ABSTRACT
Relying on Zan Ning's knowledge of Buddhist sutra translations, he pointed out that the Dayun Sutra had already been translated in the Jin Dynasty and he challenged the then prevailing view that it was a fabrication. The Dayun Sutra presented to Empress Wu is no longer extant and there is no record of Zan Ning having compared the two sutras. Citing the archaeological findings in the late nineteenth century in Chinese Turkestan and the research of twentieth-century scholars such as Wang Guowei, Chen Yinke and R. W. L. Guisso, Eva Hung concludes that the Dayun Sutra never existed, either as a 'fake translation' or as a 'new translation'. Interestingly, although the account of the Dayun Sutra referred by Zan Ning is very close to that given in the Old Tang Records, he describes the sutra as a re-translation.
