Kaiyuan Catalogue of Buddhist Texts

Introduction

Kāiyuán Shìjiàolù 開元釋教錄 "Kaiyuan Era Record of Buddhist Teachings" (Taishō Tripitaka No. 2154) is a Tang dynasty catalogue of Buddhist texts, compiled by the monk Zhisheng 智昇 in the 18th year of the Kaiyuan era (730 CE). It is a huge work, divided into 20 rolls (juàn 卷), and the Taishō Tripitaka version lists some 9,078 texts in about 27,869 rolls (including 6 copies of itself), amounting to some 3,733 individual titles.

The Kāiyuán Shìjiàolù Lüèchū 開元釋教錄略出 "Abridged Kaiyuan Era Record of Buddhist Teachings" (Taishō Tripitaka No. 2155) is a somewhat later and significantly shorter catalogue of Buddhist texts, comprising 4 rolls plus an appendix. Despite its title and the fact that it credits Zhisheng as its compiler, it does not seem to be an abridgement of Kāiyuán Shìjiàolù, but seems rather to have been a completely new catalogue, influenced by the earlier Kāiyuán Shìjiàolù but listing a far reduced number of texts which are ordered differently. The first four rolls of Kāiyuán Shìjiàolù Lüèchū list 1,080 texts in about 5,062 rolls, which are physically divided into 479 cases (zhì 帙). Each case usually contains about 10 rolls, and so large texts may fill several cases, whereas many short texts may be put together in a single case. The fact that the catalogue explicitly lists the physical distribution of texts into cases suggests that it may be a catalogue of the contents of a particular monastic library, not just a generic catalogue of Buddhist texts, in which case Kāiyuán Shìjiàolù Lüèchū can be seen as an abridgement of Kāiyuán Shìjiàolù that has been modified to reflect the actual contents of a particular library.

The distinctive feature of the Kāiyuán Shìjiàolù Lüèchū catalogue is that each of the 479 cases is associated sequentially with one of the first 479 characters (from "天" through "群") from the Qiānzìwén 千字文 "Thousand character text", an elementary text comprising a thousand Han characters that was composed during the 6th century. This system of indexing Buddhist texts with the Qiānzìwén is not found in extant editions of the earlier Kāiyuán Shìjiàolù, so it may have been devised by the anonymous compiler of Kāiyuán Shìjiàolù Lüèchū.

Index character hǎi 海 on a bundle of scrolls from Dunhuang Cave 17

Aurel Stein, Ruins of Desert Cathay: Personal Narrative of Explorations in Central Asia and Westernmost China (London, 1912) Plate 194

That this system of indexing Buddhist texts was actually used, and was not just a cataloguer's affectation, is evidenced by the Buddhist texts retrieved from the sealed library of Cave 17 at the Mogao Caves at Dunhuang. A photograph by Aurel Stein of bundles of manuscript scrolls from Cave 17 clearly shows the character hǎi 海 written next to the half-visible title of the Mahā-Prajñā-Pāramitā-Sūtra (Māhē bōrě bōluómì jīng 摩訶般若波羅蜜經) on the rough cloth wrapping of a bundle of scrolls. This accords with Kāiyuán Shìjiàolù Lüèchū, which records the characters jiāng 薑, hǎi 海 and xián 鹹 (64th, 65th and 66th characters of the Qiānzìwén) against the Mahā-Prajñā-Pāramitā Sūtra. That the same character is used for the same text in both Kāiyuán Shìjiàolù Lüèchū and in the sealed library of Cave 17 suggests that the specific indexing system used in Kāiyuán Shìjiàolù Lüèchū may have been adopted by monastic libraries across China. Unfortunately wrapping cloths such as those shown in this photograph, as well as fine silk sutra wrappers, have generally been separated from the texts they contained, so it is no longer an easy task to correlate the index characters on the wrapping cloths or wrappers now held by the British Museum with the Buddhist texts now held in the British Library.

Song dynasty editions of Buddhist scriptures frequently record the index character after the title at the start and end of a chapter (i.e. juànshǒu 卷首 "roll start" and juànmò 卷末 "roll end"). In the table below, index characters with a link open to an image of a Buddhist text showing that particular index character after the title. The sources for the images are given in the Sources section at the bottom of this page.

This system of indexing the Buddhist canon was borrowed for the Tangut Buddhist canon, but using a lost Tangut verse text for the index characters. See my blog post Ode to the Tangut Tripitaka for more details.

Table of Index Characters

Sources for Images

• No. 18 (來) :《大般若波羅蜜多經》卷176 : Incunabula @incunabula tweet (2018-07-15).
• No. 84 (字) :《大寶積經》卷119 : Stanford Libraries @StanfordLibs tweet (2018-10-02).