ABSTRACT
A monk in the Eastern Jin Dynasty (317-420 CE), Zhi Mindu was from the Kingdom of Yuezhi. Renowned for his intellectual achievements, he propounded the 'theory of the non-existence of the mind', one of the schools in the interpretation of a class of Mahayana literature called 'the Perfection of Wisdom'. During the reign of Emperor Cheng of the Eastern Jin, when Zhi Mindu lectured on the Prajnaparamita sutras, he put forth the view that 'while the mind is not ensnared by the material world, that does not mean that the material world does not exist'. He compiled a composite edition of the different Chinese versions of the suramgama-samadhi-sutra, a composite edition of the Vimalakirti-nirdesa Sutra, and also one of the first known bibliographies of Buddhist sutras, A Catalogue of Sutras in Translation Now Current in the World, which had disappleared by the end of the sixth century CE.
