Dear June,

You asked:

> Can Pali be written using Chinese characters? If they can, does anyone
> know where I can get the character conversions document? (Like how
> we can convert between Roman characters and Thai characters)

The quick answer is NO, not really.

Chinese ideogram characters, as used in China, Japan, Korea and formerly in
Vietnam, are not alphabetic -- one might say that they primarily represent
ideas rather than sounds, so the writing system is totally different to
alphabet-based scripts. The total range of characters exceeds 40,000 -- the
giant Mojikyo font for scholars, available for free download, contains over
100,000 characters, though it lists many old variants. Of course, most
modern users do not use or need such large numbers of characters. Modern
Chinese newspapers have a font range of about 7,500 characters. The way the
Japanese and Koreans use the characters is different -- they are completely
different languages to Chinese and need additional script notational
methods. That is to say, they both use an additional syllabic script, which
is more like our alphabet, to write the bits they can't or don't use
characters for -- though their sound systems are also inadequate for an
accuate notation of Pali etc. Hence they use a basic range of around 2000
characters.

The second problem for transcribing Pali or any other language with Chinese
characters is which language or pronunciation associated with the characters
is one to use ? Beijing / putonghua, Hongkong Cantonese, Hakka or other
Chinese pronunciation, Korean, Japanese etc ?
Even if you settle on Beijing (Mandarin) pronunciation, the modern Chinese
sound system is fairly sparse -- some sounds found in Pali etc do not occur
in Chinese. Even if you do not use characters, but use the official Chinese
romanization system -- pinyin -- you will still have this problem. At best,
you will get a rough approximation but nothing useful for scholars.

On the other hand, the ancient transcription of Pali and, more so, Sanskrit
into Chinese is of great interest to me. When the early medieval Chinese
scholar monks attempted to translate Buddhist texts into Chinese, they
sometimes had to transcribe phonetically Indian words as best they could
into Chinese. Things were actually easier for them then than would be the
case today, since medieval Chinese had a much richer sound system than
modern Chinese, but first the medieval sounds have to be reconstructed ! I
work quite a lot with Chinese Buddhist tantric texts that widely use
transliterations of mantras etc -- characters used for their sound and not
their meaning. However, there was no standardized way of doing this, and a
range of up to 1000-1500 chacacters were used. As it happens, I have just
been updating a personal list of these characters, with their recontructed
medieval pronunciations and the Sanskrit sounds to which they correspond in
transliterations. This is an on-going project for me, since the range of
potential characters is virtually open-ended for this purpose.

So the upshot of this is, according to your purposes, to use romanized Pali
as it is or get a Chinese person to roughly transcribe the sounds into
characters, bearing in mind that speakers of other Chinese dialects will
mispronounce the words thus transcribed.

Hope this helps.

Best wishes,
Stephen Hodge