ABSTRACT
When scholars check the history of how Buddhism spread in China, they immediately find out that the dissemination of Buddhist teachings has been closely tied to the scriptures and the translations of the many texts which contribute to it. As the centuries passed for the Chinese Buddhists, hundreds of texts were translated from Sanskrit into Chinese, and in addition, a sizable corpus of literature composed of the writings of learned and inspired monks and nuns within China was developed. 1 It was at this point that the collected translations came to be considered as an entity and were called “yiqie jing”（一切經 all scriptures), also called “Dazang jing” (大藏經 Buddhist canon). The development of Chinese Buddhist canon can be divided into four periods: hand-writing, woodblock printing, modern printing and digital. The hand-writing period, also called the copying period, spans from the early introduction of Buddhism to the block-printing period after the tenth century. This period witnessed the preparatory stage of the introduction to Buddhism of Venerable Dao’an (312–385 ce) in the Eastern Jin dynasty (317–420 ce). “In this period the canon was not yet full-fledged, but Buddhist monks had already begun to gather scriptures and classify them accordingly. The second period, from the later years of the Eastern Jin dynasty to early years of the Sui (581–618 ce), witnessed the shaping of the Buddhist canon. It was in this period that various forms of the Buddhist canon came into existence.” 2 Next was the period of formation of a systematic structure for the Buddhist canon. The milestone event was the creation of a standard catalogue of the canon in 730 by the monk-scholar Zhisheng 智昇 (699–740), often referred to as the Kaiyuan Catalogue (Kaiyuanlu 開元錄), which served as the blueprint for organizing the content of the canon in all later editions in the premodern era. 3 The following stage, as Fang Guangchang pointed out, in which the Chinese Buddhist canon entered the period of standardization, started from the persecution of Buddhism in 845 to the construction of the Kaibao Canon in 971.
