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''Bianwen'' () is a technical term referring to a literary form that is believed to be some of the earliest examples of vernacular and prosimetric narratives in Chinese literature. These texts date back to the Tang Dynasty (618-907) and Five Dynasties (907-960) periods, and were first discovered among a cache of manuscripts at Dunhuang, Gansu Province, China in the early twentieth century. The form originated in the popularization of Buddhist doctrine through storytelling and pictorial representation and was closely related to oral and visual performance. The stories were then preserved in written form, and the ways in which they were told influenced secular storytelling. Therefore, historical and contemporary stories were also found in the Dunhuang ''bianwen'' manuscripts. Popular stories include ''Mulian Rescues His Mother'', which originated in India but was made into a Chinese legend by the bianwen adaptations. By the Song dynasty, however, the form had largely died out. Their anonymous authors, although literate, were not educated members of the official class, and the tales were intended to be performed by people who could not read or write. Their language reflects the spoken language of the Tang period. The genres and themes of the tales were quite diverse and many of their forms and themes were significant in Chinese literary development.〔Ch 14, "Popular Literature: ''Ci'' and ''Bianwen''", in Wilt Idema and Lloyd Haft. ''A Guide to Chinese Literature.'' (Ann Arbor: Center for Chinese Studies, The University of Michigan, 1997), ISBN 978-0-89264-099-7, pp. 140–145.〕 ==Definition== ''Bianwen'', used as a convenient label for a type of literary form, has not yet been sufficiently defined. Disagreements over what ''bian'' means, what characteristics or formal features a text must have in order to be subsumed under the term, and consequently which texts are considered as ''bianwen'' have plagued the scholarship since the discoveries of the manuscripts. Professor Victor H. Mair of the University of Pennsylvania, the most productive Western scholar on ''bianwen'', proposes to adopt a more stringent definition than most other scholars. He identifies the following characteristics as the qualifying criteria for ''bianwen'': “a unique verse-introductory (or pre-verse) formula, an episodic narrative progression, homogeneity of language, an implicit or explicit relationship to illustrations, and prosimetric structure.”〔Victor Mair, ''T’ang Transformation Texts'' (Cambridge, Mass.: Council on East Asian Studies, Harvard University: Distributed by Harvard University Press, 1989), ISBN 9780674868151, pp. 15.〕 This definition results in a corpus of less than 20 extant ''bianwen'' manuscripts, some of which are titled with the term in it, others titled without the term but nevertheless share certain formal features with the majority of the established ''bianwen'' manuscripts. This small corpus can be further categorized, according to their stylistic features, into verse and prose.〔Hiroshi Arami 荒見泰史, ''Dunhuang bianwen xieben de yanjiu'' 敦煌變文寫本的研究 (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 2010), ISBN 9787101075328, pp. 42-54.〕 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Bianwen」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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