A Buddhist Chinese Glossary/Buddhistisch-Chinesisches Glossar by Konrad Meisig and Marion Meisig, and: A Lexicographical Study of An Shigao’s and His Circle’s Chinese Translations of Buddhist Texts by Tilmann Vetter (review)

KONRAD MEISIG and MARION MEISIG, A Buddhist Chinese Glossary/BuddhistischChinesisches Glossar. East Asia Intercultural Studies/Interkulturelle Ostasienstudien, vol. 6. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2012. xxvi, 259 pp. J38.00 CD-ROM. ISBN 978-3-447-06668-6 TILMANN VETTER, A Lexicographical Study of An Shigao’s and His Circle’s Chinese Translations of Buddhist Texts. Studia Philologica Buddhica Monograph Series, vol. 28. Tokyo: The International Institute for Buddhist Studies, 2012. 344 pp. ¥1200.00 (pbk). ISBN 978-4-906267-66-8 The works to be introduced here are two highly innovative studies produced by scholars of Indian studies lexicographically investigating the meaning of Chinese Buddhist terms. Both studies define particular Chinese Buddhist texts as the basis for their analysis. Konrad and Marion Meisig mainly base themselves on Chinese Buddhist texts that came into being between the fourth and the sixth century AD. Tilmann Vetter looks at Chinese translations of Indian Buddhist texts ascribed to An Shigao 安世高 (active ca. 147–168 AD) and his circle. On their CD-ROM, Konrad and Marion Meisig present the entire text of their work within one pdf file. Compared to a printed edition, the advantage is that the e-text is fully searchable, which makes it easier to retrieve information. The work consists of an introduction and a glossary. The introduction first discusses how Buddhist Chinese, being a language designed for the translation of Indian texts, differs from traditional Chinese language usage (pp. iii–iv). Subsequently, the introduction defines the objectives for the glossary (pp. v–vi), explains how the lemmata in the glossary are structured (pp. vi–viii), and provides a list of bibliographical references the glossary works with (pp. ix–xxvi). In defining the objectives for the glossary, the authors stress in particular the need for a reference work on Buddhist Chinese that does not only explain terms, but also names source material in which the term can be found, enabling a verification of the proposed explanation. The authors remark that major standard works on Buddhist Chinese such as Soothill’s Dictionary of Chinese Buddhist Terms, Nakamura’s Bukky ogo Daijiten, Hirakawa’s Buddhist Chinese-Sanskrit Dictionary, and Muller’s Digital Dictionary of Buddhism do not commonly provide source references. Konrad and Marion Meisig in their glossary provide references based on the edition of sources in the Taish o tripit : aka. As they explain, the current glossary, containing roughly four thousand lemmata, cannot yet fully cover the vast vocabulary of Buddhist Chinese; it is instead intended to be a basis for a dictionary of Buddhist Chinese, which will appear at a later date. The period between the fourth and the sixth century AD was the formative period of Chinese Buddhism within which a great multitude of Indian Buddhist texts was translated into Chinese, leading to the development of a Chinese Buddhist vocabulary. Konrad and Marion Meisig have chosen a selection of representative texts mostly from this time frame, which they evaluate as source material for the glossary. The selection includes (1) Chinese translations of various s utras and  agamas, (2) Chinese translations of various avad anas, and (3) didactic and missionary literature. From these texts, Konrad and Marion Meisig extracted most of the vocabulary presented in the glossary. As some of those texts have already been studied, Konrad and Marion Meisig can also refer to relevant BOOK REVIEWS 71 research in many of the glossary entries. The authors admit that the glossary also contains a small number of terms for which no source among the selected texts could be found, and which could only be translated according to definitions in other dictionaries of Buddhist Chinese. The entries in the glossary are arranged according to the common radical order. Each entry begins with a numeric figure defining the first character of the term discussed. First, the figure names the character’s radical number, and after a comma it names the number of strokes in the remaining part of the character. Subsequent to this figure, entries provide information in the following order: (1) term in Chinese characters, (2) term in Pinyin, (3) term in Wade-Giles, (4) translations of the term into both German and English, (5) (if available) Sanskrit or P ali equivalents, (6) (if available...