Making Canon Practicable: Scaling the Tripiṭaka with a Medieval Chinese Buddhist Anthology
I argue that medieval Chinese Buddhists composed anthologies like A Grove of Pearls from the Garden of Dharma (seventh century CE) to make productive use of the Buddhist canon's immense scale. By tracing how anthologists produce extracts from the canon, I show how anthologies make canon practic...
| Main Author: | |
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| Format: | Electronic Article |
| Language: | English |
| Check availability: | HBZ Gateway |
| Journals Online & Print: | Drawer...
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| Fernleihe: | Fernleihe für die Fachinformationsdienste |
| Published: |
University of Chicago Press
2022
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| In: |
History of religions
Year: 2022, Volume: 61, Issue: 4, Pages: 313-361 |
| Standardized Subjects / Keyword chains: | B
China
/ Buddhism
/ Anthology
/ Canon
/ History 600-700
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| IxTheo Classification: | AG Religious life; material religion BL Buddhism KBM Asia TF Early Middle Ages |
| Online Access: |
Volltext (lizenzpflichtig) |
| Summary: | I argue that medieval Chinese Buddhists composed anthologies like A Grove of Pearls from the Garden of Dharma (seventh century CE) to make productive use of the Buddhist canon's immense scale. By tracing how anthologists produce extracts from the canon, I show how anthologies make canon practicable, drawing a distinction between practical and formal canons in the process. I do this by first charting how a collection of extracts (titled "Bathing Monks") in A Grove of Pearls economizes diverse canonical source materials to affirm both the canon's difficulty and relevance. Then I outline how the extracts of "Bathing Monks" were further economized in a single-page manuscript preserved in the Dunhuang cache (tenth century or earlier). My findings suggest that religious anthologies be regarded by scholars of religion not only as textual repositories but also as objects that encourage the religious to mine vast canons and whittle down holy text for use. In the case of medieval Chinese Buddhist anthologies, Buddhist ideas about dharma's fluidity and usefulness flourished in a burgeoning manuscript culture in medieval China. |
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| ISSN: | 1545-6935 |
| Contains: | Enthalten in: History of religions
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| Persistent identifiers: | DOI: 10.1086/719003 |