《天地開闢已來帝王記》考究

“Tiandikaipiyilaidiwangji” is not recorded in any ancient historical records, such as“jingjizhi ”, “yiwenzhi ” or any other books. It’s not until the discovery of the Dunhuang Grottoes, People started to known about this book. The piece started with the question-and-answer format. The first part of the book, it introduces the family tree of ancient emperors and also enumerates the name of all the dynasty before the Jin dynasty; then at the second part, it turns into question-and-answer format until the end of the book. The book was written in the period of Five Dynasties. It was finished around the dynasty, Jin; but no later than the Sui dynasty Although this book is discussing the legend of ancient emperors, however, the family tree of the ancient emperors in this book is very different from those which are already passing down, such as “shishuo “, “shiji“ , “diwangshiji“ 、“gushikao“ 、“shixuepian“ 、“sanwuliji“ . More important, the most distinguishing feature of this book is the concept about the fusion of eastern Buddhism and Chinese Culture. And this concept unexpectedly also appeared in the Japanese ancient book “cyuukousenn “ with same kind of story. Through this deep connection between these two ancient books, it could tell that the legend and the concept in the ancient book “Tiandikaipiyilaidiwangji” was spread till north-east Asia country, Japan. This also shows the importance of this ancient book. Unfortunately, researches and surveys that focus on this ancient book are quite rare. As a result, this research will focus on doing the comparison analysis on the quotes and references of “Tiandikaipiyilaidiwangji” between Chinese and Japanese, in order to understand how the book do the influence on Japanese literature and culture.