Xuanzangs Leben und Werk: Lexikalische Untersuchungen zur uigurischen Xuanzang-Biographie

Alexander Leonhard Mayer & K. Röhrborn, eds.

Xuanzangs Leben und Werk: Lexikalische Untersuchungen zur uigurischen Xuanzang-Biographie

Xuanzang (600 - 664 AD) is one of the most important figures of Buddhism, whose travelogue about India and Central Asia (Da Tang Xiyu ji) was widely celebrated. At the same time he is the most important translator of Chinese Buddhism, unique in accuracy and reliability. Xuanzang's journey formed the basis of biographical work on him. In the introductory sections of Ablet Semet's study, this translation is presented and new material on the origin of the so-called "large handwriting" of the Old Turkish text is made known. The Old Turkish Xuanzang biography deals with topics from very different areas of life and has a very differentiated vocabulary not found in other Old Turkish texts. The comparison with the Chinese original enables the semantic clarification of many rare Old Turkish lexemes. For this purpose, the author has selected contexts in which a single Chinese character and a single Uighur designation, both with clearly recognizable symbols, are confronted. This is a largely new procedure that the author also applies to the Chinese formal words that have only one grammatical meaning. This study is an important step in researching the Chinese influence on the Uighur language and culture.

2005