Buddhism and the Creation of Canons

Lewis Lancaster
(The following is the transcript of class lectures and it is not
fully annotated)
The issue of canonicity within Buddhism is a complex one,
since there are several recognized canons based on language and
doctrine. In South and Southeast Asia, the Theravada canon in
what is now called the Pali language is accepted and preserved
in a number of national scripts. In East Asia, the Chinese
Buddhist canon is used in one of its several configurations by all
groups. And finally among the Central Asian communities, we
find the various editions of the Tibetan language canon, made up
for the main of translations from Sanskrit with a few texts that
were taken from the Chinese. Along side this Tibetan canon, is
the scripture in Mongolian translations made from the Tibetan.
Later, the Manchu people also constructed a canon copied from
the Chinese one. India and Nepal still preserve some copies of
Sanskrit Buddhist texts, but no complete copy of a canon can be
found among these fragmentary palm leaf and paper copies.
Each canon has its own history and development and each
deserves more attention as an integral part of the research in this
field.
It may be that a study of the Chinese Buddhist canon is
somewhat premature, since so many problems remain unsolved
with regard to the various canons that make up the totality of
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Buddhist literature and scripture. But the Chinese created their

own form of the canon, often with limited knowledge of the
history or origins of the texts being included in it. The story that
follows is not intended to be a definitive study of Buddhist
scripture, it is focused on the situation which existed in China.
It was the Chinese Buddhist community that over the years
designated a particular sets of texts as official and arranged them
and disseminated them by techniques and scribal patterns which
were peculiar to China.
When the first translations of Buddhist texts were made into
Chinese in the second century, the teachings of the faith had
been a part of Indian culture for some centuries. The
transmission of these teachings through Central Asia into China
was one of the remarkable moments in the spread of culture
from one society to another. The earliest references to the
teachings in India appear in inscriptions at sites such as Sanci,
Karli, Bharhut, and there we have the picture of an oral tradition
being carried on by monks who were called bhanaka or reciters.
By the second century B.C.E. Brahmi inscriptions carry the term
tripitika implying that the Buddhist writings had been sorted
into three types with teachers who were specialized in the three.
At this early stage it is probably incorrect to assume that the
word tripitaka meant the Buddhist canon, since it was but one of
a group of schemes that classified texts according to their
characteristics. Having the classifications did not mean that
these were closed categories,since new materials could and were
added when known and available. On the other hand, the
recognized texts in Indian Buddhism were not free from
judgment regarding the authenticity and nature of the teachings
contained in them. We hear in words attributed to the Buddha
himself the idea that even though questionable, new texts might
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be adopted as authentic, while the older ones, closer to the

original message of the Buddha could sink into oblivion:
"The sutras promulgated by the Tathagata, which are
profound in meaning, supramundane, and which teach
emptiness, will not be listened to with faith, no one
will lend an ear, nor recognize them as true--but
the sutras composed by poets, which are poetic, artistic
in syllables and phonemes, exoteric, promulgated by
the disciples, will be believed--thus sutras in the
first category will disappear."
The Dipavamsa speaks of those who introduced changes and
thus make the original text no longer valid. During the time of
Asoka, the records claim that Mahadeva tried to get the writings
of the Mahayana included in the list of accepted scripture.
Indian Buddhist had the fear that newly composed texts or
textual corruption would make it more difficult to determine the
true teachings. Thus, when we speak of the importance of
pseudographs in China and the problems presented by those
early Buddhist texts composed within China and constituting
new cultural patterns for the religion's literature, it should not be
thought that the problem of canonicity and recently composed
texts was absent in India.
When the Chinese first came into contact with Buddhist texts
either in the original Indic form or in the translations, it would
have been impossible for them to determine the canonicity of
those materials. There was no list of texts, universally
recognized by the arriving missionary monks, that could be used
by the early Chinese Buddhist community as a formal canon.
While the Indian Buddhist writings were classified under the
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three headings of Sutra, Vinaya and Abhidharma, there was no

closure in any of the categories as far as the Chinese were
concerned. Every year brought new and unheard of texts from
the Western regions and who was to say which were authentic
and which suspect. While tradition holds that the first Buddhist
Council was called soon after the Nirvana of the Buddha for the
express purpose of determining the canon, no such urkanon was
provided to the Chinese. Whatever the form of the teachings
that might have been presented at the Council, it is generally
accepted that they were transmitted orally and the accounts of
the meeting make no mention of any scribes writing down the
texts.
India also had controversy over the contents of the three
categories. For example, under the Sutra classification, a fifth
division had to be added, beyond the well known four agamas.
This fifth was a miscellaneous collection of texts which did not
fall easily into any of the arrangements of the first four
categories. There has always remained a question about whether
this fifth ksudraka section belonged to the tripitaka. During the
fourth century, the Chinese had available in the capital a text
which defined the canon as the tripitaka plus the ksudraka. This
meant that for some Buddhists the ksudraka texts did not belong
to the Sutra part of the tripitaka but constituted an entirely new
type of scripture. This fourth century document, which so
defined the canon, also provides an explanation for the
appearance of new material, by saying that the teachings of
Buddhism are not only those of the Buddha but are also the
words of the Arhats, gods and other divine beings. While the
Sutra category may be preserved as referring only to the words
of the Buddha, clearly other beings have uttered words that are
worthy of preservation and study. This same idea of a variety of
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teachers is seen in the Fen pieh kung te lun where the ksudraka
is said to be the words of the Buddha, disciples and the gods.
Etienne Lamotte makes the point that the schools of Buddhism
based on Sanskrit texts, could give the miscellaneous texts a
place in the categories of scripture, but they were not able to
achieve a concensus among themselves over the exact texts to be
included. It was the Theravada tradition among the Sinhalese
that first gave a standard closed list for the miscellaneous
category of texts. Since the Chinese received only the Sanskrit
based texts and not the tradition of the Theravada, they were
faced with the problem of having no clear picture of the number
of acceptable titles for this part of the canon.
Even though the agama category was established in the
Indian schools, early Chinese translators received copies of the
four divisions of the texts from different schools, which
purported to be the actual words of the Buddha. Thus we find in
the Chinese translations that the texts of the Madhyamagama
and the Samyuktagama belonged to the Sarvastivadin school,
while the Dirghamagama was part of the texts from the
Dharmguptaka school and the Ekottarakagama is now
considered to have come from the Mahasanghikas. This
heterogenious mix of basic texts such as the agamas, coming
from a variety of Indian schools is an example of the way in
which the Chinese received the texts of Buddhism. There was
no one school, no systematic transmission of a canonic list. No
one Indian school can be identified as the primary source for
canonic materials in the Chinese translation bureaus and no one
list of texts,belonging to some Indian tradition where consensus
had been achieve about the canon, provided the model for the
organization and content of the Chinese Buddhist canon.
The Vinaya classification, relating to the rules of conduct,
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was as ill defined for the Chinese as the Sutra one. A variety of
Sanskrit based schools were represented by the manuals of
conduct that came into China. There were the Vinayas of the
Sarvastivadins, Dharmaguptas, Mahasamghika, Mahisasakas
and Mulasarvastivadins. By the fifth century, the Chinese
monks and scholars were aware of these varied descriptions of
the correct rules of conduct thought to have been passed down
from the Buddha. Having before them an array of choices, the
Chinese had to make a decision about the nature of these texts
and they did this in a typical fashion for their own culture.
Upagupta was held to be the disciple of the Buddha who
transmitted the rules of conduct and thus the autograph for the
Vinaya would be his words or teachings. Since there were five
major Vinayas before them for consideration, the monks and
nuns of China determined that after Upagupta's death the lineage
of transmission of the vinaya had passed to five of his disciples.
The result of these lineages was, naturally enough, different
interpretations. While there might be five interpretations, there
could be no doubt in the minds of the Chinese Buddhist
monastic dwellers that there had once been a single Vinaya,
which was being transmitted through five lineages. During the
seventh century, Tao-hsuan founded a school for the study of the
Vinaya and he used the Dharmagupta version that had been
translated in the early fifth century by Buddhayasas and Cho
Fo-nien. This Vinaya School was a minor part of the Buddhist
scholastic community and its choice of one text from an Indian
school did not mean that all other vinaya codes were removed
from the canon. All of the available Vinaya texts were kept and
given equal treatment. The building of the Chinese Buddhist
canon had less to do with rejecting texts than it did with
developing a rationale for inclusion.
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The Abhidharma, the "special" teaching made up of treatises,

questions and answers and numerical listings was the third
category to be considered by the Chinese as they tried to
construct the canon. Even in this scholastic material, they found
that there was no universal acceptance of it in India, either
regarding its structure or importance. Some schools rejected the
Abhidharma altogether, most notably the Sautrantikas, and some
only made use of one part of it, as in the case of the
Mahasamghikas. This category and its importance to the
Chinese, regardless of how Indian schools considered such texts,
was given consideration because of the esteem the
translator/missionary monks were given in China. The fact that
Kumarajiva, most famous of all the holy men who came from
the Western regions, made a translation of an Abhidharma text
assured such material an honored place in the Chinese Buddhist
canon.
The greatest challenge of all came when the Chinese had to
consider the place of the Mahayana texts as opposed to those of
the Sanskrit based schools which were negatively called
"hinayana" (lower) teachings. Since the Mahayana texts taught
that they were superior to these other Buddhist teachings, the
problem of canonicity became ever more pressing in East Asia.
Did the words of the Buddha appear in both divisions and if so
how could one be judged superior to the other? One of the great
figures in this appraisal of the place of conflicting teachings
within the canonic literature was Chih I and his approach to the
problem was to be important for the classifications and
arrangements of the canon long after his death in 597. Chih I
and others held that the teachings of the Buddha had occured
over some fifty years of his lifetime and should thus be arranged
in chronological order. There were times when the Buddha in
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his compassion taught people who had little background or

understanding and after giving them the initial "hinayana"
teaching, he later took them into the more advanced studies of
Mahayana. Since the Chinese came to consider the Mahayana
teachings as the most superior, it is conceivable that they could
have constructed a canon made up only of the texts from this
school. Instead under the leadership of those who held that all
the Sutras, whether of the superior or lower rank in terms of
doctrine, belonged to the Buddha, the Chinese put together their
Buddhist canon with both types of texts included in it.
While
various schools in India struggled to produce some list of
accepted writings and to separate themselves from schools that
had opted for other choices, there was no clear pattern for the
Chinese to inherit. Receiving texts from every corner of the
Buddhist sphere, the Chinese translated them all and from these
translations created a canon, unlike anything which had ever
existed in India.
Without guidance, since there was so much conflicting
information coming from India and Central Asia regarding the
teachings, the Chinese turned to their own traditions for the
method of creating and defining the limits of authentic Buddhist
writings. They had before them a model for canonicity which
was universal for their culture and had a well established
structure for transmission and standardization. The model was
the statecraft texts which were used for the examination system
throughout the land. These texts were called ching, often
translated as "classic." The earliest canon of these so called
Confucian texts was composed of the five ching. Standard
readings of these ching existed in manuscript copies wherever
the examinations were used for the selection of government
officials. Answers had to be based on some standard so that
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judgement of the examination could be made wherever it was

administered. Because of the importance of maintaining a
standard reading for the ching, the court established the official
copy in the capital and had it engraved on stone stelae. There
are references to scandals that brought into question the
authenticity of the standard texts preserved either on bamboo
slips or on silk scrolls. Some, accused scribes of changing those
manuscripts so that errors which occured in the answers of
favored individuals taking the civil examination would appear to
be correct. One solution to the problem of having the standard
text in manuscript on surfaces that could be erased or changed,
was to engrave the standard readings on stones. Once incised,
these stones could hardly be changed, and could be a common
source for the determination of the correct form of the texts.
Only scribes of the highest position were allowed to enter the
area of the stelae and make manuscript copies directly from the
stones. These precious copies from the court scribes were taken
to provincial copy centers where large numbers of manuscripts
were prepared and distributed. It was this system of maintaining
a standard and having highly trained scribes produce official
copies of it, that was to become the model for the Buddhists.
At the end of the 5th century, the growing corpus of
translations of Buddhist texts from Sanskrit and Prakrit into
Chinese had reached sizable proportions. It was at this point
that the collected translations came to be considered as an entity
and were called "All the ching",( i ch'ieh ching). One extant
example, from Dunhuang, of a portion of this set of the i ch'ieh
ching has the date of 479, along with the biography of the
official who had paid to have ten complete sets made of the
collection. Thus, as early as the 5th century, the set of
translations known under the title "All of the Ching", was the
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object of a copying project at Dunhuang. This Buddhist center,

a long distance from the capital, was but one of many provincial
copying centers, but the fact that such copying was being done
provides us with the information that the Buddhist canon was
being recopied in exactly the fashion that the copies of the ching
of the statecraft canon were produced and disseminated. When
we compare the Buddhist developments regarding copying with
that of the Taoists, we note that similar methods were employed
by both religions. The manuscript tradition of Taoism continued
for a longer period than for Buddhism. While the Buddhist
canon was being printed in the 10th century, it was not until
1119 that the Taoist Sung canon was carved on printing blocks.
The pattern of distribution of the Taoist canon while similar in
kind to that of Buddhism was done at a much later date. For
example, while we find examples of the official copying of the I
ch'ieh ching as early as 479, the Taoist were still calling for
some pattern of copying as late as 1064, when Ch'iu
Cheng-tsung and Teng Tzu-ho complained:
"The books of Buddhism are found in every prefecture and
county, but what we Taoists have recorded is scattered and
incomplete. We wish to go to the capital and obtain an
official copy in order to transmit it widely." (Van der
Loon 96)
Van der Loon points out that as early as the T'ang, specifically in
the words attributed to Hsuan-tung in 749, we have an idea of
copying which was both a reflection of the statecraft procedure
as well as the Buddhist approach,
"Now, we are issuing from the palace the Complete Taoist
Scriptures. Let the Institutte of Taoist Studies prepare
manuscripts forthwith and distribute them to the inspecting
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commissioners of the circuits, so that the prefectures

within their jurisdiction can make their own copies. The
official set shall then remain in one large temple in the
prefecture which is the seat of the commissioner, for
regular recitation."
The size of the set of Chinese Buddhist texts gives us some
idea of the funding necessary to make copies. When Tao-an
made a catalogue of all the Buddhist manuscripts available to
him at the end of the fourth century, he could account for 1464
scrolls. His contemporary, Kumarajiva, added to that total 427
new scrolls from his translation effort. The Wei shu lists 1919
scrolls and the now missing catalogue of Li Kuo apparently had
2053 in its listings. From these records, we can surmise that by
the end of the Northern Wei, the number of Buddhist texts in
Chinese numbered more than 400 contained on some 2000
scrolls. Later, the size of the i ch'ieh ching would continue to
expand. After the account of the Northern Wei set appeared in
the Sui shu, the famed translator Hsuan-tsang returned from
India with a sizable number of Sanskrit manuscripts collected
during his stay in the homeland of the Buddha. During the
remainder of his life he dedicated himself to the translation of
these documents and today we have more than 1000 scrolls
attributed to him, including the 600 scrolls of the
Prajnaparamita. By the time of the Sung dynasty the canon
would grow to more than 6000 scrolls or 90,000 sheets of paper.
When the Chinese Buddhists referred to their scripture as
"All of the ching", the question arises as to how they defined
that term which had been for so long applied only to the classics
of the ancient sages of China. When we see in the fifth century
colophon the expression "All of the ching", it is tempting to
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translate the word ching as the equivalent for the Sanskrit word
"sutra". However, if we take note of the list of texts included
among the Buddhist ching, it is obvious that this category
included all of the translations whether Sutra, Vinaya or
Abhidharma. As mentioned above, the model for the Chinese
canonicity was not that of India, it was their own secular
approach. Just as ching was a designation for the texts which
contained the teachings of the ancient sages of China, so the
early Buddhists took the term to mean the teachings of the
ancients of India, especially Buddha. They did not assume that
all ching were the words of the Buddha since texts attributed to
Nagarjuna and other great masters were given the same
designation. While the Chinese do use the word ching where
the Sanskrit term "sutra" appears, the use of the term in the
catalogues and in the name for the canon of Buddhism retains its
Chinese meaning. We can say that ching means a recognized
book, an authentic expression of a sage, a text worthy of
preservation and coping. Since ching referred only to the
writings which reproduced the ancient teachings, it was not a
term that could be applied to a newly written work by a
contemporary author. But without the term ching being used in
the title, a work was not a recognized Buddhist text and could
not be included in the canon. It was this restriction on the use of
the word ching that resulted in the much discussed
pseudographs, writings that purported to be translations from
Sanskrit but which were clearly the product of the Chinese
environment. The use of ching for official books or scripture
was not limited to the Confucian or Buddhist traditions; later the
Taoists, Christians and Manichaens also used the term to
provide legitimacy to their scriptures.
The prevalence of the word ching for the Buddhist texts can
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be seen when we look at the catalogues that appeared in the

sixth and seventh centuries. The oldest one by Seng-yu does not
use the term ching in the title but rather refers to the san tsang,
the tripitaka. We might translate his title of Chu san tsang chi
chi as "A Compilation of the Records regarding the Tripitaka
appearing (in Chinese translations)." In his use of the term chu,
it would seem that he is referring to the Sanskrit texts which
have "come out" or "appeared" in Chinese; the emphasis being
on the Indic nature of the texts rather than the translation. After
Seng-yu's time the cataloguers changed the way in which they
referred to the canon and put the focus on the translations.
Fa-ching in 594 calls his work "A Catalogue of the Many
ching"; Tao-shih in 659 uses the title "A Compilation of a
Summary of all the ching." Ching-mai called his work "A
History of the Publication of the Translated ching in Ancient and
Contemporary times." In this latter title, we note that Ching-mai
understands ching to be a word for the Chinese translations
made of the Indic texts. Hsuan-ying in his great study of the
vocabulary of the Chinese Buddhist canon, used the title
"Meanings and Pronunciations (of the vocabulary) of All the
ching." By the time of Chih-sheng in 730, the catalogue was
seen as a much larger study and he gave the title "A Record of
Buddhism in the K'ai Yuan Era." For Chih-sheng the catalogue
had evolved into a historical document.
To this point, we have dealt only with the first designation
of the canonic list under its identification as "all the ching".
Later, the name for the canon was changed to the ta tsang ching
(literally "the great collection of ching). Here again we are faced
with the problem of the word ching. Since the term ta tsang
ching is used, even today, for the entire set of Buddhist texts,
whether translated from Sanskrit or written in China and East
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Asia, we know that the word ching in that compound cannot

mean "sutra" and that the translation used by some scholars "the
great collection of sutras" is incorrect. Even the term tsang
raises questions. What does it really mean? One solution is to
turn to the Sanskrit and to India for the answer, since tsang is the
equivalent for the word pitaka, a "basket", a "storehouse" hence
perhaps a "collection". It might be argued that the term ta tsang
is a shorten form of the Sanskrit maha(tri)pitaka, but there is
little force in an argument that claims abbreviation when only
one character is omitted. A review of the history of this phrase
as it applies to the canon can perhaps give us some new insights
about the meaning of the words that have come to mean the
Buddhist canon for all East Asians. Some have suggested that
the two terms i ch'ieh ching and ta tsang ching were used in
different regions of China as the official names for the canon.
The i ch'ieh ching was, according to this school of thought, the
expression used in the south while ta tsang ching belonged to
the north. A close reading of the literature suggests that the use
of the two terms was not geographical but rather reflects
chronological usage. The first term for the Buddhist canon was i
ch'ieh ching and this lasted until the Northern Sung dynasty
when the new expression ta tsang ching was first introduced.
Against the chronological arrangement which places the date of
this term in the tenth century, there is the argument that we find
the term ta tsang ching in one of the Sui catalogues as it now
appears in our printed editions. The occurance of this phrase in a
document dating from the Sui time is a puzzle. Ta tsang ching as
a compound was never used in the Sui shu. In that official
history and in all the Tang official records, we find only the title
i ch'ieh ching. Additional evidence of the exclusive use of i
ch'ieh ching in
East Asia prior to the Northern Sung
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introduction of the new expression ta tsang ching, can be found

in the fact that the Japanese references from the seventh to the
tenth centuries all follow the Tang precedent and never refer to
the ta tsang ching. This raises doubts about the appearance of
the term ta tsang ching in the Sui catalogue and leaves us with
the possible explanation that the single example is a later scribal
change and is not the first use of this name for the canon. With
this in mind, the search for the meaning of the words ta tsang
ching takes us to the Sung court which made use of the term.
There are references which point to an earlier Tang dynasty use
of the expression. When the court ordered block prints to be
made of the canon in the tenth century, the historical account
says the emperor wanted the ta tsang ching to be copied, he did
not say the i ch'ieh ching.
In the Sung historical documents, the term ta tsang appears
by itself. We are told that the officials or the king gave orders
for the construction of a ta tsang on the grounds of the
monasteries. It may be assumed that this meant the construction
of a library building, a structure which was specifically
commissioned to hold the official ching or books. Given this
information we should then translate the term Ta tsang ching as
"The ching of the Library", that is the ching that have been
officially placed in the library as a recognition of their worth or
their canonicity. It should be noted that the use of tsang as a
building appears in the Taoist tradition where the name for the
library building or structure was Tao tsang or tsang tien.
The appearance of a Buddhist library or a recognized set of
ching outside of the imperial context was an event of no small
significance. Given this approval by the northern dynasties to
have ching and to collect these ching in buildings built for the
purpose of housing them, the Buddhists began to occupy an
15

important place in the literary culture of China. The formation

of the canon was in one sense the result of the way in which
libraries were created, not just housing for books but recognition
of the nature of those books. The only official libraries
permitted prior to the Buddhist ones was that of the imperial
household. It was called bishu. This term in present parlance in
China and Japan has the meaning of a secretary who has access
to secret and important documents. While bishu has the
implication of a "secret document", at the same time it meant
"book." The hostility of the Chin emperor toward scholars, and
private collections of books may not be an exact description of
the events of the pre Buddhist era, but the story certainly tells us
that books and the ownership of books was a privilege that the
court did not easily share with others in the society. While the
emperor is said to have burned books in private collections and
even killed the scholars who had gathered the documents, he
maintained his own library in the palace which contained the
books necessary for state craft. The Chin court may well have
been faced with a new feature in Chinese life, that is the
situation where books and copies of the ancient ching were kept
as private books. With the advent of more widespread
dissemination of these books, scholars could question the
actions of the court by giving direct quotes from the sages. One
way to control these criticisms of the interpretation of the court
was to remove copies of privately held books, while still
retaining copies in the imperial library. In the years that
followed this attempt to keep tight control over the written
word, technology and learning did continue to develop. In 136
B.C.E. there was report of the "recovery" of classical texts and
by 53 B.C.E., the beginning of systematic study of them. By the
end of the Han dynasty, silk scrolls had replaced the earlier
16

bamboo slips and the invention of paper in the second century

opened the way for the expansion of manuscript copying. Such
was the growth of this enterprise that in the Han shu, an entire
section was given to the description of literature and the
holdings of the royal house.
In the second and third centuries, when Buddhism was
beginning to produce ching based on the teachings of the Indian
sages, upheavals in China proved to be destructive to the
archival collections of the court. In the Later Han when the
capital was returned to Loyang, there were some 2000 carts of
books and papers to be moved, but in 190 C.E. riots broke out
and the archives were badly damaged by people who took the
silk scrolls for use as cloth. When the scrolls of the court were
once again on the road as the capital was shifted to Ch'ang-an,
they could be contained in seventy carts and at least half of these
loads were destroyed in the ensuing events. Later records would
express dismay over the loss which this massive destruction of
books brought about. One record bemoans the fact that by 240
C.E. only ten scribes were left who could compose texts among
all of the officials.
The creation of Chinese translations of Buddhist texts at a
time when scribal authority and expertise had reached a low ebb,
provided China with a new type of literature and scholars who
had control over material which had no counterpart in the
history of the nation. The monasteries treasured their scriptural
texts produced in manuscript form and followed the library
model of the emperor. A special building was constructed to
house this growing corpus of manuscripts. More complete and
later histories of the Tang dynasty provide the information that
the library in the palace grounds was the place where ministers
could come to confer with the Emperor on matters of state.
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Some royal family members maintained a private library apart

from the one in the central court, for example in the case of the
crown prince who had his own collection of books. New books
were presented to the central imperial library, there to be
recognized, sometimes copied and recorded in the histories. The
act of the presentation of a work to the library was tantamount to
official recognition. When the Buddhists started to translate and
write their own texts and were given permission to collect and
store these volumes in their monasteries, they followed the
secular idea that "entering" the library was a crucial step in the
authorship or translation process. Hsuan-tsang's translation
efforts followed this pattern. Returning from India with a large
number of Sanskrit texts, he set up a bureau of scholar monks
who made Chinese versions of these scriptures. In the
colophons, we are told that the work was done at the behest of
the Emperor, and when the work was completed, a copy, perhaps
the original, was presented to the central library of the court.
The copy at the palace library became the standard text and
scribes of the highest attainment were allowed to go to the
palace and make copies which were sent out to the various
monasteries and copy centers around the nation. That is the
background for the Dunhuang texts which have in their
colophons the information that they were copied at the capital
before being sent to the center in Western China.
In the Northern Sung account of ancient Patriarchs, there is
the story of the invention of the revolving book case in the 6th
century. Fu-hi (?) is said to have designed a large multi sided
shelving, large enough to contain all of the ching. This large
revolving structure was placed inside a building in the monastic
grounds and in the same principle as the prayer wheel of Tibet,
causing the shelves to move produced as much merit as the
18

reading of the entire canon. This practice of achieving merit by

having a movable canon was also part of the Taoist tradition.
"Turning the repository (chuang tsang) still survives today in a
ritual to deliver from the Lake of Blood the souls of those who
have died from unnatural causes." By putting the Buddhist
canon in its own structure and providing great merit to lay
people who could visit those housed books, even though they
did not read them or make use of the content, the library became
an important part of the religious practice. In other words, the
creation of the library, the library structure, the presentation of
new works to the collection, the establishment of a standard
copy in the capital city, distribution of copies made by highly
trained and selected scribes, are all procedures followed by the
Buddhists which had long been used by the Chinese court for
the state classics. The veneration of these particular texts and
the ritual use of them was a particular development within the
Buddhist tradition.
Another force in the construction of the Chinese Buddhist
canon were those scholars who began to make lists of ching.
Every canon is, in the final analysis, a list of accepted texts or
teachings in whatever form they occur. The idea of making lists
of scriptural manuscripts as a crucial exercise in the spread and
knowledge of Buddhism was not something that the Indian and
Central Asian missionaries brought with them. To be sure, there
were the classification schemes of the teachings in India and
lists of types of texts, but we have yet to discover documents
which record only the titles and relevant information about
them. Here too, the Buddhists in China found a model within
the secular system. The royal libraries maintained shelf lists for
the titles included in them and when dynastic histories were
written in later years, these documents were found in the
19

archives and were given a specific place in the accounts of the

royal household. Having a library and in one sense a catalogue
of the collection was a tradition firmly in place when Buddhism
came to China. As the new religion created its own texts and
were allowed to have monastic libraries, it was natural that some
form of cataloging would occur.
The role of the catalogue and of bibliographical practices had
been important in China before the arrival of Buddhism.
Tradition says that in 6 B.C.E. Liu Hsin compiled the Ch'i lueh,
a catalogue of the library of the court. Some parts of this
pioneering work have been preserved in the Han shu. This
pattern of recording the titles in the royal collection, classifying
them in seven categories was continued in some degree by all
subsequent catalogues, be they secular or religious. Many of
these compilations of the holdings of the libraries of the
governments are lost and we can only reconstruct them in part
from the dynastic histories and later catalogues. The sixth
century work of Juan Hsiao-hsu, now lost, was influential in the
structure of the bibliographical section of the Sui shu. Later in
the Sung, the activity continued with such works as Cheng
Ch'iao's Ch'un shu hui chi. Just as we have seen the Buddhist
following the secular practices with regard to names and to the
idea of canonicity, so too the bibliographical enterprise that
produced catalogues, was firmed based on imperial patterns of
record keeping with regard to titles and other information about
the books housed in the imperial libraries.
Buddhist books were not overlooked by the compilers of the
histories. One section of the dynastic accounts from the Sui
dynasty onward, was reserved for the listing of the titles of
Buddhist ching that were held in the palace library. The
Buddhist monks had made their own lists as early as the last
20

decade of the 4th century. Our knowledge of the titles, length,

and number of scrolls of Buddhist manuscripts in China comes
to us from these two sources, the dynastic histories and the
Buddhist catalogues. Just as the archival studies made by those
who wrote the secular histories involved all types of information
regarding events, dates, names, places and source references, so
too the Buddhist catalogues contained more than just the list of
titles. These compilations held much of the recorded data
regarding the history of the introduction and spread of
Buddhism in China. Titles, names of translators, biographical
sketches of authors and translators, year of translation, size of
the manuscript, place of translation were all put together in the
creation of the catalogues. These are usually the earliest sources
for information about Chinese Buddhism. The fact that
catalogues were primarily historical documents is another way
in which the Chinese Buddhist canonic structure can be traced
within secular life of China.
Since we have both Buddhist catalogues of the texts and the
dynastic reports of those manuscripts housed in the imperial
library, it is possible for us to have independent witnesses
regarding the identification of Buddhist canonic works. One of
the earliest dynastic records can be found in the Sui shu,
prepared during the early years of the T'ang dynasty by those
who used the documents of the past Sui dynasty. In the Sui shu
we can find some titles and information that are not found in
extant Buddhist catalogues. From the Sui shu comes evidence
that there were a variety of listings of the Buddhist ching being
circulated. This is borne out by the section at the end of the
Zhou chuan which lists Buddhist catalogues, many of them no
longer in existence. Since many of the notations in the Sui shu
do not accord with those found in the extant group of
21

catalogues, we can see that there is value in comparing the

dynastic histories with these catalogues. It is probable that some
of the data contained in those lost catalogues regarding titles and
length of manuscripts, is only available in the Sui shu. While
dynastic histories are notorious for self serving documents of the
court under which they were written, Buddhist study of the
development of the canon cannot overlook the potential of this
type of data as one of the oldest accounts of the Buddhist ching
which were available and considered to be of importance.
The first collection of Buddhist texts to be collected and
housed apart from the other books in the palace library seems to
have been during the time of Emperor Wu of the Liang dynasty.
According to the Sui shu his collection amounted to more than
5000 scrolls and he had a catalogue made for this library in 518
by the scholar monk Pao-kan. Unfortunately, no copy of that
inventory survives. In 534, a second imperial collection of
Buddhist books was catalogued, this time under the patronage of
Emperor Hsiao-wu of the Northern Wei dynasty. He had more
than 2000 scrolls in the palace library; his list of works has also
disappeared.
The oldest extant catalogue is that of monk Seng-yu who
made a list of Buddhist works as a private endeavor. There is no
statement that it was done under imperial order. Since he lived
during the time of Emperor Wu, we can assume that this Ch'u
san tsang chi chi represented in its listings many of the titles in
the 518 imperial catalogue of Pao-kan. We know that palace
collections of Buddhist books continued to be of great
importance and in the Ta-yeh period (605-616) the Buddhist
holdings of the library within the palace precincts were
catalogued.
Even though our oldest records refer back to the 6th century
22

imperial libraries, there is evidence that the courts were involved

in the process of housing, cataloguing and copying long before
that time. The catalogue effort of Tao-an at the end of the 4th
century, the copying of the i ch'ieh ching at Dunhuang in 479 are
indications of the construction and recognition of the Buddhist
canon as a set at an earlier date than the Liang dynasty.
The process of cataloging the Buddhist ching met with
several problems. By the end of the fourth century when Tao-an
set about the task of making a list of titles of Buddhist texts in
Chinese, political divisions had made it difficult to communicate
between regions. While it is true that Tao-an was a traveller and
had visited a number of monasteries, sometimes crossing the
political boundaries, his cataloging work was done at
Hsiang-yang where he lived for fifteen years. We can imagine
that he had knowledge of texts in other locales and knew of
titles that were not found in the library at Hsiang-yang. This
strategically important city on the Han River in Northern Hupei
remained a regional headquarters for many centuries and
because of its location had a flow of travellers from the Western
regions, making it a likely spot for the appearance of new
Sanskrit texts coming into China and for Chinese translations
that were being copied and carried from place to place. Arthur
Wright indicates the importance of this center during the Sui
when he identifies it as a city situated on "established land and
water routes." Using the local collections and perhaps
information about scrolls in the more distant areas, Tao-an
managed to put together a fairly comprehensive list of texts. We
now reconstruct the Tao-an version by using the, the Chu san
tsang chi chi.
The early cataloguers had several task before them, not the
least being the necessity of identifying whether there existed
23

more than one translation of the same text. This was made
difficult by the fact that some translations became known by
several different titles. Further depth of cataloguing then
required that the names of all translators be included wherever
possible as one more step toward definitive identification.
Following this, was the notation concerning the number of
scrolls used in the translation.
The oldest catalogue the Chu tsang san chi chi of the sixth
century divided the canon into the Indian classification scheme
with one additional unit added for the works of China.
I. Sutra
(a) Mahayana
(b) Hinayana
II. Vinaya
(a) Mahayana
(b) Hinayana
III. Abhidharma
(a) Mahayana
(b) Hinayana
IV. Miscellaneous
(a) Additional works originating in India
(b) Chinese work
The cataloguing of the canonic collections was a major
undertaking since the size of the corpus of texts was so large.
Far larger than the state craft canon, the Chinese Buddhist canon
required years of effort for every cataloguer. No small part of
the task was the attempt to determine the content of each text,
the judgment of whether it was worthy of being included in the
24

scriptural "library."
At the unification of China under the Sui dynasty,
cataloguing of the Buddhist texts increased under royal
patronage. The Chung ching mu lu was compiled by Fa-ching
and others during the years of K'ai Huang and was completed in
the summer of 594. The first emperor of the Sui Wen-ti had
continued the practices of the Liang and Northern Wei rulers
and collected a set of Buddhist scrolls and commissioned
scholar monks to make a catalogue of them. Wen-ti's reign was
marked by an attempt to collect and salvage literary works that
had been scattered and damaged during times of turmoil. Niu
Hung sent a memorial to the court arguing that there had been
five times in the past when the ching of the state craft tradition
of Confucius had been endangered by events of history. Each
time the past rulers had attempted to reassemble the libraries and
to use them as sources for the essential learning necessary for
the orderly running of the country. Niu brings to the attention of
the emperor that while many books had disappeared in the royal
libraries, they had survived in the private collections. In order
to get copies of these ancient manuscripts, the court offered to
give every owner a roll of silk in exchange for the privilege of
making a copy of their old texts. This offer of a payment for
allowing the government to copy texts, resulted in the creation
of forgeries. The most important case being that of the scholar
Liu Cho who made a hundred scrolls in order to collect the
government grants.
While the work of Sui court to preserve and to disseminate
the state craft texts was a worthwhile endeavor and succeeded in
many ways, there was a dark side to the story. The court
extended its power over books to include a proscription against
texts that could be considered as dangerous to the power of the
25

emperor. At the very time when the Buddhist books were being
catalogued, there was an edict against individuals who had in
their hands so called "apocrypha and prognostic texts that had
often be used to inspire rebellion" (Wright: 124).
"As early as 583, Wen-ti felt obliged to execute an old
friend and supporter who was alleged to harbor imperial
ambitions based on the prognostic texts and on the
predictions of physiognomist. Later Wen-ti was to proscribe
certain Buddhist and Taoist works as subversive.
His whole reign was marked by suspicion and unrelenting
vigilance over the written word."
By the time of the compilation of the Chung ching mu lu in
the Tang dynasty with reference back to the collections of books
made in the Sui, we note that a major category of this catalogue
is devoted to works which are questionable or considered to be
pseudographs and not to be given a full place in the canon. The
question about legitimacy was as great for the Buddhists as it
was for Wen-ti and the court. This fear of the pollution of the
canon by false texts can be traced to similar attitudes among the
Chinese secular tradition, yet another example of how this factor
continued to influence the formation and study of the Buddhist
scriptures. Some of these same issues arose with regard to Taoist
texts and the official to the court Fan Tsu-yu in 1091 could still
say that "Taoist book, with the exception of Lao-tzu, Chuang tzu
and ieh tzu. are mostly false and unorthodox." Buddhist
pseudographs were constantly being identified and criticized by
the cataloguers, a sure sign that the writing of such material was
going forward. When Tao an started his cataloguing in the
fourth century, there were twenty six texts that he considered
problematic but by the eighth century the list has grown to more
26

than 400.
While there have been many catalogues of the Chinese
Buddhist canon, perhaps none has been as influential as the K'ai
yuan shih chiao lu compiled in 730 by Chih-sheng during the
reign years of K'ai yuan. The organization of this catalogue was
to become the model for the printed editions of the canon. With
the publication of the K'ai yuan shih chiao lu, a great age of
cataloguing came to an end. From the Tao-an work at the end of
the 4th century, followed by a period lasting until 730, one
catalogue followed another as translations continued to be made
and the royal house gave it support to Buddhism. The list of
extant catalogues of this period include:
Ch'u san tsang chi chi 502-557
Chung ching mu lu (594)
Li Tai san pao chi (597)
Chung ching mu lu (663-665)
Ta t'ang nei tien lu (664)
Ku chin i ching t'u chi (664-665)
Ta chou k'an ting chung ching mu lu (695)
Hsu ku chin i ching t'u chi (730)
K'ai yuan shih chiao lu (730)
It is not until the 13th century that catalogues were once again
being compiled:
N. 1612 (1286-87)
N. 1611 (1306)
N. 1662 (1402-1424)
In the process of constructing the canon, the cataloguers played
a major role. By the 9th century the list of the ching included in
the manuscript canon was established and did not change until
27

the new translation period of the Northern Sung.

The first catalogue of the Chinese Buddhist materials to be
translated into English was done by Prof. Nanjio when he
studied in Europe. While Nanjio used the catalogue of the Ming
Edition for his translation, the classification and arrangement of
the texts hardly varies from that of the K'ai yuan shih chiao lu.
Nanjio's catalogue breaks the canon into four sections: the
tripitaka and the ksudraka. He calls the ksudraka another name
using the Sanskrit term samyukta-pitaka which is confusing
since the term Samyukta rightly belongs to the agama portion
and is not appropriate for naming the miscellaneous portion of
the canon. The first division of Sutra is divided in the following
manner:
SUTRA
I. Mahayana Sutra
(a) Prajnaparamita
(b) Ratnakuta
(c) Mahasannipata
(d) Avatamsaka
(e) Nirvana
(f) Additional translations of sutra listed in
the preceeding groups
(g) Miscellaneous sutra not included in any of
the above.
II. Hinayana Sutra
(a) Agama
(b) Miscellaneous sutra not included in the
above.
28

III. Sutra translations made in Sung and Yuan dynasties

VINAYA
I. Mahayana
II. Hinayana
ABHIDHARMA
I. Mahayana
II. Hinayana
III. Abhidharma translations made in Sung and Yuan
dynasties
KSUDRAKA
I. Miscellaneous works from Indian sources
II. Chinese Buddhist texts
III. Additional texts added from Southern Ming sources.

The Nanjio catalogue is difficult to use because of its

outmoded romanization scheme but it still preserves a great deal
of information about the development of the canon and its
structure. When we look at the classification of the Ming text
used by Nanjio, we see the old arrangement of Mahayana sutras
in the first section followed by the "hinayana" one. Since, the
cataloguers tried to make a division which could be somewhat
applicable to the old Indian notion of three divisions, each of the
sections related to Sutra, Vinaya and Sastra (an expanded
29

concept of the Abhidharma category of the Indian tripitaka)

were seen as being either Mahayana or "hinayana". This
sequence in the catalogues and in the printed editions of the
Chinese canon remained in force until the Tokyo Buddhist
canon changed the system for the first time. This Tokyo Edition
was started in 1881, twelve hundred years after the K'ai yuan lu.
In the Showa hobo (Vol 3: 74), Ou-yi chih-hsu, a Tendai
priest changed the five major classes of texts as outlined in the
K'ai yuan lu. In his categories we find the texts listed in the
following order:
(1) Avatamsakasutra
(2) Fang-teng
(3) Prajnaparamitasutra
The Fang-teng divisions does not appear in the K'ai yuan lu.
The Yuen tsang chih chin classified all the sutras into five
classes. In the description of the Tokyo canon compilation, we
read that it was divided into five major sections, with
twenty-five subdivisions in accord with the Yueh tsang chih
chin. It was this Yueh tsang chih chin which first attempted to
change the arrangement of the K'ai yuan lu.
The Taisho Edition had an arrangement which was
independent of either the Tokyo Edition or that of the K'ai yuan
lu. The Taisho editors choose to put the "Hinayana" sutras first,
dividing them into the Agama and the Avadana. The Mahayana
sutras follow, and they were also put into divisions:
Prajnaparamita, Avatamsaka, Ratnakuta, Mahaparinirvana, and
Mahasamnipata, These six divisions of the sutras were followed
by a section for miscellaneous sutra translations. There was also
a section for Tantra which includes a large number of texts. The
Vinaya and Sastra sections are not divided into Mahayana or
Hinayana". All commentarial literature was placed in this
30

section. After the canonic portions of the Taisho, we find from

Vol. 56 onward, an appendix of collected works that were
excluded from the canons used by the editors. In addition, there
are volumes which deal with Buddhist iconography. It is
interesting to note that nowhere in the Taisho is there is any
explanation for the classification of texts. Even such detailed
works as Bussho kaisetsu jiten only gives the listing of the
contents of the Taisho Edition but never discusses the
arrangement or its method. It may be said that the Taisho
Edition is arranged chronologically, that is that the Agamas are
considered to be the oldest parts of the canon and thus come
first followed by the later Mahayana sutras. Thus, in one sense
it might be said to be an attempt to make a scientific
arrangement of the canonic text complete independent of any of
the older traditional methods of arrangement. It is also an echo
of the ancient attempt of Chih I to classify the teachings of the
Buddha, by establishing a chronological order within his
lifetime.
The content of the Chinese Buddhist canon is still in process
of being established. With each modern publication in Taiwan
or China, texts not found in other editions are included. Thus in
one sense, we can say that the Chinese Buddhist canon is still
"open." The long history of defining the canon indicates the
large number of problems that the Chinese faced when they
attempted to make translations of all the Buddhist teachings and
to create a standard list of these translations. The result of these
centuries of work is the remarkable collection of texts available
today under the title of Ta tsang ching. The questions of how to
evaluate and arrange these thousands of texts remain and it is
not possible to say that we have finally arrived at a concensus on
how to answer these many questions. As we begin to put the
31

Buddhist materials into electronic data bases, there is no

limitation to the inclusion of texts. It is probable that the
electronic data bases will expand the canon beyond any of the
current editions in terms of size and types of materials included.

32