fan-ch'ieh

Another occasional appendage to Buddhist sūtras, occurring for some reason with special frequency in copies of the Chin kuang ming tsui shêng wang ching (N. 126), is what I have ventured to call a phonetic glossary. This consists of just a few words selected from the preceding text, with their fan-ch’ieh (initial plus final) pronunciation.

1961, “Introduction”, in Richard A. Gard, editor, Buddhism (Great Religions of Modern Man), New York: George Braziller, published 1962, →LCCN, →OCLC, page 49

However, the most important system of Chinese spelling is the syllabic method fan ch’ieh, which gives the sound of a character by writing two other characters, the first to represent the initial and the palatalization, the second to represent the final—including the vowel—, the labialization and the tone.

[1968, “Chinese Language and Writing”, in The Alphabet: A Key to the History of Mankind, volume I, Hutchinson, →OCLC, page 73

The influence of the Sanskrit alphabet is traced in the practice of fan-ch’ieh (wherein two characters are used to indicate the pronunciation of the third character) and tzu-mu (wherein thirty phonetic radicals are divided as in Sanskrit into five categories as labials, linguals, gutturals, dentals and glottals.

2005, Ananda W. P. Guruge, “Tapping Two Millennia of Sino-Indian Buddhist Literary Resources for In-depth Study and Re-interpretation of Buddhist Philosophy and Thought to Answer Current Issues”, in Buddhist Answers to Current Issues: Studies in Socially Engaged Humanistic Buddhism, AuthorHouse, →ISBN, →LCCN, →OCLC, page 299