New Books In Buddhist Studies

Tanya Storch‘s recent book, The History of Chinese Buddhist Bibliography: Censorship and Transformation of the Tripitaka (Cambria, 2014), focuses on the development of Chinese Buddhist catalogs from their first appearance in the third century to the eighth century, when printed editions of the canon took over the catalog’s role of identifying and delimiting the Chinese Buddhist canon. Storch has written this work with two goals in mind, which correspond to two different audiences she is targeting. On the one hand, she aims to present the first-ever English-language overview of Chinese Buddhist bibliography, a feat she accomplishes through an examination of catalogs in their chronological order of appearance (chapters 2-5). Along the way she highlights a number of important points and developments: the way in which Sengyou (445-518) was indebted to earlier catalogs other than Daoan’s, Buddhist appropriation of the organizing principles used in catalogs of Confucian texts, the unprecedented p