Scribal Notation in Medieval Chinese Manuscripts: The hewen ...

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8GALAMBOS | SCRIBAL NOTATIONFig. 3: Section of manuscriptOr.8210/S.1547 showing the use ofthe repetition mark. The characters in the first line and inthe second are repeatedFig. 4: Repetition marks for multi-character chongwenA: Or.8210/S.2067 B: 80TBI:009 C: Or.8210/S.116pearance, it remained practically unchanged, as abundantlymanifested in the Dunhuang and Turfan corpora.Principally speaking, there are two kinds of chongwen:single and multiple ones. In the first type, only one characteris repeated, whereas in the latter two or more. Whilethis may seem a trivial distinction, the notation for these inactual usage was somewhat different. The single characterrepetition is simply marked by a small mark in place ofthe second character. This mark was sometimes written asor , and probably derived from the pre-Qin chongwenmark. Nevertheless, the form is by far the most commonin Dunhuang and Turfan. An important difference betweenearly and medieval usage was that, in the latter, the mark wasplaced within the main text, in place of the omitted secondcharacter. In this way, the repetition mark occupied a fullcharacter space.Or.8210/S.1547, for example, is a manuscript of theChengshilun (*) dated to 512 AD.At the very end of the scroll, we find the following two sentences(given below in modern punctuation):Such a man is like a fire burning the firewood: once the firewoodis exhausted, it will become extinguished; this man isalso like this; because he receives no more, he becomes extinguished.If he extinguishes the three minds, he will attaineternal liberation from all sufferings.chongwen:first the character and then a bit later the character . Ineach case, the second characte r is omitted and a mark isplaced in its stead (Fig. 3). Although the characters do notform a single unit in the text grammatically (i.e. , or ) and, in a modern punctuated transcription, are separatedfrom each other by a comma or a period, this did not stop themedieval scribe from applying the chongwen device purelybased on their physical adjacency.In multi-character repetition, the chongwen mark is placedeither underneath the character or at its lower right corner. Anexample of the former usage is Or.8210/S.2067 (Fig. 4/A)where the characters (indescribable or unspeakable)are repeated in the phrase indescribable and indescribablemyriads of sentient beings . What makesthis case different from the single chongwen seen above is thatthe three characters are to be read together and only then repeatedas a string. At least theoretically, it would be possibleto read them repeated one by one as but thiswould produce a meaningless string of characters. Therefore,the context is used by the reader for disambiguation.manuscript cultures NEWSLETTER N O 2
GALAMBOS | SCRIBAL NOTATION9The other way of marking multi-character chongwen canbe seen on manuscript 80TBI:009 discovered in Turfan (Fig.4/B), where the device is marked with a slanted double dashunderneath the lower right corner of the character. The sectionshown on the picture contains two such cases: in the firstline, we find Buddha’s habitual exclamation (Excellent, excellent!’); and in the third line, thewords (‘monks and nuns’) arewritten with the characters marked as having to be readtwice. This latter case is a wonderful example to show thatthe chongwen device is completely unrelated to the grammaticalstructure of the text and it relies solely on the physicalposition (i.e. adjacency) of characters. In other words,chongwen appears to be concerned only with characters, notwords or sentences.In addition, the doubled chongwen mark is sometimeswritten as a single slanted stroke, as can be seen in manuscriptOr.8210/S.116 (Fig. 4/C), where the word niepan () is marked in this way. In this particular case,the repeated word occurs at the end of one sentence andthe beginning of another: ‘This is why it is called the Great. In there is no pleasure...’ . In the first sentence, the word is actually ‘Great’is semantically not completely parallel. In this respect, thisusage is similar to that of the words (‘monks and nuns’).Looking through concrete examples of chongwen, it is apparentthat the device was optional in medieval manuscripts.Even in documents where it occurs, there are places of oftenidentical context where it is not used and the characters are‘spelled out’ in their full form. In fact, there are fewer caseswhere chongwen is used than where it is not—it is rather anexception than the norm.REFERENCESHong Mai (1978), (Shanghai:Shanghai guji chubanshe).Huang Zheng (2005), (Shanghai: Shanghai jiaoyu chubanshe).Lowe, Elias Avery (1980), South Italian miniscule (Roma: Edizioni di storia e letteratura).Qiu Xigui (1992a), ‘Jiaguwen zhong chongwen he hewenchongfu pianpang de shenglue’ ‘’, in Qiu Xigui, . (Beijing:Zhonghua shuju), 141–146.–––– (1992b), ‘Zai tan jiaguwen zhong chongwen de shenglue’ ‘, in Qiu Xigui, (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju), 147–150.Shanxi sheng wenwu gongzuo weiyuanhui (1976) (ed.), Houma mengshu (Shanghai: Wenwu).Shen, Baochun (2002), ‘Xi Zhou jinwen chongwen xianxiangtanjiu: yi “Yinxu jinwen jicheng” guilei chongwen wei li’: “”’ , 24: 307–11.Wu Zhenwu (1989), ‘Guxi hewen kao (shiba pian)’ ' 17: 268–281.Xinjiang Weiwu’er Zizhiqu Tulufanxue yanjiuyuan , Wuhan daxue zhongguo san zhijiu shiji yanjiusuo (2007)(eds.), (Beijing: Wenwu).SummaryThe use of hewen and chongwen devices in medieval manuscriptsis interesting from the point of view of the transmissionof scribal practices in Chinese history. While the hewenin the medieval corpus shows no similarity to Warring Statesusage, chongwen remains a common phenomenon and ismarked in a similar way as it was fifteen hundred years earlier.This observation is significant because we do not haveany evidence that such scribal techniques would have beentaught. They are certainly absent from the linguistic treatises,dictionaries and primers describing some of the more obviousfeatures of the script (correct character forms, variants,etc). Therefore, the analogous use of the chongwen deviceand its similar notation arguably demonstrate a direct continuitybetween pre-Qin and Tang-Song manuscript culture.Picture credits:Fig. 1: Tracing from Shanxi 1976: 264.Fig. 2: International Dunhuang Project (http://idp.bl.uk),Or.8210/S.238. Copyright of the British Library.Fig. 3: International Dunhuang Project (http://idp.bl.uk),Or.8210/S.1547. Copyright of the British Library.Fig. 4: Images A and C are from International Dunhuang Project(http://idp.bl.uk), shelfmarks Or.8210/S.2067 and Or.8210/S.116.Copyright of the British Library. Image C is from the publicationXinjiang 2007: 11.NEWSLETTER N O 2manuscript cultures
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