Subscribing to a canon

Book Culture in Buddhism and Beyond lecture given by Lucille Chia (賈晉珠)

Inspired by the compilation and the first printing of the Chinese Buddhist canon by the Song state, Buddhist institutions and private groups in China produced some seven editions of the canon from the tenth through the fourteenth century. While textual studies have looked closely at the differences in the contents of these different editions, less is known about the circumstances under which each was compiled, published, and transmitted, largely because such material--including entire or large portions of the work itself--is lacking. This talk will review available information about these “private” editions of the Chinese Buddhist canon during the Song, Jin, and Yuan periods in order to understand the different motives for and conditions under which they were produced.

Lucille Chia (賈晉珠) is Professor emerita of the Department of History at the University of California at Riverside. Her research includes studies on Chinese publishing and book culture from the Song through the early Qing (commercial printing, religious printing, including the production of editions of the Daoist canon and Buddhist canon, etc.). Her most recent study in this area deals with the life and after-lives of the Qisha Buddhist canon, the printing of which took over a hundred years to complete and which remained in distribution for another three hundred years. She has also done research on early Chinese migration to the Spanish Philippines during the sixteenth through the eighteenth centuries. Another of her current projects is a historical (rather than art historical) examination of the rise and decline of ceramics producing centers in south and southeast China, especially in southern Fujian and the Chaozhou area in Guangdong.

Qisha zang 磧砂藏, (千字文：翔 12 (函72)), Bore boruomiduo xin jing 般若波羅蜜多心經, 唐 玄奘譯 [Princeton East Asian Library, Gest Collection]