The adventures of Pāṇini’s grammar in China and Japan: the case of the kāraka/vibhakti system

In this article we deal with the translation and reinterpretation of the Indian indigenous theory of grammatical case in China and Japan. After a brief survey of the kāraka/vibhakti system as it appears in Pāṇini’s Aṣṭādhyāyī, the earliest Chinese accounts on this topic are presented. We argue that this refined theoretical achievement of Pāṇini’s was not entirely understood in East Asia. We mainly focus on the accounts of the Indian case theory by two Chinese monks, Xuánzàng and Kuījī. We hypothesize that the eight cases identified by Kuījī go back to some late post-Pāṇinian grammatical tradition. Concerning the Japanese treatment of kārakas, we focus on the fact that a modified version of this same theory was applied to the Japanese verbal inflection, thus showing a total reinvention of this Sanskrit grammatical category via Chinese mediation and some original innovations performed by the Japanese Buddhist scholars.