Yongning Temple Stele
52°56′N 139°46′E / 52.94°N 139.76°E
The Yongning Temple Stele (
Background
The Ming government under the
In response to the destruction of Buddhist sculptures by local shamans, Yishiha made further expeditions to the Nurgan region in the 1420s, and in 1432–1433 he made one last expedition with 50 ships and 2,000 soldiers to invest a Jurchen chief as the new Nurgan Military Commissioner. As the temple he had founded twenty years earlier had been destroyed, Yishiha built a new Yongning Temple, situated a short distance away from its predecessor, overlooking the Amur River.[2][3] In 1435 the Ming government abandoned its military presence in the region, and disbanded the Nurgan Regional Military Commission.[1]
The 1413 Stele
Om mani padme hum | |
---|---|
Chinese | |
Hanzi | 唵嘛呢叭𡄣吽 |
Pinyin | ǎn má ní bā mí hōng |
Jurchen | |
Jurchen script | |
Transliteration | am ma ni ba mi xu[note 1] |
Mongolian | |
Mongolian
|
ᠣᠣᠮ ᠮᠠ᠋ ᠨᠢ ᠪᠠᠳ ᠮᠢ ᠬᠤᠩ |
Transliteration | oom ma ni bad mi qung |
Tibetan | |
Tibetan
|
ཨོཾ་མ་ཎི་པད་མེ་ཧཱུཾ |
Transliteration | oṁ maṇi pad me hūṁ |
The 1413 stele was erected at Yongning Temple to commemorate its construction by Yishiha. The stele is 179 × 83 × 42 cm in dimensions,[4] and is inscribed on the front with an inscription in Chinese which extols the Yongle Emperor and recounts Yishiha's expedition. On the back of the stele are abbreviated versions of the Chinese inscription written in Mongolian and Jurchen. On one side of the stele, the Buddhist mantra Om mani padme hum is engraved vertically in four different scripts:[4][5]
This stele is the latest known example of an inscription in the Jurchen script.[6] The earliest record of this stele was probably in book published in 1639 by a Chinese scholar called Yang Bin, but a rubbing of the actual inscription was not published until 1887 after a Qing official called Cao Tingjie made a journey along the Amur River in 1885. The stele was removed to Vladivostok Museum in 1904.[4]
The 1433 Stele
The 1433 stele was erected in commemoration of the rebuilding of the Yongning Temple by Yishiha in 1433. It has a single, monolingual Chinese inscription.[5]
Gallery
See also
- Cloud Platform at Juyongguan, 1345 Buddhist structure with inscriptions in the same six scripts as the Stele of Sulaiman
- Mani stone
- Stele of Sulaiman, 1348 stele with Om mani padme hum inscribed in six scripts
- Tangut dharani pillars – two 1502 dharani pillars inscribed with the Dharani-sutra of the Victorious Buddha-Crown in Tangut script
Notes
- Jin Qizong's Dictionary of Jurchen (Beijing: Wenwu Chubanshe, 1984). The characters are nos. 474, 370, 560, 419, 641 and 385 in Wilhelm Grube's Die Sprache und Schrift der Jučen (Leipzig: Otto Harrassowitz, 1896).
References
- ^ ISBN 978-0-521-24334-6.
- ^ ISBN 978-0-8047-2701-3.
- ^ ISBN 978-0-7914-2687-6.
- ^ ISBN 978-0-933070-23-3.
- ^ Jin, Qizong(1980). 女真語言文字研究 [Study of Jurchen Language and Script]. Wenwu Chubaneshe. pp. 355–376.
- ^ Kiyose, Gisaburō Norikura (1977). A Study of the Jurchen Language and Script: Reconstruction and Decipherment. Hōritsubunka-sha. p. 25.
Further reading
- Головачев В. Ц., Ивлиев А. Л., Певнов А. М., Рыкин П. О. "Тырские стелы XV века: Перевод, комментарии, исследование китайских, монгольского и чжурчжэньского текстов" (Golovachev V. Ts., Ivliev A. L., Pevnov A. M., Rykin P. O. The Tyr Steles of the 15th Century: Translations, commentaries, study of the Chinese, Mongolian and Jurchen texts). Russian Academy of Sciences, Institute for linguistic studies; Institute of History, Archaeology and Ethnography of the Peoples of Far East, Far Eastern Branch; Institute of Oriental studies. St. Petersburg, Nauka, 2011. ISBN 978-5-02-025615-6(in Russian)