their parallels in Indian language. Copyright © 2017 中華書局(香港)有限公司.