The is the oldest extant

Japanese dictionary have a history that began over 1300 years ago when Japanese Buddhist priests, who wanted to understand Chinese sutras, adapted Chinese character dictionaries. Present-day Japanese lexicographers are exploring computerized editing and electronic d ...

Chinese characters Chinese characters are logographs used Written Chinese, to write the Chinese languages and others from regions historically influenced by Chinese culture. Of the four independently invented writing systems accepted by scholars, they represe ...

. 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 The is the last division of classical Japanese history, running from 794 to 1185. It followed the Nara period, beginning when the 50th emperor, Emperor Kammu, moved the capital of Japan to Heian-kyō (modern Kyoto). means in Japanese. It is a ...

monk and scholar

Kūkai , born posthumously called , was a Japanese Buddhist monk, calligrapher, and poet who founded the Vajrayana, esoteric Shingon Buddhism, Shingon school of Buddhism. He travelled to China, where he studied Tangmi (Chinese Vajrayana Buddhism) und ...

, founder of the

Shingon is one of the major schools of Buddhism in Japan and one of the few surviving Vajrayana lineages in East Asian Buddhism. It is a form of Japanese Esoteric Buddhism and is sometimes called "Tōmitsu" (東密 lit. "Esoteric uddhismof Tō- ...

Buddhism, edited his ''Tenrei banshō meigi'' around 830–835 CE, and based it upon the (circa 543 CE) Chinese '' Yupian'' dictionary. Among the

Tang dynasty The Tang dynasty (, ; zh, c=唐朝), or the Tang Empire, was an Dynasties of China, imperial dynasty of China that ruled from 618 to 907, with an Wu Zhou, interregnum between 690 and 705. It was preceded by the Sui dynasty and followed ...

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 The ''Shuowen Jiezi'' is a Chinese dictionary compiled by Xu Shen , during the Eastern Han dynasty (25–220 CE). While prefigured by earlier reference works for Chinese characters like the ''Erya'' (), the ''Shuowen Jiezi'' contains the ...

''. One of the

National Treasures of Japan Some of the National Treasures of Japan A is " Tangible Cultural Properties designated by law in modern Japan as having extremely high value." Specifically, it refers to buildings, arts, and crafts designated as especially valuable from ...

held at the

Kōzan-ji , officially , is a Buddhist temple of the Omuro sect of Shingon Buddhism in Umegahata Toganōchō, Ukyō-ku, Kyoto, Ukyō Ward, Kyoto, Japan. Kōzan-ji is also known as Kōsan-ji and Toganō-dera. The temple was founded by the Shingon scholar ...

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'' 部首), which slightly modified the original 540 in the ''Shuowen jiezi''. The Japanese ''Tenrei banshō meigi'' defines approximately 1,000 ''

kanji are logographic Chinese characters, adapted from Chinese family of scripts, Chinese script, used in the writing of Japanese language, Japanese. They were made a major part of the Japanese writing system during the time of Old Japanese and are ...

'' (Chinese characters), under 534 radicals (''bu'' 部), with a total of over 16,000 characters. Each entry gives the Chinese character in ancient seal script, Chinese pronunciation in

fanqie ''Fanqie'' ( zh, t= 反切, p=fǎnqiè, l=reverse cut) is a method in traditional Chinese lexicography to indicate the pronunciation of a monosyllabic character by using two other characters, one with the same initial consonant as the desired ...

, 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).

In modern terms, this dictionary gives borrowed

on'yomi , or the Sino-Japanese vocabulary, Sino-Japanese reading, is the reading of a kanji based on the historical Chinese pronunciation of the character. A single kanji might have multiple ''on'yomi'' pronunciations, reflecting the Chinese pronuncia ...

"Sino-Japanese readings" but not native

kun'yomi is the way of reading kanji characters using the native Japanese word that matches the meaning of the Chinese character when it was introduced. This pronunciation is contrasted with ''on'yomi'', which is the reading based on the original Chi ...

"Japanese readings". A later Heian dictionary, the (898–901 CE) ''

Shinsen Jikyō The is the first Japanese dictionary containing native ''kun'yomi'' "Japanese readings" of Chinese characters. The title is also written 新選字鏡 with the graphic variant ''sen'' ( 選 "choose; select; elect") for ''sen'' ( 撰 "compile; com ...

'' was the first to include Japanese readings. Ikeda Shoju has studied the conversion of JIS encoding to

Unicode Unicode or ''The Unicode Standard'' or TUS is a character encoding standard maintained by the Unicode Consortium designed to support the use of text in all of the world's writing systems that can be digitized. Version 16.0 defines 154,998 Char ...

in order to create an online ''Tenrei banshō meigi''.

References

Further reading