A Textual Study and Disambiguation of the Naxi Dongba Character "Chan Spirit"
This philological article by Gao Xinkai challenges the standard dictionary claim (in Li Lincan's and Fang Guoyu's compendia) that the common Dongba character conventionally read "Chan spirit" is a deformed variant of the character for "blood." Surveying dozens of manuscript occurrences across the Baoshan, Mingyin, Dadong, Lijiang, and Ludian regions, the author shows the two graphs have entirely distinct early forms, and that "Chan spirit" came to write "blood" only through phonetic-loan and phono-semantic-compound spelling that developed over time, not because "blood" evolved into it. The article further argues that "Chan spirit" and the separately dictionary-listed "Wei Ling" (numinous potency) are, in actual scriptural practice, one and the same graph, and proposes that the character was originally borrowed from the Tibetan letter "sa."
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