ABSTRACT
Zan Ning never did any translation, and all his observations were based on his study of Buddhist sutra translations. But he wrote one of the richest pieces of work in the history of Chinese discourse on translation. It contains pertinent observations on two main topics. The first topic deals with two intimately related points. One is the differentiation of the source languages and of the writing styles of the source sutras, a point few had touched on, except perhaps Yan Cong. The other is about ways of translating. The second topic is the organization of a Translation Assembly. Zan Ning's Six Groups of Notes form a kind of treatise on the translating of terminology. They encompass the points dealt with by Xuan Zang in his Five Guidelines for Not-translating a Term, but also go beyond these Guidelines in scope and differ from them in method of analysis.
