Sengyou (Chinese:
Sengyou's ancestral home was Xiapi in Pengcheng Commandery (northwest of modern Suining, Jiangsu). However, his father moved to Jiankang (
Collected Records Concerning the Tripitaka
editAlthough there were earlier works of bibliography with respect to Buddhist texts at the time, Sengyou's Collected Records Concerning the Tripitaka (Chu sanzang ji ji) introduced important innovations in how the texts were arranged, including a hierarchy of authenticity. Not only were Buddhist texts continually trickling in along the Silk Road, but the Chinese had begun to pass off local productions as authentic Indian sutras. Sengyou proposed criteria for assessing the authenticity of Buddhist sutras at a time when many fake or apocryphal texts were in circulation.[2] He was particularly focussed on the translator of a text, and this made him suspicious of unattributed texts. As Tanya Storch says, "Absence of information about the translator was a signal that it might be a compilation by a Chinese person who did not understand Sanskrit and had never studied Buddhism in the west [i.e. India].[3]
The Chu sanzang ji ji is presented in five sections[4]
- A discussion on the provenance of translated scriptures,
- A record of (new) titles and their listings in earlier catalogues,
- Prefaces to scriptures,
- Miscellaneous treatises on specific doctrines, and
- Biographies of translators.
"By subjecting Buddhist scriptures to the textual criticism similar to that applied to the Confucian classics, Sengyou managed to elevate the literary and social status of the Tripiṭaka.”[5] At the Liang court, Sengyou's work was overshadowed by the catalogue of Baochang (
Sengyou was assisted in his literary work by his student, Liu Xie,[6] who went on to write an important work on literary aesthetics.
Bibliography
edit- Buswell, R and Lopez D. (Eds) The Princeton Encyclopedia of Buddhism.
- Knechtges David R. and Chang Taiping (eds). 2014. Ancient and Early Medieval Chinese Literature (vol. 2) Brill
- Storch, T. (2014). The History of Chinese Buddhist Bibliography. Amherst, NY: Cambria Press.