Chinese Transcription of Buddhist Terms in the Late H?n Dynasty

Abstract

This dataset is a compilation of Chinese transcriptions of Buddhist terms produced by translators from the late Hàn period. It is a compilation of the previous works of Coblin (1983), Karashima (2010), Vetter (2012), Hill, Nattier, Granger, and Kollmeier (2020) for the Chinese transcriptions. To these were added phonological reconstructions of the Chinese terms for late Hàn from Schuessler (2009) and Middle Chinese from Baxter and Sagart (2014a), as well as the Gandhari equivalents of Sanskrit and Pāli terms from Baums and Glass (2002). This dataset, shared on Zenodo, aims at being the new state-of-the-art dataset on Buddhist transcription material and can be used by anyone working on Hàn Chinese phonology and will help better understanding the possible language sources of the Chinese transcriptions, as well as the phonology of the target Chinese dialects.