Journal Asiatique 304.1 (2016): 117-124 doi: 10.2143/JA.304.1.3146837 Introduction Christopher I. Beckwith’s ‘The Aramaic source of the East Asian word for ‘Buddhist monastery’: On the spread of Central Asian monasticism in the Kushan period’ (2014), recently published in this journal is, in our humble opinion, very imaginative, but at the same time funda- mentally flawed, both in respect to its methodology and the treatment/presentation of data. We leave it to Semi- tists to discuss his Aramaic data, which are outside of our field of expertise, but we were prompted to discuss his East Asian data that, unfortunately, present ad hoc recon- structions, false presumptions and hypotheses built on top of other hypotheses, inadequate philological handling, and we are sorry to say, even unfamiliarity with important secondary sources. We will start with Beckwith’s LOC *dēʁa ‘Buddhist temple’ > MSC sì (寺). Before we go into the discussion of the details, we have to mention that, unfortunately, Beckwith’s reconstruction of Chinese falls outside of the mainstream of the Chinese historical linguistics and is idiosyncratic, as in spite of the fact of it being presented as the last and non-contestable truth, no other Sinologist supports it. In addition, his reconstruction of LOC and EMC (in usual terms, not in Beckwith’s) is largely circular: it is based on Beckwith’s reconstruction of the pseudo-Koguryǒ language (2004), and in return his pseudo-Koguryǒ reconstruction is highly dependent on his Chinese reconstruction. 2 Old Chinese 寺 *s-[d]əʔ-s > MC ziH vs. Beckwith’s *dēʁa ‘Buddhist temple’. There is no need to suppose a borrowing from Ara- maic or elsewhere to explain why 寺 became the Chinese designation of Buddhist temples in the first century CE. Both historically and linguistically, the Chinese facts are largely clear. The Chinese character 寺, MC ziH (Bax- ter’s notation), MSC sì, often translated as ‘hall’, was in Hàn times the usual designation of official buildings. Around the 1st century CE Buddhism began its propaga- tion in China. The first Buddhist temple was opened in Luòyáng 洛陽 in 68 CE. Imperial sponsorship made it a kind of public building: it was accordingly designated as a 寺 ‘public building’, specifically Báimǎsì 白馬寺 ‘White Horse Official Building’. From then on, Buddhist temples and monasteries were designated as 寺. In a paper dealing with the reconstruction and function of the Old Chinese *s- prefix, Sagart and Baxter (2012:49) clarified the etymology of 寺 in its primary meaning of ‘public building, hall’. They showed that term to be a morphological derivative, prefixed with *s-, of the verb 侍, OC *dəʔ-s > MC dzyiH > MSC shì ‘to accompany, wait upon, serve’. One of the functions of OC *s- was to derive circumstantial nouns (place, time, instrument of action) out of verbs. Here 寺 OC *s-[d]əʔ-s > MC ziH > MSC sì public building, hall’ is to be understood as a locative noun ‘place of serving’. The literature on Chinese reconstruction is misquoted in Beckwith’s paper. A passage in Sagart (1999:148-151) cited in support of ‘a de-affricating dialect that seems to be the primary ancestor of Proto-Mandarin’ has been misread. Sagart makes no remotely similar argument. Pulleyblank’s Middle Chinese for 侍 is incorrectly given on p. 112 with initial dz- (Pulleyblank gives dʑ-); Beck- with’s understanding of the evolution of Chinese conso- nants is approximative. In order to make his Aramaic borrowing proposal minimally explicit, Beckwith puts forward a series of novel phonological hypotheses, each of which amounts to a major revision of generally accepted views on Old Chinese, and none of which is accepted by other scholars. For instance he (fn. 4) states that ‘the final glottal stop phoneme of Pulleyblank’s, Sarostin’s and Baxter’s recon- structions is impossible for Old Chinese based on com- parative-historical data. It must have been a voiced velar or uvular fricative’. Yet the reconstruction of a glottal stop in words evolving to the MC rising tone is the stand- ard view since the work of Haudricourt (1954). Chinese NO ARAMAIC WORD FOR ‘MONASTERY’ IN EAST ASIA REFLECTIONS ON CHRISTOPHER I. BECKWITH’S RECENT PUBLICATION 1 ALEXANDER VOVIN – LAURENT SAGART CRLAO (EHESS AND CNRS), PARIS 1 The part on Old and Middle Chinese is by Laurent Sagart, while the parts on Old Japanese, Middle and Old Korean, and Jurchen, as well as Introduction and Conclusion are by Alexander Vovin. Vovin thanks Stefan Georg for his very detailed comments. 2 See the negative evalution of Beckwith’s Chinese and Japanese reconstructions (2004) in Pellard (2005).