1962 I graduated from the Chinese Department of Nankai University and was admitted to the graduate school of Sichuan University, majoring in literature of the Tang and Song Dynasties in the Six Dynasties. At that time, my research object was the world-class great poets who emerged during the highly developed feudal society and culture in China. I have been fascinated by the immortal works of these great poets since I was a child, and I have a strong interest in the ancient culture of China.
The "Cultural Revolution" interrupted my research plan. I was assigned to a military reclamation farm for two years, and then I worked as a middle school teacher for ten years. An accidental opportunity turned me to a new research field.
From 65438 to 0976, I was seconded from a middle school to a Chinese dictionary writing group, and soon received a task: to extract the example sentences needed to write a dictionary from Dunhuang variant anthology. In this way, I first came into contact with a large number of popular literary works of the Tang and Five Dynasties found in the Tibetan Sutra Cave in Dunhuang at the beginning of this century. I marvel at and admire the profoundness of Tang literature from my heart. Just as the great writers in the Tang Dynasty pushed poetry and ancient prose to an unprecedented peak, there are countless unknown writers in the folk who are creating brand-new popular literature styles, such as various genres of singing literature, ballads and vernacular poems. The new literary thoughts they represented eventually developed into the mainstream in the second half of China's literary history. However, these popular literary works, which were created and loved by the people at that time, are far from being appreciated and accepted by the people today. Even among specialized classical literature researchers, there are always differences and misunderstandings about them.
There is a reason for this. There are three main obstacles to reading Dunhuang popular literature works such as Dunhuang Bianwen and Wang Fanzhi's poems today. First, due to the low cultural level of the people who copied the paper, the original text was seriously mistaken and there were many popular folk characters at that time, which also increased the difficulty of identification. Secondly, it used many colloquial words of Tang and Five Dynasties, which was easy to understand at that time, but today's readers find it difficult to solve. Third, due to the changes of the times, their historical background and ideas are quite different from ours. For example, there are a large number of works describing Buddhist themes or expressing Buddhist thoughts, which are difficult for ordinary readers to understand today.
In recent decades, due to the efforts of several generations of Dunhuang scholars at home and abroad, great achievements have been made in the collation and research of Dunhuang documents. The Collection of Dunhuang Bianwen compiled by Mr. Ru has been preliminarily sorted out, which provides us with a relatively complete and readable collection of Bianwen, while Mr. Jiang's Interpretation of Dunhuang Bianwen is a pioneering work to explain common words in Bianwen. At the beginning of my contact with Dunhuang literature, all I could see were these two works, which led me into the palace of Dunhuang studies. However, there are a lot of problems to be solved in the study of Dunhuang literature (here mainly refers to Dunhuang popular literature), so I take continuing to overcome these three obstacles as the main task of the first stage of research work.
This requires relearning. When I was in middle school and college, I read a lot of books hungrily and had a certain foundation of ancient culture. This time, I was immersed in reading numerous cadre books, such as the Tripitaka, the official history before five dynasties, many works by the Ministry of Economics and Education, and the complete works of Tang poetry. "Taiping Magnolia" was originally for reference, and I read it one by one, which is equivalent to reading the remnants of many ancient books in different categories. On this basis, there are other miscellaneous works, even some relatively remote works.
A graduate student once asked me: aren't you bored when you chew big books, such as spending two or three years reading the Tripitaka? How much did you gain after reading it?
It all depends on how you read it. I hesitated for a long time before reading the tripitaka. However, this is the most thorough way to truly understand many problems about Buddhism in Dunhuang documents. Nothing ventured, nothing gained? So I gritted my teeth and continued to study. Whenever I encounter materials related to this, I am overjoyed and my interest is greatly increased; Otherwise, it would be boring. But I soon found that the Buddha's book collection is really a great treasure to be developed, from which I can get a lot of gains, and the original reading purpose is too narrow. For example, most people who translated Buddhist scriptures in past dynasties were not Han Chinese. They learned Chinese from real life. They can't have a deep understanding of China traditional culture like Han literati, and naturally they can't "drop books" like Han literati. This has resulted in a prominent feature of Chinese translation of Buddhist scriptures: the preservation of a large number of precious oral materials since the Eastern Han Dynasty. Therefore, I am also happy to collect examples from Buddhist scriptures to prove the spoken vocabulary of Tang and Five Dynasties in Dunhuang popular literature.
For example, before that, I had intensively read Tai Ping Guang Ji and a large number of note novels. I remember that Mr. Lu Xun once gave a famous example of "admiring a scholar" in Wu Yun's "Continued Harmony Collection". In fact, China's early novels are closely related to Buddhist scriptures. Judging from the materials I have accumulated, in fact, the plots of some novels are transformed from Buddhist scriptures or formed by Buddhist scriptures. In A Dream of Red Mansions, the plot of Wang Xifeng setting up an acacia bureau is similar to the plot of Chou-heung teasing the Fahrenheit brothers in San Xiao. It should be influenced by the story of Queyao in Tang Huangmei's Rain in Sanshui, but the story of Queyao was transplanted from the story of the first wife teasing five teenagers in the second volume of Fundamentals of Everything. From a deeper perspective, some concepts of Buddhism have deeply penetrated into people's daily lives in past dynasties and continued to modern times.
When I was a child, I often heard adults in the neighborhood scold children, always calling them "enemies" and "short-lived ghosts". Later, I watched the Yuan drama Cui Fujun's Breaking Friends and Creditors, but I didn't think it was anything special. As for the study of Wang Fanzhi's poem "Killing Thieves by Hating Home", it is a flash in the pan. ..... The creditor came over temporarily to ask my husband and wife to cry "("Wang Fanzhi Poetry Collection "), and carefully explored the source of this concept. The original answer lies in Buddhist scriptures. The Five Bitter Chapters and Sentences Classic attributed the relationship between "father and son" to five reasons, such as "blaming the family" and "creditor". The Analects of Essays recorded the story of a short-lived son who asked his biological mother to repay the unjust debt of his previous life, which had great influence. There are countless such stories in China's novels. The short-lived sons written in Taiping Guangji (volume 125) and Lu Shulun's Daughter not only paid back the money of their previous lives, but also their parents' tears. This is the "tears of husband and wife" in Wang Fanzhi's poems. From this, I think that the crimson pearl fairy grass "tears back" for the first time in A Dream of Red Mansions, and I don't think it is passive water.
When I finished reading the Tripitaka and made a self-summary, I didn't feel that I had wasted more than two years, because I not only accumulated a lot of valuable Dunhuang literature research materials, but more importantly, I got a more real and in-depth understanding of China's cultural history from one side, as if divers were beginning to see another strange world in the depths of the sea. I often feel similar when I finish reading other great books. In the academic ocean, once a scholar realizes the realm of mastery and openness, nothing is more enjoyable than this.
So I told this graduate student that if you want to study China's ancient scholarship, while you are still young, you should make up your mind to sit on the bench for a few years and chew a few voluminous basic books, which will benefit you for life. Don't be eager for quick success, but don't be utilitarian. Reading is to study and solve problems, so you must study with your mind full of problems, collect information to solve problems in reading, constantly discover new problems, and collect information to solve new problems, so that knowledge will snowball, and existing knowledge will bridge each other, so that you will gradually form your own research field and research path.
Academics have never been isolated, and now academic research has shown a comprehensive trend. It is necessary to study Dunhuang literature. If we are not satisfied with a little taste, we should also make some efforts in language, history, religion, folk customs and so on. Of course, it is impossible for a person to be proficient in all subjects, but it is a fact that the depth of knowledge determines the size of academic achievements. We can only approach this goal through our tireless desire for knowledge.
Understanding Dunhuang literary works is the premise of studying Dunhuang literature. Due to the characteristics of Dunhuang manuscripts, text collation and text interpretation are the first step of in-depth research. Mr. Chen Yuan pointed out four methods of book proofreading: proofreading, proofreading, other proofreading and proofreading. In proofreading, he said, "Therefore, this method is the best and the most dangerous." The above are the basic methods of collating Dunhuang manuscripts, and on many occasions, only the correct use of collating can solve the problem, which is a strict test of researchers' knowledge. The level of hand-eye depends on the depth of basic skills and the breadth of knowledge. The study of characters, phonology and exegetics is essential, but the study of general characters, phonology and exegetics may not be enough. For example, the similarity of glyphs is an important reason for misspelling, but the misspelling of this book is often slightly different from today's regular script, because it is similar to the northwest dialect of Tang and Five Dynasties and misspelled.
For example, some words are uncommon and never recorded in the dictionary, but they are not misspelled, because they are spoken words ignored by traditional exegetics. Moreover, collating is not only a matter of words, but also an understanding of the meaning of the text. These problems are varied, and researchers can only deal with them if they don't attack one place and broaden their knowledge accordingly.
There are a few words in "Compilation of Shen Yinfu in Damu Ganlian": "Criminals in prison live in Japan, occupy Galand, make good use of melons and fruits, and steal salaries." Among them, I thought hard about the word "swimming mud" for several years, and one day I suddenly realized that it should be "mud", and the word "mud (pollution)" was misspelled as "swimming" because of its close shape. "Mud Galand" means to make the temple dirty. After all, it is extremely simple, but it is very difficult to get it. Because I have read it several times in Buddhist scriptures, saying that polluting temples will be bad for me, and I may be enlightened, otherwise I may still be racking my brains because of my outspoken views.
There are a few lines in Wang Fanzhi's poem: "Ten thousand golden flowers are worth a thousand years. I don't know if the car will accept it in the dark. " Some articles think that "car" is wrong and should be changed to "wife", but they don't know that "car" is a name. Gan Bao's "Searching for the Gods" (Volume 10) records a story about a man named Zhou Jitu who was destined to be poor. One day, I dreamed that God had pity on him and temporarily lent him tens of millions of money destined to belong to an unborn car. Since then, he has gradually become a rich man. The Zhou family had a poor female employee named Zhang Gui, who gave birth to an illegitimate child in the garage and named it Che. Later, the Zhou family gradually became poor, but when the conductor grew up, he became rich, and the wealth that originally belonged to Zhang Che was finally returned to him. "Selected Works" (Volume 15) Zhang Heng's "Si" says: "It is right to take bribes against cars and get pregnant and have children." Lao Zhu also quoted a story about a car to explain these two sentences. Shan Li pointed out that he saw ghosts and gods and found records of God. "Bao Piaozi's article? Argument also said: "Life has a destiny, and it is right to say that a car is a car." It can be seen that Zhang's story has been widely circulated since the Eastern Han Dynasty, and this allusion is used in Brahma's poems to illustrate that the cycle of the rich and the poor is predestined. When researchers occasionally browse unprepared, it leads to the result of correcting the original text incorrectly.
Literary works reflect social life, which is complicated, especially the life reflected by Dunhuang literature. Therefore, although we take the study of Dunhuang literature as the direction, we should always broaden our horizons and try to learn more about all aspects and even some details of that society. In fact, we should thoroughly understand the historical environment in which Dunhuang literary works were produced.
There are still a few lines in Wang Fanzhi's poem: "Zuo's family is not supported by Taiwan, and the official is to the state and county." Without a good family background, Ding Er avoids taking precautions. Don't worry about abandoning home, stealing and asking for support. "This poem is about auxiliary history. What does "stealing for support" mean? It turns out that the feudal society in China advocated filial piety to the elderly, and there was also a system of "serving servants" in the Tang Dynasty.
According to the Six Classics of the Tang Dynasty, anyone who lives to be 80, 90 or even 100 years old will eventually be supported by/kloc-0, 2 or even 5 servants respectively. Attendants are exempt from all kinds of chores and bring close relatives, but they can also treat Ding Bai as an outsider. In the Tang Dynasty, Pin Guan's immediate family enjoyed the privilege of exemption from military service, but Zuo was a small official with a "poor family background". Without this privilege, their adult children will have to perform military service. However, Zuo's family has its own brilliant way of "avoiding the levy and preventing it", that is, letting their children act as "servants" of their old-age relatives. This is "stealing for support", in which means such as replacing flowers are inevitable, so the author uses the word "stealing". As a waiter, I'm not worried about leaving my hometown, so I say, "I'm not worried about abandoning my home."
From this point of view, these poems describe the common phenomenon of Zuo's escaping from military service through the back door for his children, which can make up for the omissions in history books and deepen the understanding of that society. However, the word "Shi Ding" did not appear in the original text of Wang Fanzhi's poems. If we are not very familiar with the system of the Tang Dynasty, it will be difficult to understand these poems. There are still a few lines in Brahma's poem: "This patrol even asks for help, and the Lord accuses people of peace. When you don't blame it for coming late, you can cover it. " There are many things to be explained in these poems, and only "asking for help" and "moving people" are explained here. The word "person" in these two places is actually a repetitive mark, which should be pronounced as "suo" and "Pingping". But it's still hard to understand.
In Tang Shi Bu, Biography of Liu Binke, Song Douping's Wine Spectrum and Zanning Yao Yan cited in 6 1 volume, it was mentioned that Deng Hongqing, the secretariat of Shibi, Tang Gaozong, created a four-word wine order, in which "seeking" and "ping" were included. The specific content of the four-character drinking order was lost in the Song Dynasty, and it is difficult to explain it in detail today, but if we continue to search along its hint, we can understand that this puzzling poem is actually the interest in writing drinking orders. You see, whether you can read a poem depends on whether you know the long-lost four-character wine order. In order to study Dunhuang documents deeply, we should start with finding many such "small things", and then continue to analyze and synthesize them at different levels, and achieve a leap in understanding, so as to draw various accurate and comprehensive conclusions.
Dunhuang literature is the creation of ancient people. After thousands of years of historical dust, today we have the responsibility to restore its original dazzling brilliance. At present, I am writing "Notes on Dunhuang Bianwen", which focuses on the essence of the works in Bianwen and explains them in detail. The purpose is to provide convenience for more scholars to study this precious cultural heritage, and also to make this precious heritage gradually enter the people today. (Originally published in Knowledge of Literature and History No.6 1987)