Abstract：Taboos on using the names of emperors in the Tang Dynasty emphasized the forms of taboo characters. Various methods were adopted to change the inherent forms of taboo characters, producing a large number of taboo replacements in the Tang Dynasty. Those special characters, endowed with taboo attributes, would be transformed again with their increasing use to give birth to new characters. They would also be used, due to writing habits and psychological habits, after the taboo conditions and background disappeared, and gradually became common characters. These taboo replacements in the Tang Dynasty, with complex causes, were scattered in all kinds of written documents at that time and became important objects of collection in wordbooks after the Song and Yuan Dynasties when block printing gradually replaced manual copying. In the Liao Dynasty, a monk named Xing Jun selected nearly 30,000 characters in popular forms from handwritten Buddhist scriptures at that time to compile the book Longkan Shoujing. In addition to phonetic notation and interpretation, the book also dealt with the relations between different forms of characters, including standardized forms, popular forms, interchangeable forms and modern forms, in the hope of providing a reliable wordbook of forms, sounds and meanings for the study of Buddhist scriptures. Among those characters, Tang taboo replacements often seen in Buddhist scriptures were also included in the book.The Tang taboo replacements in Longkan Shoujing were easily recognizable, most of which were used to evade the names of the deceased Emperor Taizu, Emperor Gaozu, Emperor Taizong, Emperor Gaozong, Emperor Ruizong and Emperor Xuanzong of the Tang Dynasty. In particular, characters to replace the name of Emperor Taizong numbers most. This is basically consistent with the historical fact of respecting ancestral temples in the Tang Dynasty, the ups and downs of the taboo system, and the distribution characteristics of taboo replacements in the Tang Dynasty demonstrated in Dunhuang manuscripts. These Tang taboo replacements collected from Buddhist scriptures not only verified the influence of usage habits on the life-span of Tang taboo replacements in terms of form and quantity, but also extended the life-span of Tang taboo replacements in time. However, from the interdisciplinary perspectives of taboo ology and philology, when compiling Tang taboo replacements, Longkan Shoujing did not do well in tracing and classifying the forms of different taboo replacements for different emperors’ names or taboo replacements that contained obviously consistent components, and seemed to lack a relatively consistent standard. In the textual research of character forms, the book was beset with such problems as lacking discrimination of the original forms, the unclear relationship between the original forms and the taboo replacements in the Tang Dynasty, and the doubtful conclusion regarding character forms. These ways of dealing with Tang taboo replacements in Longkan Shoujing reflected that Xing Jun had a vague understanding of the ancient taboo system, which affected his recognition of Tang taboo replacements and prevented him from effectively distinguishing those characters from common characters in popular forms. Meanwhile, Xing Jun may have absorbed the classification conception of written character model books in the Tang Dynasty, and took the frequency of characters in popular forms as the classification basis while he had no definite criteria of standardized form and even committed occasional mistakes. These two reasons may account for the omissions in the collection and discrimination of Tang taboo replacements in Longkan Shoujing. As a matter of fact, such omissions were universal in some wordbooks before or after the Song and Yuan Dynasties, which affected their overall quality of collection and discrimination of character forms.
窦怀永. 《龙龛手镜》所收唐讳字形论析[J]. 浙江大学学报(人文社会科学版), 2021, 51(2): 175-184.
Dou Huaiyong. On the Character Forms of Tang Taboo Replacements in Longkan Shoujing. JOURNAL OF ZHEJIANG UNIVERSITY, 2021, 51(2): 175-184.
2021, Vol. 51 
