『無門關』에 나타난 ‘將’의 용법 小考

Abstract

In order to analyze the Hanwen Yuandian(漢文原典) which refers to the original Chinese character text, the following conditions must be confirmed. First, the exact meaning that was used amongst the many meanings of the actual Chinese character within the context of the sentence must be checked. Second, not only are Chinese characters an independent language entity, they are also devoid of hierarchy and format and must be interpreted only through word order. As such, the components of the actual sentence structure must be checked to see if it is correctly aligned. Third, the Chinese character itself is an ideograph but in many cases, it has a lot of borrowed meaning from elsewhere. So, an additional careful scrutiny must be made to see if it can be interpreted in relation to sound. In this paper, the fundamental meaning of the Chinese character ‘Jiang(將)’ was taken under scrutiny and various meanings that have originated from it were looked into. Several deductions were made in conclusion as a result of this. The character ‘Jiang(將)’ was found not only to be used just as an adverb or verb, but was actually being used as an introductory word(介詞) and even a postpositional particle(助詞). Here lies the problem as most translators were seen to commit the error of translating the character with the mistaken assumption that it always has a lexical meaning. Based on the findings of this paper, it is strongly urged that other Chinese characters other than the ‘Jiang(將)’ should be scrutinized in a similar way. The Chinese character ‘得’ especially is a character that occupies an important position in the modern Chinese language(近代漢語) and contemporary Chinese language(現代漢語) and should be given further emphasis.