Eastern Jin Dynasty in the context of "Ziyuan (book)"

The Ziyuan (Chinese: 字苑; pinyin: Zìyuàn; Wade–Giles: Tzu-yüan; lit. 'Character Garden'; or "Essays on Chinese Characters") was a Chinese dictionary attributed to the Eastern Jin Dynasty scholar Ge Hong. The original text was lost, and the small modern Ziyuan recension has 34 headwords, mostly Chinese Buddhist loanword terminology.

The Ziyuan is notable for having the first occurrence of the Chinese borrowing ta (塔; tǎ; t'a; "tower; pagoda"). Feng (2004:205) classifies ta as a "monosyllabic phonemic loanword," and notes: