ABSTRACT
Zan Ning has given a list of all the posts that were established in Translation Assemblies in different periods of Buddhist sutra translation in China. Zan Ning's systematic account of the responsibilities of each post in the Translation Assembly gives a fascinating introduction to what was involved in the process of sutra translation. With the issuing of the royal decree banning sutra translation, everything came to a standstill for about a hundred and fifty years, from the fifth year of the Yuanhe reign of Emperor Xianzong in the Tang Dynasty to the end of the State of the Later Zhou. During the Tang Dynasty, works on the sound and meaning of difficult terms in the sutras began to appear. A traditional way of indicating the pronunciation of a Chinese character is by the use of two other Chinese characters, the first having the same initial consonant as the given character and the second having the same vowel and tone.
