White Horse Temple

[escherplex]

Question for you experts on historic Kanji writing.
In US and UK we have access via satellite to NHK live and CCTV9 (CN) and CCTV9 recently ran an special on the history of Buddhism in China with frequent references to the original White Horse Temple (no reference to the fact that it was burnt down during the cultural revolution). In pictures at the top of a restored arch the temple presents itself in characters written horizontally as: ﾅｽ窶ｺ窶拵窶昶?
Yet googling White Horse Temple only yields results for 窶昶?吮?拵ﾅｽ窶ｺ
My question is whether in the old days when writing horizontally they treated characters as if they were at the top of a column and wrote text from right to left. That would be interesting because, like with Roman script, characters are built top to bottom and left to right and are meant to be scanned that way.

 

[Grandpa Frank]

I found a picture....

not sure if it is too big??

Uncle Frank

:?

 

[escherplex]

ﾅｽ窶ｺ窶拵窶昶?兌/b]

窶堋ｨ窶堋ｶ窶｢ﾂｧ窶披?凪?堙ｱ窶ｹ{窶堋ｳ窶堙
窶堙絶?堋ｳ窶堋ｵ窶堙披?堙ｨ
窶氾??堋｢ .jpg! 窶堋?窶堙ｨ窶堋ｪ窶堙 ...
What's interesting is that you can imagine where the vertical writing convention came from: before paper you held a long strip of bark in your left palm and wrote with your right. To make a scroll you would sew strips together and roll them up. Then to read it you would hold the scroll in your left hand and unroll it with your right (we all know left and right hands had different assigned functions in those days :sorry: ). But the character order reversal in old horizontal writing seems odd since your eyes would move like a pendulum on a grandfather clock. Probably put you into a hypnotic trance real quick ☝

 

[ajin728]

In old time, we Chinese write from right to left.

白马寺是中国最早的佛寺。