A Primer in Chinese Buddhist Writings

Each Chinese character is pronounced with a single syllable. Words can, however, be composed with more than one character. For example, the word for “disciple,” dìzi 弟子 is composed of the two characters dì 弟 and zi 子. In archaic Chinese, words composed of two or more characters were relatively few. From medieval times to the present they have become increasingly common.

There are various styles of writing characters. The earliest Chinese characters are those found on the oracle bones, dating to ca. 1500 B.C. Discovered by scholars only in the twentieth century, these characters are quite different from later Chinese and are only decipherable by specialists. In contrast, from circa 200BC on, the way characters are written has changed relatively little. An educated Chinese person with minimal training can recognize the characters in most medieval manuscripts, even if he or she doesn’t understand the overall meaning of the text.¹

The standard division of characters into different types is that first proposed by Xǔ Shèn 許慎 in his dictionary of Chinese, the Shuōwén jiězì 說文解字 (Explanations of Graphs and Analysis of Characters) at the beginning of the second century. He proposed six types of characters:

1. zhǐ shì 指事, “pointing to things.” These are characters that symbolize ideas, e.g. xià 下 for “down” and shàng 上 for “up”.
2. xiàng xíng 象形, “imitating shapes.” These are words that derive from pictograms like rì 日 “sun” and yuè 月, “moon”.
3. xíng shēng 形聲, “form and sound.” Characters that combine two graphs, one representing the sound and one the meaning. For example, in the word kǎo 烤, “to roast,” the part on the left 火 means fire; the part on the right 考 has nothing to do with the meaning, representing instead the sound of the character.
4. huì yì 會意, “combined meanings.” For example míng 明 combines sun (rì 日) and moon (yuè 月) and means “bright.”
5. zhǔan zhù 轉注, “transferred notation,” an obscure category for words with similar meaning written with similar graphs.
6. jiǎ jiè 假借, “borrowing,” where a character is used for another of the same or similar sound.

For practical purposes, these categories are not particularly useful for learning characters; they do, however, illustrate that Chinese characters are not simple pictograms. When first learning characters, some students invent their own folk etymologies as a mnemonic device. Some use flashcards, and others go over lists. Since many elements of characters are repeated in different characters, the more characters you know, the easier they are to memorize. The most difficult phase of learning characters is the first.

Each Chinese character has been assigned a “radical.”² This is an element of the character (or in some cases the character as a whole) that can be used to find the character in a dictionary. As on-line dictionaries and digital resources become more common, allowing the reader to cut and paste unknown characters into an on-line dictionary, radicals will become less important for finding characters.

In the second part of the course you will be given instruction in the use of dictionaries. For the first part you will be given glossaries designed especially for this course. None the less, you may want to experiment with on-line dictionaries (links provided separately) which are easy enough to use. Since the texts for this class are available here, you can cut and paste them into on-line dictionaries relatively easily.

Notes

1. There are exceptions. Medieval manuscripts (in particular epigraphy) makes frequent use of unusual forms for characters that are only recognized by specialists.
2. Today, the most common list of radicals consists of 214 radicals, laid out in a dictionary compiled at the behest of the eighteenth-century emperor Kangxi 康熙. For a complete list, see http://www.yellowbridge.com/chinese/radicals.php.