Chinese Buddhist canon

• 1. Introduction

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  The Chinese Buddhist canon exists carved into stone at Yunju Temple near Beijing, a project a monk named Jingwan began in the 7th century. Generations of monks kept carving after him, continuing well into the Ming dynasty. Among those stone tablets sits the earliest dated copy of the Heart Sutra, carved in 661.

  During the Han dynasty, Chinese translators began rendering Indian Buddhist texts into Chinese, and the collection grew for the next two thousand years. It came to hold thousands of separate works. Some were barely a scroll long, others filled dozens of volumes. Chinese authors added their own histories, dictionaries, and travel accounts alongside the translations. Along the way, this body of scripture became something communities worshiped, not just read. Some devotees even copied it out using their own blood. What decided which of these many thousands of texts belonged inside the canon and which stayed out? How did translated foreign teachings come to be seen as capable of protecting an emperor's throne? And why, after two millennia of copying and printing, does not one complete manuscript canon survive from before the age of printing?

• 2. Not One Basket, But Many

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  The Chinese scholar He Mei has counted 4,878 individual texts that eventually became part of this canon. That number reflects centuries of gradual accumulation, not one single act of compilation. In India, teachings were gathered into a tripitaka, literally three baskets holding sutra, vinaya and abhidharma texts. Each Indian Buddhist school kept its own version of this three-basket collection. Chinese Buddhists never had access to one complete tripitaka from any single Indian school. Instead, they translated whatever texts reached them from many different sources. They also combined these translations with brand new works composed inside China itself. Those homegrown additions were not limited to religious teaching. They included philosophical treatises, histories, geography and travel writing, biographies of famous monks, catalogs, encyclopedias and dictionaries. The canon has also carried other traditional names beyond the literal Great Storage of Scriptures. These include Internal Classics, Myriad of Scriptures, and All Scriptures. Settling on which of these many accumulating texts actually counted as authoritative took Chinese translators and cataloguers several more centuries of work.

• 3. Translators and a Closing Core

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  During the reign of Emperor Ming, from 58 to 75 CE, the first Chinese translations of Buddhist texts appeared in the later Han Dynasty. The Sutra of Forty-two Sections is said to be the very first sutra translated into Chinese. A Parthian monk named An Shigao was among the earliest translators, alongside the Kuchan translator Kumarajiva, who lived from 343 to 413. Later translators were native Chinese who traveled to India themselves to study Sanskrit texts. These included Faxian, who lived from around 337 to 422, and Xuanzang, who lived from 602 to 664. Nearly all of these translators worked in teams of translators and scribes rather than alone. A Yuan dynasty catalogue records about 194 known translators, who together produced roughly 1,440 texts across 5,580 fascicles. The scholar Jiang Wu writes that for about a thousand years, translating, cataloging and digesting these texts was a paramount task for Chinese Buddhists.

  A monk named Zhisheng, who lived from 699 to 740, compiled the Kaiyuan Catalogue during the Tang dynasty, later listed as Taisho Tripitaka number 2154. That catalogue became the blueprint for rebuilding the canon after the Great Buddhist Persecution of 845. Modern scholars consider the Kaiyuan Catalogue the text that effectively closed the core of the canon. Jiang Wu notes that despite the canon continuing to grow for centuries afterward, this core body has remained stable without much alteration. Any later collection missing these core texts was not considered a complete canon. Poorer temples that could not afford a full set instead kept what was called a Small Canon. It held only the essential Mahayana scriptures from the canon's first four sections: Prajnaparamita, Ratnakuta, Avatamsaka and Nirvana.

• 4. What Survived Before Printing

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  None of the earliest Chinese Buddhist manuscript canons, compiled during the Eastern Jin and Sui dynasties, have survived to today. The oldest surviving manuscripts instead turn up in the Dunhuang text collections. The earliest known catalogue of the canon's contents is the Records of the Dharma Jewels through the Generations. Its compiler, Fei Changfang, was active between 562 and 598. Other early manuscripts survived separately, preserved in the libraries of Japanese temples. As Chinese Buddhists organized and catalogued this growing body of scripture, they drew on an existing scholarly tradition. Confucian cataloguing, especially the work of Liu Xiang, who lived from 77 to 6 BCE, shaped how Buddhist monks classified their own texts. None of this scholarly effort involved a printing press, though. That technology would only reach the canon in the Song dynasty.

• 5. From Manuscript to Woodblock

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  In 983, workers finished carving the Kaibao Canon onto some 130,000 individual woodblocks, the first printed version of the Chinese Buddhist canon. Printing changed more than just the technology behind reproducing the canon. It reshaped the canon's layout, its style, and the social world built around producing it. After the Song dynasty, manuscript canons gradually disappeared, replaced almost entirely by printed editions. Hand copying persisted anyway as a devotional practice, and it also survived as an elite art form. Scribes mixed ink with gold and silver powder to produce lavishly decorated manuscript sutras.

  The Thousand Character Classic gave printed canons a new library classification system. Each text was assigned a character from this work, one that every educated person had memorized in school.

  The Kaibao canon came bound as scrolls made from pasted paper sheets. Later editions used accordion folding books instead. Still later ones adopted a string binding style, first introduced by the Jiaxing canon. That style was nicknamed Indian style because it imitated Indian manuscripts. Printed texts were also framed by prefaces and colophons listing titles, origins, printing dates, sponsors, and sometimes even the names of the printers and binders. Some editions added illustrations too, including scenes of Buddha assemblies drawn from particular sutras. The paper for these canons was mostly made from mulberry and hemp, while the woodblocks themselves came from pear or jujube wood.

  Once printed, a canon was typically stored inside a monastery, sometimes in a dedicated building called a Tripitaka Pavilion or Tripitaka Tower. Some temples kept their copies in huge cabinets built into a library's walls. Others used revolving repositories, cabinets that could be spun to reach different texts. These were themselves treated as devotional objects, since turning one was believed to generate merit. Over the following thousand years of Chinese Buddhist history, fifteen more editions of the canon were produced. Roughly half were funded by the imperial court, and the rest came from laypeople and monastics working on their own.

• 6. Worship, Merit and Money

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  Tang dynasty emperors backed the production of Buddhist canons for several believed benefits. These included protecting the state, bringing peace, benefiting the imperial family, and making subjects more moral. Some modern scholars call this broader devotional activity a cult of the canon, covering everything from sponsoring a printing to ritually copying texts by hand. Printing or owning a complete set of the canon also raised a temple's prestige. One motive behind copying the Korean canon in particular was the belief that its merit could protect the country from foreign invasion. Monks, literati and commoners supported the effort too, sometimes copying texts themselves or funding a single page or woodblock.

  During the Ming dynasty, a government office called the scripture factory, staffed by eunuchs, produced state-sponsored editions of the canon. At the local level, the Ministry of Rites oversaw transferring an imperial canon to a monastery. The project relied on sponsors, fund raisers, and monks assigned to manage the canon and its printing blocks. Collators, proofreaders, carvers and printing workers did the physical labor, alongside private printing shops, merchants and local literati. Temples developed their own rituals around these finished texts too. One, called sunning the scriptures, began as a practical way to air out manuscripts and prevent dampness before becoming a public ritual of veneration. Another, called turning the scriptures, involved ceremonially reading the entire canon aloud. It was sometimes done as a solitary practice, and was believed to generate merit, sometimes even serving a funerary purpose. Worshippers also circumambulated the stored canon inside a Tripitaka Hall while chanting.

• 7. A Language of Its Own

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  Scholars call the written language of these texts Buddhist Chinese, or Fojiao Hanyu, a distinct variety of literary Chinese. For most of the pre-modern history of China, Korea, Japan and Vietnam, it served as the main religious and scholarly language of East Asian Buddhism. Scholars split it into two broad categories: the language used in translations of Indian texts, and the language of original Chinese compositions. One feature that sets Buddhist Chinese apart is its heavy use of disyllabic and polysyllabic words, driven by specialized Buddhist vocabulary. Some of that vocabulary is a direct transliteration from Indian languages, such as the character combination pronounced boluomi, standing in for the Sanskrit term paramita. Other terms are calques, translated loanwords rather than sound transliterations, such as rulai, meaning thus come, used for the term Tathagata. Buddhist Chinese also allowed syntax forbidden in standard classical Chinese, including nouns of address placed in the middle of a sentence. The translator Zhi Qian used this Sanskrit-influenced word order in his translation of the Vimalakirti Sutra, matching the structure of his Sanskrit source text directly. The scholars Lock and Linebarger caution against overgeneralizing about Buddhist Chinese. It spans thousands of texts written over nearly two thousand years. Its genres range from elegant Wenyan prose to language that is recognizably colloquial. Because of that range, broad generalizations will not hold for every single text. Zhi Qian's early translation style already differed sharply from that of Kumarajiva, and both differed again from the later style of Xuanzang and his followers.

• 8. Editions and the Digital Age

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  According to the scholars Chikusa Masaaki and Fang Guangchang, every printed edition of the canon belongs to one of three lineages. These are a central Chinese tradition rooted in the Kaibao Canon, a northern tradition, and a southern tradition. Emperor Taizu of Song, who reigned from 960 to 976, ordered the Kaibao's printing. That edition ran to 5,048 fascicles across 1,076 titles, though only fourteen fascicles of it survive today. Most of the printing blocks were destroyed when the Northern Song capital of Kaifeng fell in 1127. Even so, the Kaibao, along with a later Liao dynasty edition, became the main source for the Tripitaka Koreana. That Korean canon, in turn, became the basis for the modern Taisho edition.

  The Tripitaka Koreana was first carved in the 11th century, during the Goryeo period, which lasted from 918 to 1392. Mongol invaders destroyed that first set in 1232. A second set was carved between 1236 and 1251, during the reign of King Gojong, who lived from 1192 to 1259, and this version survives. It runs to 81,258 individual woodblocks. Each block was carved on both sides, with twenty-three lines of fourteen characters per side, cut from a hard wood known in Korean as Paktal. Those woodblocks are still kept today at Haeinsa temple in South Korea.

  More than 300 Japanese scholars, led by Junjiro Takakusu, Kaigyoku Watanabe and Ono Genmyo, worked on the Taisho Tripitaka from 1922 to 1934. In total, some 450,000 people contributed to the project, at a cost of 2.8 million Japanese yen. Published in Tokyo across 100 volumes between 1924 and 1934, the Taisho broke with the old Kaiyuan schema. It organized texts instead by their historical development, from the earliest Agamas through commentaries and treatises.

  The SAT Daizokyo Text Database and the Chinese Buddhist Electronic Text Association, known as CBETA, are the two main free online editions today. Both were built from the Taisho Tripitaka. A separate project in South Korea is digitizing the Tripitaka Koreana as well. None of this was possible until the Unicode character encoding standard expanded to include the many ancient Chinese characters the canon requires. That expansion even let scholars restore original characters that the first Taisho typesetters lacked and had to replace with substitutes. In 1965, Dr Yehan Numata founded the Society for the Promotion of Buddhism, known as BDK, aiming to translate the Buddhist canon into English. BDK has since published numerous professional English translations, though many works from the canon remain untranslated.