Avesta, also known as Zend-Avesta, is the sacred book of Zoroastrianism (Zoroastrianism * * *, translated into Zoroastrianism and Zoroastrianism in Chinese), and is also the most complete existing ancient Persian classic, and is said to be the prophet of Zoroastrianism (Zoroastrianism). The original meaning of "Avesta" is difficult to prove. Academics generally say that it is the ancient Persian used to write scriptures, which belongs to Indo-European Indo-Iranian. This language belongs to Iranian languages such as Persian, Kurdish, Pashto (the main national language in Afghanistan) and Ossetian (Ossetian in North Caucasus).
The original text of Avisto was destroyed by the war during Alexander the Great's conquest of Persia (334-327 BC). In order to revive the Zoroastrian tradition, Sassanian Dynasty (AD 224-65 1 year) compiled a standard version from the remaining scriptures at that time, but unfortunately the version was not completely preserved. Today, various versions of Avisto's original texts or translations have been compiled into books by modern European and Indian scholars, but only about a quarter of Sassan's versions have been preserved.
The Avista Sutra is divided into five parts. The first three parts: Asna (meaning "offering sacrifices"), Weiss Palade (meaning "praying to the gods") and Wenddad (meaning "fighting evil spirits") are the most important parts of Zoroastrianism.
1. "Jasna": The main purpose is to strengthen the material and spiritual cosmic order initiated by Ahura Mazda in god of light and resist the destruction and evil forces linked by Angora Mann, the god of darkness. There are 72 verses in Jasna, the most important of which is five Gathas, which consist of 65,438+07 hymns, and it is said that Zoroaster wrote them himself. Other "Jasna" poems contain hymns and their annotations circulated in different periods and regions.
2. "Vespaladi": There are 23 or 24 verses, which are prayers to God and attached to the ceremony of "Asna".
3. Wendida: It consists of 22 articles, presented in the form of a dialogue between Mazda and Zoroaster, involving the myth of the creation and destruction of the universe, the rules of ritual cleanliness, and general ethics and moral precepts. Unlike Jasna and Weiss Paradi, Wendy doesn't need to recite it completely during Jasna Festival. . The fourth part "yasht" (originally meaning "worship and praise") and the fifth part "Khordeh Avesta" (little Avesta) are secondary sacrificial texts, which are not the ritual texts of "Yasna" or other important festivals like the first three parts, but are used for general folk sacrifices.
Four. Xu Yate: There are 2 1 eulogies, each of which is aimed at a certain god, but the style is quite different, and it is prose rather than verse.
5. Every part of Houlda Avesta is also a prayer to different gods.
According to the legend of ancient Zoroastrianism, 2 1 of Avesta was inspired by Mazda, and Zoroaster passed it on to his disciple Vishnpa. Then he wrote two manuscripts, one sealed in the treasure house and the other in the court archives. After Alexander conquered Persia, the Greeks translated the scientific part of the Bible. Centuries later, Tansal, the high priest in the early Sassanian dynasty, began to collect scattered folk scriptures and decided which ones should be included in the canon. The compilation of canon was finally completed during the term of Adurbad Mahraspandan(309-379), and it was revised many times since then. The last revision was made in the 6th century during the reign of Kuslau I (53 1-579 during the reign of Koslau I).
At the beginning of the 20th century, based on the above-mentioned ancient legends, European academic circles set off an upsurge to explore the original version of Avisto of Sassanian Dynasty. German orientalist Friedrich Karl Andreas (1846- 1930) studied various manuscripts of Avisto, and thought that the ancient Persian of this scripture was very old, and there must be ancient written texts handed down from generation to generation, some of which were misspelled in medieval Persian used by Sassanian dynasty (Pahlavi). However, Andreas' hypothesis was gradually challenged in the1940s, until the German linguist Karl Hoffman (65433 Hoffman) pointed out that the "spelling mistakes" in the manuscript were actually the result of different reading methods of oral narrators in different times and regions, on the one hand, because of different ways of reciting scriptures; On the other hand, from Central Asia to Iran, speakers speak different dialects. In addition, the pronunciation of Avesta itself has changed with the times. In recent years, most of the academic circles accepted Hoffman's theory that in the long years of ancient times, Avisto's writing was mainly oral, and it was not until the 5th and 6th centuries that written writing began to appear.
Because the original text of Avista is quite scattered, to restore its original appearance, it is necessary to compare the original copy of Avista with various translations and related references from ancient times to the present, and the Indian scholar Erwad Kawaji Edard Ji Kanga (1839- 1904) has made the greatest contribution to this. After textual research on various original works, Kango translated various parts of Avisto into Indian Gujarat and published them one after another. The most famous part of Avista is "Hymns", which was published in 1895 and is a solo book "Gath-Ba-Maani". Kango also published two most important reference books for studying Avesta, A Practical Grammar of Avesta Language (189 1) and English -Avesta Dictionary (1909). These important original translations.