Abstract
There are no punctuation marks used in ancient Chinese texts, nor are in the Chinese translations of Buddhist scriptures. The first Tripiṭaka which uses punctuation marks is Hongjiao Tripiṭaka《弘教藏》(CE. 1880-1885). The utilization of punctuation marks makes the unpunctuated Buddhist texts much easier for the general public to read. The most popular Taishō Tripiṭaka only uses one kind of punctuation marks, namely, the period ―。‖. The Chinese Buddhist Electronic Text Association (CBETA) offers online Tripiṭaka, and tries to mark Buddhist scriptures with so-called ―new punctuation marks‖ which contains seventeen different punctuation marks. However, neither Taishō nor CBETA provides a consistent use of punctuation marks for Buddhist texts. This paper explores the issue of using various punctuation marks adopted in Kumārajīva’s Chinese translations of the Diamond Sūtra. The author first compares the use of the punctuation marks adopted in Taishō Tripiṭaka with that in CBETA, and notices that CBETA does not only employ the new punctuation marks to suit the modern reader, but also rectify some misplaced punctuations to resolve the wrong readings of some Buddhist texts in Taishō. Moreover, the paper finds that CBETA also contains some misplaced punctuation marks, and miscellaneous inconsistent uses of the punctuation marks among similar sentence structures. Those kinds of various misplaced punctuation marks can be found among the six different Chinese translations of the Diamond Sūtra, and even within each of the six translations. In sum, this paper offers a new perspective of using correct punctuation marks based on three methods: comparing the six Chinese translations, studying the Sanskrit text, and referring to syntactic structures of Chinese.