On the origin of the term "hanzi"

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[This is a guest post by Nicholas Morrow Williams]

I recently came across this article on the first occurrence of hanzi 漢字 ("Chinese character; Han character; Sinogram; Japanese: kanji; Korean: hanja; Vietnamese: hán tự/chữ hán漢字/漢"):
 
Wang Yong 王勇. "'Kanji' tanjō no isseki: 'bonzi' kara 'kanji' e" 「漢字」誕生の一齣――「梵字」から「漢字」へ.
Bukkyō shigaku kenkyū (The Journal of the History of Buddhism), 56.1 (2013): 1-11.
 

It's obvious when you think about it, but of course there was originally no need to write the word hanzi when Chinese characters were the only game in town, writing-wise. Wang first refers to some earlier identifications of the earliest use of hanzi dating to the Song (960-1279) or Yuan (1271-1368), and then points out that the Japanese monk-scholars Kūkai 空海 (774-835) and Saichō 最澄 767-822) seem to have used it in their works, though the details are a bit complex. The clearest single usage seems to be in a text completed by Saichō in 818, entitled the Jugokoku kaishō 守護国界章. But then Wang further points out the Fànyǔ qiānzì wén 梵語千字文 by Yijing 義浄 (635-713), which explains in its introduction that it uses hanzi in correspondence to each Sanskrit letter. The overall point is clear: the term hanzi first came into common usage among Tang-era (618-907) monks as it was required to distinguish Chinese writing from Sanskrit. This insight does not seem to have been incorporated into all the standard reference works yet (my Hanyu da cidian identifies the earliest usage in the Song).

I see a few lessons to draw from this. First, this is a subtle example of the extraordinarily broad impact of Buddhism on medieval Chinese culture. Unlike, say, a statue of Guanyin 觀音 (Avalokiteśvara), the word hanzi doesn't have anything obviously Indic about it, and yet it turns out in its own way to be a side-effect of the arrival of Buddhism.

Second, this is a reminder of the general principle that dictionaries are only a starting point for research and rarely contain the full story. This was drilled into us frequently during my graduate training at the University of Washington.

And finally, for these monks hanzi was a slightly pejorative term indicating something secondary and inferior, since Chinese writing was one step further removed from the Buddha's teachings than Siddham or other ways of writing Sanskrit. This is one good reason to be wary of the term Sinosphere: for some of the key figures involved, Sinitic writing itself belonged to the periphery, not the cultural center.

 



10 Comments

  1. Victor Mair said,

    February 3, 2021 @ 9:44 am

    Diana Shuheng Zhang has been intensively studying the Fànyǔ qiānzì wén 梵語千字文 (Sanskrit Thousand Character Text) for several years. Superficially modeled after the famous Qiānzì Wén 千字文 (Thousand Character Text [aka "Classic"]) that has been widely used as a primer for teaching children basic literacy since the 6th century AD, the Sanskrit Thousand Character Text, though based on content wholly different from the original Qiānzì Wén, has important implications for Sino-Indian cultural relations during the medieval period and for the teaching and learning of Indic languages in East Asia during the past millennium. We can look forward to remarkable revelations about the Sanskrit Thousand Character Text when Diana has the opportunity to publish her research findings.

    For an account of the history and nature of the Qiānzì Wén 千字文 (Thousand Character Text [aka "Classic"]), see:

    http://www.chinaknowledge.de/Literature/Classics/qianziwen.html

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thousand_Character_Classic

  2. Frank L. Chance said,

    February 3, 2021 @ 1:57 pm

    Did the Chinese never notice in their contact with Rome, Persia, and even Greece that the people of those countries used a different writing system from their own, and that therefore they needed a designation for their writing as opposed to Roman or Greek alphabets? That contact ought to predate Buddhist contact by hundreds of years.

  3. Yong Ho said,

    February 3, 2021 @ 2:15 pm

    Dear Prof. Mair,

    Your observation "And finally, for these monks hanzi was a slightly pejorative term indicating something secondary and inferior" is very apt. I would even say the term was very pejorative, particularly during the period immediately following the Han when terms prefixed by han tended to have a pejorative meaning. I wonder if your dictionary says anything about when the word hanyu first occurred in Chinese. My understanding is that it occurred in the Northern and Southern Dynasties.

    Yong Ho

  4. Victor Mair said,

    February 3, 2021 @ 4:11 pm

    @Frank Chance

    You ask a sensible question. Nonetheless, I do not know of any indication of the awareness of pre-Buddhist authors in China making mention of another writing system qua the name of that writing system. Indeed, even though the great Song encyclopedist, Zheng Qiao (1104-1161), knew some of the details and shapes of Indic writing, he had only a partial grasp of how the writing system worked.

    See:

    "'Between the Eyes and the Ears': SPP turns 300" (7/20/20)

    https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=47719

    —–

    300 April 2020 Shuheng Zhang and Victor H. Mair
    University of Pennsylvania
    "'Between the Eyes and the Ears': Ethnic Perspective on the Development of Philological Traditions, First Millennium AD", Sino-Platonic Papers 49 pages free pdf

    http://www.sino-platonic.org/complete/spp300_zheng_qiao.pdf

    @Yong Ho:

    Also an excellent question. Yu Xin (513-581), the medieval poet, politician, and writer of the Liang and Northern Zhou dynasties, did use the expression hànyǔ 漢語 ("Han language"), but that was much after Buddhism was well established in China and Chinese people were vaguely aware of the sounds of Indic languages and the overall shapes of the scripts.

  5. Chris Button said,

    February 3, 2021 @ 11:18 pm

    Did the Chinese never notice in their contact with Rome, Persia, and even Greece that the people of those countries used a different writing system from their own …

    I think that raises a further question about when the idea of onsets (or initial consonants) as something separate from a rhyme emerged in China.

    The persistence of "hanzi" might suggest that such a concept occurred relatively late, but I think that's mistaken. It's far more likely that the concept goes all the way back to before the earliest oracle-bone inscriptions. After all, the oracle-bones represent a complex writing system founded on phonetic principles. Granted, the oracle-bone inscriptions treat syllables as whole chunks rather than breaking them into onsets and rhymes, but the way the phonetics are used in writing (e.g., allowing variations in onsets around manner of articulation but not place of articulation) seems to me to require an understanding of onsets and rhymes.

    As to why "hanzi" persisted, I suspect it has less to do with an elite wanted to keep writing from the masses, and more to do with how breaking writing up beyond syllables would violate the natural association of speech with syllables as its formative building block (consonants and vowels being an artificial–albeit useful–abstraction).

  6. Jonathan Silk said,

    February 4, 2021 @ 7:44 am

    There are a few strange things in the romanization of this discussion that I wonder about:

    bonzi > should be bonji

    Jugokoku kaishō 守護国界章 > should be Shu-

    Are these just slips, or is there some reason behind them? I ask this because there can be sectarian readings of certain terms in Japanese contexts (a famous example is Hōnen's Senchaku/jaku-hongan nembutsushū 選択本願念仏集), but by the same token, I am not even sure how I would write -zi- in Japanese script, unless one follows the Nihon-shiki romanization system, but then the rest of the romanization is off.

  7. Nathan Vedal said,

    February 4, 2021 @ 10:39 am

    This brings to mind the longstanding debate in imperial times concerning just how Indic the origins of Chinese phonological study are. Some Song scholars such as Shen Gua and Zheng Qiao asserted the fundamental influence of Sanskrit methods on Chinese phonological techniques and understandings of the nature of language. This is something my forthcoming book takes up in the context of Ming philologists, who made similar claims about the influence of Sanskrit on Chinese vocabulary and even the Chinese writing system(!). Others, particularly Qing kaozheng thinkers, maintained that these methods were already present in the pre-Buddhist tradition or alternatively that they represented a corruption of proper phonological methods.

  8. Andreas Johansson said,

    February 4, 2021 @ 4:01 pm

    @Jonathan Silk?

    Isn't that just a question of different romanization schemes? Without knowing much of anything of Japanese, I note that "zi" is the Nihon-shiki version of the syllable that Hepburn renders as "ji".

  9. Tim Lubin said,

    February 5, 2021 @ 11:58 am

    Thanks very much for sending this. I am interested to know more about what the term fàn 梵 connoted. You gloss it as “‘brahmanical’ [i.e., Sanskrit/Indic].” Given that the Chinese were exposed to such writing mainly (if not exclusively?) through Buddhist sources, I am curious to know why they would characterize the language as intrinsically connected with Brahmins. Were Brahmins conceived of as birth-status group, as a religious professional order, as a sect, and/or as a class of littérateurs representative of India? The connection of Buddhist Sanskrit with Brahmins is easier to expect within India itself, but in China too?

  10. Jonathan Silk said,

    February 5, 2021 @ 1:04 pm

    @Andreas Johansson
    You are correct, and I wrote that in the last line. But, if that were being followed then the rest of the title is wrong = does not follow this system: 「漢字」誕生の一齣――「梵字」から「漢字」へ. = kanzi tanzyō isseki… …

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