Encyclopedia of India–China Cultural Contacts v1.c8.17

v1.c8.17

During this period, the Chinese scholars had also developed some understanding of the Indian phonology in the course of translation of the Buddhist scriptures. Dharmaraksa (vide the entry) had translated the Lalitavistara Sutra (Pu Yao jing) in eight volumes in the second year of the reign of Yong Jia ie, in 308 CE, and Jnanagupta (vide the entry) translated the *Sutra of Buddha's Fundamental Deeds* in 60 volumes during the 7ᵗʰ to 12ᵗʰ year of the reign of Kai Huang i.e., from 587-592 CE. It may be noted that the account offered by them on the 'Sixty-four scripts (shu)' was actually a reference to the 64 kinds of Chinese characters and it talks about 'Qin Shu' or the Qin script (written as 'Cina-lipi', namely the Chinese calligraphy). This shows that the ancient Indians had also, by that time, noticed the unique features of the Chinese language and characters. Further, the 26th volume of *Mahisasaka Vinaya* (《Wu fen Lu》), which was translated during the first half of the 5th century CE, mentions the fundamentals of Sanskrit grammar, such as long and short vowels, the voiced and the voiceless features of the consonants, gender and number features of nouns and the tense aspects of the verbs, etc. The fifth volume of *Mahanirvana Sutra* (《Da Nie Pan-jing》) further talks about Indian grammar, the Vyakarana-sastra (《Pi jia luo lun》), which had attracted much attention from Chinese scholars like Xie Lingyun (385-433 CE) and Shen Yue (441~513 CE). Both of these two scholars had thus, for the first time, made an intensive study on phonology and written much about this subject. Their contribution towards the growth of Chinese phonology is noteworthy and commendable.