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 ...

Chinese characters Chinese characters () are logograms developed for the writing of Chinese. In addition, they have been adapted to write other East Asian languages, and remain a key component of the Japanese writing system where they are known as ''kanji ...

. 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 Kanmu, moved the capital of Japan to Heian-kyō (modern Kyoto). means "peace" in Japan ...

monk and scholar

Kūkai Kūkai (; 27 July 774 – 22 April 835Kūkai was born in 774, the 5th year of the Hōki era; his exact date of birth was designated as the fifteenth day of the sixth month of the Japanese lunar calendar, some 400 years later, by the Shingon se ...

, founder of the

Shingon Shingon monks at Mount Koya is one of the major schools of Buddhism in Japan and one of the few surviving Vajrayana lineages in East Asia, originally spread from India to China through traveling monks such as Vajrabodhi and Amoghavajra. Kn ...

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, t= ), or Tang Empire, was an Dynasties in Chinese history, imperial dynasty of China that ruled from 618 to 907 AD, with an Zhou dynasty (690–705), interregnum between 690 and 705. It was preceded by the Sui dyn ...

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 ''Shuowen Jiezi'' () is an ancient Chinese dictionary from the Han dynasty. Although not the first comprehensive Chinese character dictionary (the ''Erya'' predates it), it was the first to analyze the structure of the characters and to give t ...

''. One of the

National Treasures of Japan Some of the National Treasures of Japan A is the most precious of Japan's Tangible Cultural Properties, as determined and designated by the Agency for Cultural Affairs (a special body of the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science ...

held at the

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

temple is an 1114 copy of the ''Tenrei banshō meigi''. The Chinese ''Yupian'' dictionary defines 12,158 characters under a system of 542

radicals Radical may refer to: Politics and ideology Politics *Radical politics, the political intent of fundamental societal change *Radicalism (historical), the Radical Movement that began in late 18th century Britain and spread to continental Europe and ...

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

kanji are the logographic Chinese characters taken from the Chinese script and used in the writing of Japanese. They were made a major part of the Japanese writing system during the time of Old Japanese and are still used, along with the subsequ ...

'' (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) 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 syllable and one ...

, 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 are the logographic Chinese characters taken from the Chinese script and used in the writing of Japanese. They were made a major part of the Japanese writing system during the time of Old Japanese and are still used, along with the subsequ ...

"Sino-Japanese readings" but not native

kun'yomi are the logographic Chinese characters taken from the Chinese script and used in the writing of Japanese. They were made a major part of the Japanese writing system during the time of Old Japanese and are still used, along with the subsequen ...

"Japanese readings". A later Heian dictionary, the (898-901 CE) '' Shinsen Jikyō'' was the first to include Japanese readings. Ikeda Shoju has studied the conversion of JIS encoding to

Unicode Unicode, formally The Unicode Standard,The formal version reference is is an information technology standard for the consistent encoding, representation, and handling of text expressed in most of the world's writing systems. The standard, ...

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

References

Further reading