I study the Satyasiddhishastra (Chengshilun) by Harivarman. For anyone else who might be interested in exploring this text, I’ve created a simple website to help memorise the 280 most frequently used Chinese hanzis from it:
The text has a lot of recurring characters, and these 280 hanzis make up about 80% of the entire work. So, learning these characters well is great for studying the text more effectively.
The website and hanzi translations are functional, but there’s always room for improvement or corrections. If you have any suggestions or corrections, feel free to reach out to me directly—I’d really appreciate it!
By the way, I’m not sure if this post fits in this category, so if it doesn’t, please let me know.
@Dogen , if you want to use the code or something similar, feel free to go ahead. If you need anything, just let me know. Anything to help people study more about Harivarman.
I’ll get there in no time, like, 5-10 years perhaps?
Cheers! I’ll look around the code to see if I can hack a simple interface to increase the database manually or with a text file. But the way my studies go it’s already close enough to basic buddhist lexicon I’m learning.
Regarding the Satyasiddhishastra, the Chinese characters repeat quite a bit, and there aren’t too many unique ones. So, if you get a good grasp of the first 280-300, you can already read it pretty well, just needing to look things up in the dictionary occasionally.
That’s how I’ve been studying with my Sensei. It’s actually been really cool, and it’s nice to see I’m picking things up!
Following the logic, if one wished to study the most common Chinese characters in another Buddhist text, you could certainly use Python to identify the most frequent ones.
This would provide a sound strategy for study; one would simply need to swap the JSON data in the code.
There’s absolutely no problem in doing that. I had considered it myself for some Agamas concerning the five aggregates, but haven’t quite found the time yet – I tend to potter about with these things during breaks from work.
I’ve made a few improvements I hope your guys appreciate.
Now, you can now have three goes at a question, which should help you figure out the correct hanzi. What’s more, if you get a hanzi wrong, it’ll pop up again soon after, giving you a better chance to remember it.
Thanks! Personally, I have no difficulty with the common characters, it’s the tricky ones that sometimes present a problem for me. Is it possible to include all of them in this tool?
BTW, the new academic translation of a great deal of SSSh is coming! (Unfortunately, I’m not allowed to provide more details.) The previous translation is significantly inferior to the new one.
The plan is to put 'em all in.
But the idea to do it is to start off with the proper common ones to make it a doddle to understand. Because once you’ve know those usual suspects, the reading can just roll on, and you can stop, like you said, at the proper head-scratchers.
Bearing in mind that the 280 most common hanzi make up more than 80% of text. This is very rare in Chinese Buddhist Texts, which, for me, is a good thing
My Sensei did his Ph.D. on the Chengshilun in Japan. So, the idea is for him to create a dictionary of all of Harivarman’s hanzi , but, as I said, starting with the most common ones.
If anyone knows Chinese Buddhist Vocabulary and would like to help me, I can provide the list of hanzi here. I would only ask that you put it in JSON format, which is quite simple, and send it to me. The only thing I’ll do is run it by the Sensei, just in case.
陰成實論 - Chengshilun | Satyasiddhi-Śāstra’s All Non-Repeated Hanzis List:
