ベトナムバクニン省出土仁壽舎利塔銘、及びその石函について

Abstract

In 2004, the oldest inscription of Viet Nam was discovered in the Province of B́ăc Ninh. The inscription was unearthed with a lid of its own, an empty coffer, a coffer lid and a stone plank. According to this inscription, the text was inscribed in 601--the first year of Emperor Sui Wen-di's Renshou relic-distribution campaigns--and the coffer and its accessories were made for the Chanzhong Monastery 禪衆寺, located in Rongbian-Xian prefecture 龍編縣 in Jiaozhou 交州 province. According to a recent research, it was argued that all the Renshou Relic stone coffers, as well as the pagodas, were made in the same way in more than 100 monasteries, and that the stone coffer buried in the Shende Monastery 神德寺 in Yi-Zhou 宜州could have been the model of other stone coffers. But the one discovered in the Chanzhong Monasterywas different from the Shende Monastery model in size, motif and form. Therefore, this paper, in an attempt to test the above theory, gathers and analyses the records on Renshou Relic stone coffers, and comes to a conclusion that a standard for the stone coffers was not given or, if there ever was one, it was not necessarily observed. It should be argued instead that the stone coffers were the product of the localization of Buddhism in China, and their style and form might have depended on how the monks of the area understood Buddhism, together with the political and economical circumstances of each monastery or province in which the pagodas were built.