- Tenrei Banshō Meigi
The is the oldest extant
Japanese dictionary ofChinese characters . The title is also written 篆隷万象名義 with the modern graphic variant "ban" (万 "10,000; myriad") for "ban" (萬 "10,000; myriad").The prominent
Heian Period monk and scholarKūkai , founder of theShingon Buddhism, edited his "Tenrei banshō meigi" around 830-835 CE, and based it upon the (circa 543 CE) Chinese "Yupian " dictionary. Among theTang Dynasty Chinese books that Kūkai brought back to Japan in 806 CE was an original edition "Yupian" and a copy of the (121 CE) "Shuowen Jiezi ". One of theNational treasures of Japan held at theKōzan-ji temple is an 1114 copy of the "Tenrei banshō meigi".The Chinese "Yupian" dictionary defines 12,158 characters under a system of 542 radicals ("bùshǒu" ), which slightly modified the original 540 in the "Shuowen jiezi". The Japanese "Tenrei banshō meigi" defines approximately 1,000 "
kanji " (Chinese characters), under 534 radicals ("bu" ), with a total of over 16,000 characters. Each entry gives the Chinese character in ancient seal script, Chinese pronunciation infanqie , and definition, all copied from the "Yupian". The American Japanologist Don Bailey writes:At the time of its compilation, calligraphic style and the Chinese readings and meanings of the characters were probably about all that was demanded of a dictionary, so that the "Tenrei banshō meigi" suited the scholarly needs of the times. It was compiled in Japan by a Japanese but is in no sense a Japanese dictionary, for it contains not one "Wakun" (Japanese reading). (1960:3)
In modern terms, this dictionary gives borrowedon'yomi "Sino-Japanese readings" but not nativekun'yomi "Japanese readings". A later Heian dictionary, the (898-901 CE) "Shinsen Jikyō " was the first to include Japanese readings.Ikeda Shoju has studied the conversion of
JIS encoding toUnicode in order to create an online "Tenrei banshō meigi".References
*Bailey, Don Clifford. (1960). "Early Japanese Lexicography". "Monumenta Nipponica" 16:1-52.
*Mori Shiten 林史典. (1996). "篆隷万象名義 ("Tenrei banshō meigi")." In "Nihon jisho jiten" 日本辞書辞典 ("The Encyclopedia of Dictionaries Published in Japan"), Okimori Takuya 沖森卓也, et al., eds., pp. 196-197. Tokyo: Ōfū. ISBN 4-273-02890-5External links
* [http://homepage3.nifty.com/shikeda/kkg178.html A Database for Tenrei-Bansho-Meigi 篆隷万象名義データベース] , Ikeda Shoju 池田証寿 (in Japanese)
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