Encyclopedia of India–China Cultural Contacts v1.c8.s3.t4.1

v1.c8.s3.t4.1

Shouwen (守温) was a Buddhist monk and Chinese phonologist of the period of the Five Dynasties of the late Tang era. According to the information contained in the work of *Jade Sea*, 'Shouwen wrote a book entitled *Chart of Thirty Six Alphabets*, which is also otherwise known as *Shou Wen’s Thirty Six Alphabets*. The original work of Shouwen is believed to have been lost long back. However, its fragments are still available in the Dunhuang cave. From page 2012 of the *Dunhuang Collection*, a text titled *Records of Monk Shou Wen in the Southern Liang Dynasty* has been discovered. The introduction of the fragments of that record offers a list of the labial sounds (such as bu, fang, bing and ming), lingual sounds (duan, tou, ding and ni were tongued sounds; zhi, che, cheng and ri as retroflex sounds), glottal sounds (such as jian, jun, xi, qun, lai and ning, etc.), dental sounds (such as jing, qing and cong further sub-categorised as tip-toothed sounds and shen, chuan, chan and zhao as conical-toothed sounds), and guttural sounds (such as xin, xie and xiao, further sub-classified as unvoiced guttural sounds and xia, yu and ying as voiced guttural sounds). These alphabets differed from the *Thirty Six Alphabets of Shou Wen* which were seen in extant literature sparsely. Some scholars thought that the 'thirty six alphabets' of the Song Dynasty were the same as those of Shouwen's '36 alphabets'. These alphabets were used to represent the initials of the pronunciation of the Chinese characters. Thus, the ideas and method to use some representative characters to show different sound categories was inspired by Sanskrit letters. However, the work titled *Shou Wen's Fragments of Rhymes* was an important piece of literature to study phonology of the Tang Dynasty which reflected information on speech sounds of the northwestern part of Tang rule. Although Shouwen was not the first scholar to talk about letters (alphabets) in the comparative context of the Sanskrit and Chinese languages yet his contribution in the notation of Chinese characters was immense, and the influence of Sanskrit linguistic works on the growth of Chinese phonological study has been quite significant.